Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.

Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:

Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain? Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves? With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know? Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives? Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society? How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain? Who are the "good readers" of every epoch?

Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.

Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Education, Books About Books, Technology, Audiobook

277 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 7, 2018

About the author

Maryanne Wolf received her doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Human Development and Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, where she began her work on the neurological underpinnings of reading, language, and dyslexia. Professor Wolf was awarded the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and also the Teaching Excellence Award from the American Psychological Association.

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The unsettling reality, however, is that unbeknownst to many of us, including until recently myself, there has begun an unanticipated decline of empathy among our young people. 50

This quote is a good jumping-off point for the review - it not only demonstrates Wolf's "OMG, think of the CHILDREN!" pov but also shows of her writing ability or lack thereof.

Wolf never uses 15 words where she can use 60. She never uses a 'common' word when she can use a longer, lesser-known one.

Her whole schtick is that 'modern people' and 'younger generations' can't appreciate or get through older, verbose, dense books. She sees her verbose, dense, long-winded form of writing as a moral triumph. It's almost as if she's saying that if you think reading her writing is a slog, you are a poor, unfortunate person whose brain has been rotted by Twitter.

But no matter what she personally believes, the writing in this book is very hard to get through. And not because Wolf is a virtuous throwback to the time when people (in her opinion) relished reading Middlemarch. It's because it's unnecessarily wordy and lengthy.

Will new readers develop the more time-demanding cognitive processes nurtured by print-based mediums as they absorb and acquire new cognitive capacities emphasized by digital media? For example, will the combination of reading on digital formats and daily immersion in a variety of digital experiences - from social media to virtual games - impede the formation of the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading? Will the mix of continuously stimulating distraction of children's attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves?

In other words, through no intention on anyone's part, will the increasing reliance of our youth on the servers of knowledge prove the greatest threat to the young brain's building of its own foundation of knowledge, as well as to a child's desire to think and imagine for him- or herself? Or will these new technologies provide the best, most complete bridge yet to ever more sophisticated forms of cognition and imagination that will enable our children to leap into new worlds of knowledge that we can't even conceive of in this moment of time? Will they develop a range of very different brain circuits? If so, what will be the implications of those different circuits for our society? Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts? 8

I mean, you can understand what she's saying, but I'd be lying if I said reading this book was enjoyable.

Which is unfortunate. Wolf is smart. She loves reading. She has some valid points. But working through this bog is a job of work. I can't see many people finishing this, I see a lot of DNFs. Perhaps it would have been better as an article or in the hands of an author who is more concise.

Let's get to the content.

Wolf believes adults ability to read "deeply" and critically is being damaged by the Internet, social media, etc. etc. She is even more afraid of what being raised in a world that embraces technology is doing to the children.

That's the crux of the book.

You need only examine yourself. Perhaps you have already noticed how the quality of your attention has changed the more you read on screens and digital devices. Perhaps you have felt a pang of something subtle that is missing when you seek to immerse yourself in a once favorite book. Like a phantom limb, you remember who you were as a reader, but cannot summon that "attentive ghost" with the joy you once felt in being transported somewhere outside the self to that interior space. It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge. This means that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less developed. Young reading brains are evolving without a ripple of concern by most people, even though more and more of our youths are not reading other than what is required and often not even that: "tl;dr" (too long; didn't read). 2

While I agree with Wolf that digital media are changing the way people think, see the world, and read, I do not have as dire or alarmist an outlook as she does.

She seems to think we are in an immediate crisis because people don't want to read Moby-Dick or, The Whale anymore. I hate to break it to her, but even in the 1970s a lot of people didn't want to read Moby Dick. So... yeah.

I agree with her that people spend too much time on screens, and it's probably not good for children to be on-screen TO THE EXTENT they are much of today in first-world countries, but I still see people reading and enjoying reading. Yes, even children.

She also very much disparages e-books. She says reading on a Kindle or Nook isn't as good for your brain as reading a print book. I'm less radical. It's true - there are advantages to reading print. I find it easier to remember where important passages are in a print book. However, I don't find e-books to be less immersive than print books - which is one of Wolf's claims. I can still be transported into a magical book-world while reading on my Kindle.


In this book, Wolf is fleshing out the ideas presented in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. If that book left you scratching your head, this is going to give you more information about her ideas and why she has them.

Which is far from saying this is a science-based text. Wolf is no Mary Roach. She does talk about studies done, but only a few and only in passing.

Her basic tenets are:

- Reading increases empathy. Young people are not as empathetic nowadays because they read less.

- Reading strengthens your ability to focus and concentrate. Young people have more attention deficit disorders because they don't read as much as young people did in the past.

- Older people are becoming stupider as technology rots their brains losing their abilities to think critically and focus attention due to their increased time on-screen.

I worry that we are one quick step removed from recognizing the beauty in what is written. I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them. Or when they are buried in the last, least read, twentieth page of a Google search. The digital chain that leads from the proliferation of information to the gruel-thin, eye-byte servings consumed daily by many of us will need more than societal vigilance, lest the quality of our attention and memory, the perception of beauty and recognition of truth, and the complex decision-making capacities based on all these atrophy along the way. 85


I really take issue with some of her points, though.

It is fair to say that a generation of young people raised on the Internet and Twitter, simultaneously flooded with volumes of words and accustomed to expending only 140 characters to write their thoughts, would have a difficult time appreciating this sentence or reading Melville or Eliot, much less the 150 to 300-plus words in a typical sentence by Proust. 90

This makes me angry. One, some people don't want to read Proust today. Guess what? A lot of people in 1962 didn't want to read Proust, either! Some people think classic books are boring. I don't think you can blame that on the Internet. "Little Timmy doesn't want to read Moby Dick because of Twitter!!!!" No, he doesn't want to read it because he thinks it's fucking boring. This isn't some new phenomenon. I work with some highly educated liberal-arts people and even I would be hard-pressed to find even two who have read Middlemarch. I can't really blame that on Twitter.

Older people's hand-flapping and screeching about "young people" is misguided, in my opinion. And also not a new opinion. Every single generation thinks younger people are horrible, stupid, amoral wasters who can't appreciate the books, music, and type of work the older generation values. Doesn't matter if it's 1919 or 2019. *shrug*


I agree with Wolf that the increase of time spent on-screen for children and adults affects their brains. However, a.) this is inevitable, and b.) perhaps it's not the END OF TIMES that we think it is. Who knows what the future holds? Even Wolf admits that there's no stopping digital advancements and the increase of digital media in our daily life. She clings to the old ways harder than I do, but does sensibly suggest pairing digital life with analog life and creating a generation of people who are, in a sense, "bilingual" - able to move critically and analytically through both print and digital content.

While she seems afraid of what digital content does to human beings, I'd like to point out that reading is still a huge thing. Whether you are reading The New York Times online or in print is not really as big of a deal as she makes it out to be, IMO. You are still reading a long, well-researched article. Whether you choose to enjoy the latest Jodi Picoult book on your Nook or in print is your decision. It's still reading a book. You still get the benefits of reading. While some people will prefer print books for a variety of reasons - and that's perfectly okay - it amuses me that she treats e-readers like the death of critical thought. I think e-readers are great. I read some books digitally and some physically. Both are fine. I slightly prefer physical books, but I don't mind digital books and I don't feel like reading on my Kindle stops me from being transported into the world the author is creating for me.

Also, perhaps instead of being a brain-destroying and soul-destroying thing, new technology might be wiring our brains differently... because we are on the cusp of a new age. Of course, people fear it - and with good reason! - but perhaps video games and social media are actually preparing youth for what the future will be like and what the future will value. That might be terrifying - and it is terrifying in some ways! - but it might also not be the horror apocalypse people are envisioning.

I'm an optimist.


Tl;dr Wolf seems to be experiencing fear and anxiety brought on by our modern digital age. This is understandable. One could even say it is justified. However, I don't think reading is dying. I don't think critical thinking is in it's end days. The idea that people in the past were learned, rational, critical thinkers who had great focus and concentration is frankly suspect to me.

It's true that digital life is changing the way humans think and behave. This can be bad and have negative outcomes. But it's hardly the apocalyptic horror that Wolf seems to think it is. Look at Goodreads. We have people reading books right now and offering their critical analyses on them - FOR FUN! I mean, it's mind-boggling if you think about it.

I wouldn't advise reading this nor Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Wolf's writing style just makes it not worth it. That's just my opinion.

P.S. She talks about other books in here, like Anna Karenina. She's not as horrible a spoiler as someone like Will Schwalbe or Katarina Bivald, but there are some books that I feel like she gives spoilers for - mostly classics. You're warned.


ETA: April 10, 2019: "My two grown sons and I limit phone use when we're together, but the communication that technology affords us when we're apart is a gift. One of my sons is an artist, and he shares his creative process with me by sending photos or videos. When he created a seven-foot Venus de Milo sculpture out of 130 metal isosceles triangles, for example, I felt I understood his work so much better after seeing the process unfold - how he used geometry to configure things, welded the pieces together, experimented with variegated shades of gray to paint it. I never could have gotten that from a phone call. As a neuroscientist who is often worried about technology's impact, I think it's important not to let tech detract from our interactions when we're together. The key is to find an intentional and thoughtful balance." Real Simple, March 2019

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Fellow Reader,

In the spirit of the book, allow me to address you in the old-fashioned way of a personal letter, directly pointing at You, Goodreads Reader, who by your very presence on this site already embrace the new biliterate reading brain Maryanne Wolf suggests for our digital era. I have a faible for Wo(o)lfs in literature, and after Virginia and Christa, Maryanne is the third bright star in my collection of influential Wolfs. Reading her Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain was a revelation to me, and I remain endlessly fascinated by the science behind what happens in the brain while one reads a string of sentences and makes sense of them. That alone is a magical story, well worth exploring in depth.

But the magic of the reading brain is in danger, and Nothingness has invaded the Literate World, figuratively speaking. Invaded by an army of devices, all created to divert our attention from the deep concentration required to read complex, deep stories in sophisticated language, we slowly but steadily give up some of the magic power of true, full literacy. And with that concentration we lose all the secondary benefits of immersion into the world of reading: vivid imagination, critical thinking skills, empathy, reliable internal knowledge. Depending more and more on external knowledge - "checkable facts" - we lose context and framework, and ultimately our literary judgment and capacity to express ourselves. We don't know what we don't know anymore. And Socrates turns in his grave.

Maryanne Wolf shows a dire truth from a scientific point of view, and I dare say no teacher is surprised at her findings. What are we to do about our distractive technology though? It is here to stay, like so many other "fastfood" features of modern life. We can't turn back time, and we don't want to either. But to lose our literary brain to a flood of random information that we skim through without reflection, that can't be the end of the story either, can it? Our brain was never made for reading, and an acquired skill like literacy can of course be lost again, but at an immense cultural and social cost. So what are we to do? As teachers? As parents? As consumers of digital media and books?

The biliterate brain is Wolf's suggestion: a deliberate, careful "bilingual" training in different ways of reading and in reflective use of print and screen reading - depending on purpose and context. To fully immerse children in the pleasure of storytelling, print media are far better suited than reading on a screen, for various linguistic and social reasons. But to search for specific information or to train a dyslexic child with the high amount of repetition required to reach the intended goal of cracking the reading code, a computer may be the wisest choice.

Finding a balance, not choosing one over the other medium, that is the path out of the dark forest of confusion. We can't deny we are at a moment of a massive paradigm change in our reading society. But we can move with care, or jump blindly.

Dear Fellow Reader, rarely have I read a more passionate plaidoyer for preserving one of our most amazing achievements as a species!

To the ability to read Henry James and Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust with pleasure and understanding!

Sincerely,

A Wolf Fan

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've seen a lot of speculation about the bad effect that smartphones and social media might be having on people's thinking; the other day, I asked clever o1-preview if it could recommend anything which looked at it in more depth, and this book was top of its list. I've just finished it; Reader, Come Home doesn't answer all my questions, but it's better than anything else I've seen so far and agrees well with my own informal observations. Thank you, o1-preview!

Maryanne Wolf is an expert on reading and literacy who's been studying the issues for a long time from both practical and theoretical angles. She argues persuasively that digital media is having a much larger effect on us than we realise: people are losing the ability to read in a deep and engaged way, and many dangerous things are associated with that shift. Your first reaction might be that her claims are exaggerated (surely it can't be that bad?) or elitist (people's reading tastes have always changed over time, who cares if no one wants to read Proust any more?)

But it seems to be rather worse than a reluctance to read Proust. Wolf starts off by reminding us of a critical difference between listening and reading. We are biologically programmed to pick up spoken language just from being around people who talk, and almost all children do that automatically; it's been that way for many tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer. But reading is a very recent addition to our repertoire, and it's not innate. If people aren't taught how to read, they usually can't do it. It's a skill that's correspondingly easy to lose.

Since, until recently, it was taken for granted that almost all educated people would read, and that the people who couldn't read would generally want to, it's also easy to underestimate how important reading is to our culture. It teaches us to concentrate our attention and memory; less obviously, I was interested to see Wolf focussing on the idea that it teaches us empathy. We read fiction and we identify with the characters in the book, who may be very different from us. That makes us more inclined to try to understand a larger range of people on their own terms. They may be different, but our reading suggests to us that different people may also be admirable in their own way. Not least, careful reading helps us build us a common world-view that we share with all the other people who've read the books we appreciated.

None of this is more than suggestive on its own, but it does give a framework for making sense of what we see around us. Starting with data measurable with standard psychological tests, Wolf says that studies over the last couple of decades show dramatic declines in working memory (no longer "seven plus or minus two", but now more like "four plus or minus one"), average attention span (down from ten minutes to five), and empathy (reduced by 40%). It's harder to pin down, and she doesn't talk about it explicitly, but I receive the strong impression that people are more likely to believe things that obviously are not true. It is still astonishing to me that QAnon could be taken seriously by a large proportion of the US population; even Flat Earthism, once a synonym for gullibility and idiocy, has acquired a substantial following. If people don't read properly, they fail to acquire a stable frame of reference. And people are not reading. Wolf cites more studies showing that two-thirds of all US fourth-graders cannot read proficiently. If you haven't reached proficiency by then, the rest of your education is unlikely to yield results.

As you can see, I found this material, which takes up the first half of the book, extremely interesting. In the second half, Wolf suggests fixes, organised around the idea of helping children to strike a happy balance between print books and digital media. I was less impressed by this. It sounded like good advice for prosperous upper middle class parents who want their children to thrive, but these are not the key demographic; it seems unlikely that it will help children from poorer families. I would say that much more radical measures are needed. Australia is currenting mooting a social media ban for children under 16, with the platform providers responsible for enforcing the rules. If that succeeds, it could be a substantial step in the right direction, but I wonder if it's actually feasible.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the book is written in a way that sometimes comes across as a bit annoying. I am not crazy either about Wolf's skills as a prose stylist. But she has her heart in the right place, and she knows a great deal about these vital questions, so I wasn't bothered. It's couple of hundred pages and doesn't take long to get through. I strongly recommend looking at it.

A final thought that came to me while I was writing this review. I have often wondered who the mysterious "elites" are that Donald Trump teaches his followers to oppose. It didn't seem to make any sense. He's a billionaire, most of them are poor. What do they have in common? Who are the "elites" they both hate so much?

I think they are people who can read.

[Rose Rosetree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually this reader isn't easily overwhelmed, but with this treasure chest of a book -- this truly life-changing book -- it's hard for me to know which gems to pull out first.

Okay, how about this? No question, this is hands down the best book I've read all year. Actually, it's one of my favorites ever. At my blog, I've never recommended any other author's book so often; and I've enthusiastically recommended it to family, friends, and even many of my clients.

BUT WHY?
For decades now (both as a reader, and also as a writer) I've worried about how people are reading. College graduates and grad school grads -- even among them -- I've noticed such changes in how much. and how thoughtfully. people around me seem to be reading.

Maryanne Wolf's gave me a conceptual model. More than that, she brought me hope.

YES, HOPE
You see, I love reading so much. It's the one thing I've always been good at in life, the one thing this late bloomer learned earlier than most folks (age three). Reading opens treasure chests of knowing -- and sometimes also human hearts -- to me.

Much as I love people, and have built my career around learning from them, as well as about them, I'll admit this: Reading is always there for me, as one of life's dependable ways to keep on finding the freshness deep down things. Reading, to me, means the possibility of learning every single day, learning at least a little something.

Despite accepting that reading-and-writing don't matter as much to most people... as to me... for decades I've felt as if witnessing the slow-motion death of literacy. (Right now, putting words to this experience, I keep blinking back a stream of tears.)

MARYANNE DESCRIBES THE SOLUTIONS SHE'S FOUND
Not content with cataloging today's reading problems and their causes, how many solutions Maryanne Wolf brings to this worldwide, varied... well, I was going to use the word "tragedy" but now I won't, since "Reader, Come Home" has brought me great hope that this tragedy can be averted.

Also important: Seems to me, Maryanne Wolf's ingenuity in this book is matched only by her depth of understanding about reading. (Confession, I didn't understand the elegant neuroscience she presented, but that's not the author's fault. Science isn't my thing in this lifetime, although I often admire it. And yes, I'm fully Covid-vaxxed.)

From the first page, I began to fall in like with this book, so I wasn't going to stop reading due to my own limitation.

Overall, this is an amazingly accessible book: The organization, the style, the tone, and especially that sweetness, like a lovingkindness for all the world's readers. I can hardly believe that the average rating for this book here on Goodreads isn't at least TEN STARS!

WOLF IS A TRUE PROFESSIONAL AT BRINGING LITERACY TO THIS WORLD

One last point: The part about "Magister Ludi"? Not just the humility and candor involved -- no spoiler coming from me about any of that -- but I will share how the biggest impact of that part, for me, involves my own love of all the books I've read by Hermann Hesse, and especially this particular title.

Not only was "Magister Ludi" my favorite of them all but, just last year, I gave my best friend a copy for her birthday. Could there be higher praise of an author's book?

And now I know that Maryanne Wolf, Reader, understands another one of my favorite books ever.

Yes, by that I mean my favorite book of Hesse's that she appreciates, and also Maryanne has given me a new favorite book, this one that she has written.

[فادي · Rating 4 out of 5]

منحاز لكل كتاب يتحدث عن القراءة والكتب، وأسعدُ حين تقع عيني على أفكار غير مألوفة لأشياء أصبحت تقليدية ومملة.
القراءة؛ ذلك الفعل التعبدي التأملي الصامت الذي يمارسه ملايين الناس كل يوم، حين تتطلع على تفاصيله العلمية، وكيف تتغيّر بنية دماغك بالقراءة تشعر بالذهول.
الكتاب عبارة عن رسائل وفصول متصلة، الفصول الأولى كانت ممتعة لي عكس الفصول الأخيرة التي خصصتها الكاتبة للحديث عن مستقبل القراءة للأطفال وكيف يمكننا أن نصنع لهم عالماً غير حالم وسط هذه الفوضى الرقمية التي تأكل أوقاتنا وتركيزنا.
من أجمل أفكار الكتاب تقسيم مراحل القارئ إلى 3 مراحل:
1- المرحلة الأولى وهي التي يكون فيها متلذذاً بالاستكشاف والتعرف على العوالم الغريبة.
2- الثانية حين يندمج ويتأثر بآراء الآخرين ويعيش في قصصهم.
3- الثالثة حين يعتكف على ما قرأه بالتأمل والتدبر وصنع عالم خاص له من القراءة.

أزعجني قليلاً كثرة الهوامش باللغة الإنكليزية - ولو وضعت في آخر الكتاب لكانت خيراً -
الترجمة حلوة وسلسة.

[Bon Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This whole book is a tribute to something called Deep Reading. That's the skill, real magic you once had, probably as a child, when membership in local library meant entry to the worlds beyond the senses. That was your first pay-per-view service. Except, you didn't have to pay for any cheap shit entertainment, and you didn't actually view. You imagined. Hours passed. You ventured into the story and you came back, changed, more creative, with new materials for real, organic play under the sun and blue sky with your friends.

Years passed and somehow, along the way, you lost that magic. You sit with the book and you're not going anywhere. Is it less interesting? Not capable of engaging you with its simple words and static, monochromatic "display"?

Maybe it's not so much that, I mean, you not being able to concentrate. Maybe it's you not being able to stop paying attention to other stimuli, that offer readily available dopamine shut. We all live in information feed with seemingly indubitable relevance for our own lives that we can't escape illusion something bad will happen if we just, simply - disconnect. Even for a while.

E-books are great, but how many of us are able to ignore all the other content on the device and their siren's call? And the sheer availability of the e-books in today's market make you wanna skimm through them just to ingest more of them. Not digest, mind you. You're not digesting anything this way. You are suffering from content malabsorption syndrome here. It's passing through you like shit through a goose.

It's the curse of skimming through all the gigabytes of information you're flooded with today that's plaguing you. Technology, SMS, Twitter reduced our brains to thinking that 140 character chunks are all that's necessary to convey the meaning. Everything more than that: TLDR (too long, didn't read). How many times do you read that in forums? People freely admit their attention span is on the squirl on crack level, and they're proud of it.

Enter the Deep Reading. It's all about connecting: what you know with what you read, what you read with what you feel, what you feel with what you think, and what you think with how you conduct your life.

Pretty deep huh? Didn't count, but I believe it's within 140 character limit so even the most attention challenged millenial should dig that. So read-deeply. It's the only way to raise above the average.

[B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I do not recommend this book.
I actually disliked it so much in fact – thought it was so biased and self-righteously written – that I was driven to create a special “not-recommended” tab for my bookshelf on Goodreads.
 
I’m going to start my review with “letter four” from the middle of this book. Letter four is truly, deeply bad. This author’s elitism cannot be excused. It all started earlier as she constantly addresses the reader with “we, the expert readers” know/believe/trust/expect/etc. I understand ingratiating yourself with your audience, but this author’s judgmental tone was a lot to take, especially when it came over and over again in quick progression.

She presents the fact that people – on average – now read about 100k words a day. Let that sink in. That’s a good-sized novel a day! That number is way up, she says, and is in fact more than people have ever read before. But she also argues that it is a bad thing because all of that readings doesn’t come in huge, dense passages that you have to spend hours decoding. She doesn’t concede the fact that your average person has never read that way from today through time in memoriam. The very fact that people are reading that much means that people are more literate than ever, even if it isn’t deep reading. There are stats out there today that say that the average person consumes more information on a single day than an educated person from the middle ages consumed in a year. It is such a culturally biased idea to think that the average person, who is indeed reading more than at any time in history, is going to be worse because the top 1% of readers might be reading somewhat less complicated materials. She has no idea what an average reader is, clearly, as she panders to her “expert readers.”

She does (what she herself calls) an unscientific study of three best-selling novels from today, and three from a century ago – all of which are on her bookshelf at home. She says she doesn’t know about how to evaluate them, and shouldn’t draw conclusions, and then after skimming them draws the conclusion that new novels have shorter sentences and less hard-to-understand thoughts and phrases, and that is bad. She also neglects to say anything about what “best seller” constitutes sales- and readership-wise, and who could read/afford books in those disparate time periods. Once again, she is only considering the very most literate of people from 100 years ago, and comparing them to your average reader today.

Here is a passage from the book that she believes exemplifies good writing:

“Italo Calvino wrote about this a single, unalterable sentence: ‘For the prose writer, success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration, but as a rule involves a patient search for the mos juste for the sentence in which every word is unalterable, the most effective marriage of sound and concepts, concise, concentrated, and memorable.’”

Let’s be clear on something here: this sentence isn’t concise. It isn’t concentrated. It isn’t memorable. It is written in such a way as to be dense for denseness’s sake. It actually disproves her point about “good” writing and in fact exemplifies some of the problems with older writing in the minds of the modern reader: it is dry, boring, and purposefully confusing.

She has a long passage where she talks about her (former) favorite novel – a dry, byzantine Pulitzer prize winner from decades ago, where long passages are nothing more than meditations of monks as they continually ascend and descend stairs. She chastises herself for not liking it – not being able to read it in fact – in a (once again unscientific and yet conclusion-rich) study of her own making decades after she read it for the first time. She said she didn’t have the patience for it because of all the screen reading she does. Well, maybe. But maybe it was also a favorite book because of the prestige it held at the time for a student trying to get a terminal degree and justify her reading to herself. Also: reading tastes change with the times and some things don’t age well. But it was her fault for no longer having the patience… to me, this whole pursuit seemed distasteful as well as elitist.

She seems to be trying to grapple with her own elitism in the following passage:
‘Some of you, no doubt, will think that I protest too much, and that only the elite parts of any population will miss the shelves of older books and poems that pass out of favor with clockwork regularity age after age, generation after generation. But it the very opposite of elitism that propels my worries. I write this book and conduct my research today only because of the dedication of my parents and of a few deeply committed teachers from The School Sisters of Notre Dame in a two room eight grade school house gave me a reason as a child to read the great literature of the past. Only those books prepared me not to leave the coal miners and farmers in my tiny Midwestern town, but to understand each of those still dear people, and the world outside of El Dorado, Illinois in whole new ways.’

First off, you were right, only the elite parts of society will care. Full stop. Second, if you have to point out you are not elitist and do so by saying you’re the very opposite, I would suggest you go back and really think about your motives, because more often than not, the lady *doth* protest too much. You cite your non-elitism by talking about a small school presumably with a low teacher to student ratio, dedicated teachers, literate parents (who were professionals), and the expectation of leaving everything behind for a better life in a better place. You say that only by reading were you able to understand the “still dear people” (who couldn’t possibly understand their town without reading Ulysses) you so smarmily smirk at in the rearview mirror. Gross.

She says that kids these days are lacking a knowledge base. *Her* references are not being internalized anymore, and that makes her worry about her kids (who can code, but don’t know the literary references she expects in order to be considered educated by herself and the people who educated her).

She says that “teachers” [citation needed] are mad because students don’t want to learn old books anymore (as if most students ever did). “Professors” are mad that their old popular classes can’t be taught anymore for lack of demand (boo-hoo, they have to work more and create a vital education experience for which they are being paid). My take on all of this is that in today’s world kids speak up and want interesting things to learn and aren’t automatons like the author’s generation was often expected to be.

But probably the most ridiculous part of this letter is when she castigates herself for not writing perfectly in every office communication and every personal letter she writes. She castigates herself for not reading all the things like the New Yorker (which ‘actually matter’ in her own words) and instead reading journals and summations and noting things that she should probably read more thoroughly later, but probably won’t. She castigates herself for reading more now to be informed than immersed. Because unless it is hard to understand you can gain no value from it, I guess.

I feel like this letter is just a letter in self-hate that she’s stapled onto the backs on those less-educated than she. OK Boomer.

Letter Seven I find especially dubious as she cites a disproven study saying that children of poor or minority backgrounds hear far fewer words growing up. In fact it has been shown that this study is biased. Poor and minority parents keep quiet with a researcher sitting in their living room because they are afraid of being judged and having the researcher report something to CPS. Rich and white parents speak more verbosely in order to show off and prove themselves to the academics. If you take the researcher out of the home and install cameras/microphones, all of these differences disappear. This is institutional racism showing up in the original study. She is furthering institutional racism by citing this study.

This is a recent book, and with this author using a biased and disproven study in her work makes me question anything else she has to say on the matter.

Letter Eight is all politics and opinion. She talks about how (deep) reading is necessary to be a good citizen. She states, ‘We conflate information with knowledge, knowledge with wisdom with resulting diminution of all three.’ Good line. And I don’t disagree. She also says that we need to reeducate all citizens to process information vigorously across all media. Here in lies another thing that I don’t think she understands about herself, her motivations, and her writing.

This obviously Boomer author (who in letter six was condemning a “Millennial mother” for being worried about reading to her kid, and not instinctively knowing what to do, but coming to her for help – I guess shame on you?) doesn’t realize that it isn’t the child’s fault that democracy is crumbling and people don’t have attention spans anymore. Boomers don’t seem able to handle TV (Fox News), let alone the internet (Breitbart). They were the ones always complaining about how those mediums would rot your brain, and now they are the ones who are destroying democracy and believing every conspiracy theory. I truly believe it takes a generation or two to understand what to do with new technology – and teach the kids a generation or two later – in order to deal with “new” technology. She is so hopped up on this because she and her generation are often unable to make the jump successfully.

And like any Boomer, she says that, ‘this is our generation’s hinge moment.’ Whose, now? Who is this book meant for? It is meant for the (I’d argue) overly-educated, self-righteous, non-reflective, panicking, ageing generation of people on the out, who do not understand the world anymore and are terrified and yet still narcissistically myopic. And believe that everything they’ve done and experienced is the only possible way to live life. And they damn will enforce it exactly like that on every generation to come. Ever.

But what’s worse than all of this is her final thoughts on how to fix democracy. We need to ‘recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those that disagree with us.’ This may sound great to her Boomer ears, but the problem with the opposition is some people are being purposefully ignorant and rely on the a priori rational of hard core right wing religion. It is counter to being a deep reader to argue that “everybody has a point that is valid.” It is apologist nonsense and shouldn’t be tolerated. It is the reason that we are in this mess. It is a failing of an older generation, not today’s children. Stop projecting this on to today’s children.

She closes: ‘Readers are guardians’ - good readers like us, of course… so much self-aggrandizing bull.

Her take away on how to lead a good reading life: Festina Lente, or hurry slowly. Well I will leave you instead with my own latin expression you could take a note of: quiquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.
 
I try to give authors a lot of room. I am trying to write myself, and I know how difficult and personal it is. But this book is something else. Something that deserves to not be read. Something that deserves to go away.

As of today, I’ve read 89 book so far in 2019. There are 215 total books on my Goodreads profile listed as read or currently reading. Of all of these books, I’ve only deemed 6 to be “not-recommended.” When going over all the books I’ve read since 2014 when I started keeping track, I could only come up with six that really had no redeeming value.

Let me put this into more perspective: I didn’t even include Left Behind on this list. That is a truly terrible book – it is terribly written, has terrible plotting and characterization, and utilizes and promotes terrible theology. In fact, I think a lot of it is bad for a person to read because of both the horror and the righteousness it inspires in its target market, the “true believers” of the Evangelical far right. That said, that book did give me an insight into a former friend I grew up with, and without it, I would have far less empathy (and actual sympathy) for people of this persuasion. So even Left Behind has its merits in the right context, and isn’t on this list. That’s saying something.

I dislike Reader, Come Home that much.

There are a lot of books and articles (sorry if that isn’t deep enough reading for you) that contain anything of merit that this book might hold. But a lot of them come without the judgement, elitism, baggage, and extremely boring summary of how the brain reads (it is good, dense stuff I’m sure she loves – it is an instant sleep-inducer for the rest of us).

Dear Reader, stay away.
 
*Audiobook

[Rose]

DNF. I'd probably enjoy this far more as a podcast series...which I'm sure says something damning about my brain the digital world.

I don't dispute that Wolf has very valid concerns about our brains' development in the digital age but this reads like a shallow literature review. Telling me what Wendell Berry, Marcel Proust, Emily Dickinson, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer thought and said is great. Just not all on one page. Almost every page in this book has a pithy quote or anecdote from three or four different literary/historical figures and it's just so tiresome I can't continue.

Some positives:
- Maryanne Wolf has a warm and compassionate voice, so she's easy to like as a writer even if you don't agree with some of her conclusions
- Neuroscientific evidence about the way our brains develop and react when we engage in deep reading (versus the short bursts of information we read from the internet)
- Valuable discussion about inequality of access to technology

What I didn't care for:

This book reminded of a line from Upstart Crow when David Mitchell's Shakespeare says,

"Young people have such short attention spans these days. And with publishing, kids have instant entertainment in the pockets of their puffling pants. Oh, you see them hanging around together, hunched over a book of 14-line iambic pentameter, thumbing away, transfixed like zombies. Not talking to each other. Not interacting socially. Lost to the world. "Get off your book of sonnets!" cry parents up and down the land. "You'll develop a hunch!" I do worry about how their brains will develop with so little variation of stimulus to challenge their imagination.".

[Kathryn Bashaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kind of proved this book's point by my reaction to it. First, I felt like Wolf was taking too long to make her point in each "letter" (each chapter is written in the form of a letter to her reader). I am used to business communication, which is all about bullet points, visuals and not wasting your executive's time. Second, I skipped the chapters about children because I am not a teacher, nor currently the parent of a young child.
Which just proves her point. I am a voracious reader and yet even I have lost patience with long texts. I want to get the to point. I have a harder and harder time immersing myself in a long book, story, or essay. When she listed the symptoms of losing your attention span for deep reading, I had every single one. I was very disturbed by that.
What disturbed me even more was the very good argument that Wolf makes for the peril that this decline poses to our democracy. People who don't take on the role of an "other" by reading fiction, tend to be less empathetic and less willing to tolerate opposing points of view. People who can't read deeply and critically, can't think deeply and critically and are susceptible to manipulations & bunkum. Does any of this sound familiar?
Social media is where fingers usually point when critics lament the decline of reading and attention span, and Wolf definitely points that finger. But, as I read, another culprit occurred to me: the business world. I am a middle manager, and a lot of my job has to do with communicating, both up and down. The people above me absolutely will not tolerate lengthy texts. Whatever I have to say, must be said in 2-3 PowerPoint slides and conveyed in a 30-minute meeting. The people who report to me must understand their subject matter deeply, and I must understand it pretty deeply. The people I report to only have to understand the bullet points and graphs on the PowerPoint slide, and ask a few questions. And, on this basis, they make decisions about staffing, spending, and strategies. Working in this environment 40+ hours per week, for the past many years, has conditioned me to think that the bullet-point style of communication, because it is efficient, is the best. I'm starting to question that after reading this book. We are awash in information, but lacking in knowledge and wisdom.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I love books about books, it seems like books on reading generally make me grumpy. While I'd like to learn to read better, but the books on the topic have made me realize that I'm attached to my own approach. Many of the techniques these authors suggest don't work for me and their tone often strikes me as smug or condescending. This particular book is about the differences between reading electronic and print versions of a text and about the way reading online may be changing our reading habits.

I should put it out there that I'm biased in favor of digital communication. Keep that in mind when I say that I felt the author had a strong bias the other way. She constantly makes unsupported claims that I might let slide if I agreed with her. For instance, she claims that critical thinking is increasing 'embattled' as technology promotes ease, efficiency, immediacy - no citation. Are people getting worse at thinking critically? Is this because of the way we interact with material online? I certainly think this could be true, but if you're going to put something in print it feels authoritative and it should be supported with a citation.

Even when she does cite specific studies, I feel like she's being at best imprecise and at worst misleading. As an example, she describes one study as finding that 'skimming is the new normal in our digital reading' and that 'as often as not' we read digital material with eye-movement that suggests skimming. She doesn't give us an exact percentage of the time this is the case. She doesn't compare this to frequency of skimming when reading a physical book. And she doesn't describe the purpose of the reading someone is engaging in when skimming. I'm often reading online to find specific information, so I skim to find it. That's different from reading for complete comprehension. All of this lack of detail may simply be the author trying to simplify, but I find myself suspicious that a more complete picture wouldn't support her narrative as well.

I did enjoy some of her explanations of basic science, such as how the brain processes the written word. However, when she strayed into science I knew, I found her descriptions vague to the point of being wrong. She also on many occasions explained a study in such a way that I couldn't tell if the study coined the word for a particular phenomenon or showed that phenomenon was actually happening. Alternately, she might state something authoritatively and than go on to discuss whether or not what she said was true. I am unpleasantly surprised that someone who studies language would use language so imprecisely and it does almost seem like she's trying to fool an inattentive reader.

Last but not least, there was some of the usual snobbery I've noticed in books like this. The author claims (without support) that a generation used to the 140 characters of twitter would have a hard time handling sentences of 150-300 words in some classics. When discussing genres we might read, she gives positive descriptors of all genres but romance (described only as 'bodice-ripping'). She also name-drops specific authors in the other genres she mentions, but can't be bothered to mention any well known romance authors. 

Anyway, I hope you don't mind yet another rant about a book telling people how to read. I think I'll be moving on from my ill-fated experiment with reading about reading, so this should be the last one.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey

[اليازية خليفة · Rating 5 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب، دفعني لإعادة النظر في طريقة تفكيرنا عندما يتعلق الأمر بالقراءة .. القراءة العميقة .. والقراءة الرقمية السريعة ..
بنكمل يتهدد البشرية إن سلّم القُرّاء عقولهم وأوقاتهم لمن لايفهم في القراءة -ولايمتلك وقتًا للتمعن في الأفكار والوصول إلى مرحلة القراءة بعمق-
هذا الكتاب يجب أن يطلع عليه كل مسؤول - بغض النظر عن نوع ماهية هذه المسؤولية -

[Carol Tilley · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book pissed me off.

[خلُود · Rating 4 out of 5]

مميز!

إن عالم الكتب، من بين العوالم العديدة التي لم تمنح للإنسان كهبة طبيعية، بل ابتدعها بروحه، أشدها سحرا وعظمة، عندما يخربش الطفل أحرفه الأولى على لوحة ما، ويحاول قرائتها يخطو بذلك أول خطواته نحو عالم مصطنع وأكثر تعقيدا، يتعرف به على قوانين هذا العالم و قواعده وكيفية ممارستها دون أخطاء ليس هناك متسع في الحياة لنقرأ ونكتب ما نشتهي، لكن لن يكون هناك تاريخ، أو مفهوم للانسانية بدون الكلمات وبدون الكتب.
هرمان هسة

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a follow-up to Wolf’s previous book, Proust and the Squid, which explored how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. In this book, Wolf writes a series of letters to her readers to share her concerns and hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it adapts to digital mediums.

Wolf raises some difficult questions, such as:

1. Will children learn to incorporate the full range of “deep reading” processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?
2. Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?
3. With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?
4. Will all these influences change the formation in children and the use in adults of “slower” cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?
5. How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?

[verbava · Rating 3 out of 5]

якісь висновки з цього тексту я спробувала зробити для «вербуму», але якщо зовсім коротко, то:
- люди народжуються без схильностей до читання, і мережі, які наш мозок вибудовує, коли ми вчимося читати, – це щось не зовсім природне і в кожному випадку унікальне;
- електронні носії впливають на те, як ми читаємо, але насамперед тому, що з паперу нашому організмові таки легше читати осмислено, а всілякі девайси відкриті до перескакування зі здорових і корисних текстів до словесного фаст-фуду;
- дітям корисно, коли вдома багато паперових книжок, які з ними читають, і просто коли з ними розмовляють; звісно, не відкриття ні разу, але меріен вулф розробляє ідеальну читацьку програму – в сенсі носіїв і практик – для дітей від нуля до підліткового віку, і це може бути цікаво;
- білінгви краще перемикаються між завданнями, ніж ті, хто виріс на одній мові.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dit naar mijn mening uiterst actuele en belangrijke boek voelde aan als een apotheose van wat ik de laatste tijd aan non-fictie gelezen heb rond de nadelen, de gevaren en de impact van digitalisering, sociale media en mobiele communicatie voor en op ons leven en dat van onze kinderen. In eerste instantie dacht ik daarbij aan Willem Schinkels zinnig eigenzinnige Waarom ik geen mobiele telefoon heb: Aphonismen, maar uiteraard ook aan het oeuvre van filosoof Byung-Chul Han.

Bij Byung-Chul Han zijn bovenstaande bezorgdheden al langer een terugkerend element. In zijn filering van de globalisering en het neoliberale productie- en consumptiedenken, waarschuwt hij voor een verlies van democratische waarden (Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy), van empathie voor de ander (The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today) en van ons vermogen om in taal en narratief in de diepte te denken en te reflecteren, onderhevig als die taal is aan de vluchtige, op efficiëntie gerichte digitale communicatie (Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld).

Al deze elementen keren letterlijk terug in dit boek, het tweede dat ik las van Maryanne Wolf, na Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, wat een ideale, maar taaiere voorbereiding bleek hierop. In haar neurologisch onderzoek naar taal, lezen en dyslexie, stuitte ze enigszins voorspelbaar op de veranderingen die het gebruik van (mobiele) schermen en digitale teksten in ons brein en ook merkbaar in ons concentratievermogen teweegbrengen. Wolf schrijft hier negen brieven aan ons, haar 'Dear reader'. De eerste drie bouwen nog voort op wat ze in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain aan neurologische kennis meegaf, eindigend met het menselijk en maatschappelijk belang van 'Deep reading' om tot 'Deep thinking' te komen, en op die manier tot kritische analyse, empathie en (zelf)reflectie.

Toen kwam het hoofdstuk 'What will become of the readers we have been?', waarin ze uit de doeken doet hoe we aan lees- en denkvermogen inboeten, ten koste van het snelle online skimmen van teksten en wat dat met onze breinen en dat van onze kinderen en jongeren doet. En over hoe ze zichzelf aan een test onderwerpt om Hermans Hesse's Het kralenspel te herlezen, een klassieker waar ze vroeger literair van onder de indruk was en die haar nu ... enfin, u moet het zelf maar lezen en ontdekken, dear reader.

Ik ging ervan uit dat deze vierde brief het kloppende hart van dit boek zou worden, zo empathisch, bezorgd en betrokken is het geschreven. Maar nee, Maryanne Wolf bleef tot het einde toe een bevlogen betoog voeren om ons lezen te beschermen en het uiteindelijk te laten evolueren tot wat ze (vrij door mij vertaald) 'bi-geletterdheid' noemt, een hybride vorm van leesopvoeding, waarin het lezen op papier een symbiose aangaat met het digitale lezen, gebaseerd op haar neurologisch onderzoek naar in tweetalige gezinnen opgevoede kinderen.

Al haar kennis gooit ze in de strijd om die onzekere, op hypothesen gebouwde toekomstmuziek noodzakelijk, aantrekkelijk en realiseerbaar te laten klinken, inclusief voorbeelden uit haar eigen bezielde literaire leven. De rol van zowel de wetenschap als het onderwijs en de opleiding van leerkrachten zijn daarin net zo cruciaal als een beleid dat regels ondersteunt voor een doordacht gebruik van digitale tools en apps die specifiek ontworpen zijn om de verschillende vormen van leesproblemen aan te pakken.

De titel van dit boek - dat mij als leraar en lezer nu al nauw aan het hart is gaan liggen - is ook de titel van Wolfs laatste brief, waarin ze haar 'dear readers' persoonlijk en absoluut niet eenzijdig optimistisch uitgeleide doet. Ze wenst ons meer trage en diepe leestijd toe met een term waar, jawel, ook Byung-Chul Han een essayboekje aan wijdde: Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Iets wat voor mij de leescirkel perfect rond maakte. Lees dit boek, dear Goodreaders. En laat ons hopen dat het wereldwijd vertaald wordt ... op papier!

[shams hoter | · Rating 3 out of 5]

دراسة حول أثر التقنية الحديثة على دماغ القارئ ، ومدى تغير عمليات التفكير والتحليل النقدي وما آثار سرعة تدفق المعلومات على قدرتنا على التركيز والصبر المعرفي ..

لكن وجدت أن الإسهاب في بعض الجوانب وعدم الإهتمام بجودة الترجمة قلّلت من المقدرة على الإستفادة منه .

[May Ling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: From her last book, I think she was asked to write a book that was more in line with what the masses could understand. In this regard, she dumbed her intense thinking down a lot. Still 4 stars, but a prefer Wolf unfiltered.

Reader, Come Home is a series of letters on various topics. To me, these were a bit obvious platitudes about feelings on how the digital age is destroying critical thinking, reading deeply and more. If you need that type of thing for your research or understanding of the stakes, then yeah, this book is a home run.

I just know from her previous book, that she is soooo deep. It made me a bit sad. Still, there are always great take aways and I have such respect, I can, but remove a single star.

Reading the Canary in the Mind (p 7) - Somewhat interesting about the effect on plasticity.
Under the big top - P. 20 - I like how she tells people that think we only use 10% of our brain that they are wrong. "a reading circuit that incorporates input from two hemispheres, four lobes in ach hemisphere (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital), and all five layers of the brain.... .Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn't yet become aware of what we do when we read.
P 24 - She speaks to who eye movement and shifting visual attention aids in focus.
P 79 - She concurs with Harvard physicist John Huth who writes about the fact that we are in a time where we fail to connect the facts, knowledge and detail to the larger picture. She quotes him: "Sadly, we often atomize knowledge into pieces that don't have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to the guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value."
To me these are the stakes of the failure currently to teach true reading comprehension.
P. 94:.... a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills an render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write.
P. 102 - she talks about how reading circuits had readapted to the lower demanding reading of the internet. As a result, she needed a running start before reading the higher quality material found in books.
p. 141 - She talks about how children that are read to develop an easier time with reading later in life as they acquire important phonetic patterns.
P. 193 - She speaks to the relationship between reading and cognitive patience.

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

“When you read carefully, you are more able to discern what is true and to add it to what you know. Ralph Waldo Emerson described this aspect of reading in his extraordinary speech ‘The American Scholar’: ‘When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant.’ In reading research, the cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich suggested something similar some time ago about the development of word knowledge. In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the ‘Matthew Effect’ after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know.”

Gripping, even if the book is often repeating much of the research that readers already know (reading on screens has ruined our capacity for concentration, retention, and critical thinking). Wolf has a distinctly humanist approach, focused on the well-being of children in a device-addicted age, and she presents a challenging view of the ways in which we have rushed headlong into depleting the development of human reason.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lesen ist eine komplexe Tätigkeit, die mehrere Ebenen des Gehirns fordert und die keine neuronalen angeborenen Netzwerke hat, wie zum Beispiel für Sprache oder Sprachverständnis. Dementsprechend machen digitale Medien die Lesefähigkeit extrem vulnerabel. Nicht nur ändern digitale Oberflächen unser Leseverhalten, sondern auch unsere Fähigkeit für Deduktion und Schlussfolgerungen.
Wie schön es doch zu wissen ist, dass die Wörter jedes Buches uns verändern und unsere neuronalen Verbindungen anreichern. Jedes Wort wird mit mehr Bedeutung füllt. Es aktiviert nicht nur unsere emotionalen Erinnerungen und unser Wissensschatz, sondern auch unsere motorischen Fähigkeiten. Ohne Bücher wären wir dem Barbarentum näher als uns lieb ist.
Wie nah sind wir dem ganzen durch digitale Medien und wie sieht es mit den jüngsten unserer Gesellschaft aus? Welche Herausforderungen müssen wir annehmen? Dank Maryanne Wolf einer Kognitionswissenschaftlerin kommen wir den Antworten näher. Ein Buch das gelesen werden muss!

"Everything we read adds to a reservoir of knowledge, which is the basis of our ability to comprehend and to predict whatever we read."

[Manzoor Elahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.
—David Ulin

The question isn’t what will books become in a world of electronic reading. The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been — quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted — in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.
—Verlyn Klinkenborg

The average person consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day. Basically, that is the equivalent of close to 100,000 words a day. The average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. There is much at stake in the development of the reading brain and in the quickening changes that now characterize its current, evolving iterations.

You need only examine yourself. Perhaps you have already noticed how the quality of your attention has changed the more you read on screens and digital devices. It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge. This means that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less and less developed. Young reading brains are evolving without a ripple of concern by most people.

Reading reflects our medium. And to the extent that a digital medium is going to require us to process large amounts of information very quickly, it will diminish from the time we have for slower processing work.

And these slower processes are deep learning, the ones that are more cognitively challenging. They’re the basis for going beyond that initial short circuit of decoding the information and understanding it at a very basic level. The digital medium affordance rewards and advantages fast processing at the cost of the slower processes that build our very important critical, analytical, and empathetic processes. To possess cognitive patience is to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention.

Skimming has led to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical. One of my major worries is that when you lose the novel, you lose the ability to go into another person’s perspective. The biggest worry now is that a lot of what we’re seeing in society today — this vulnerability to demagoguery in all its forms — of one unanticipated and never intended consequence of a mode of reading that doesn’t allow critical analysis and empathy.


There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader.

There is the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge. We are awash in this life.

There is the second life, in which reading’s varied forms of entertainment are to be found in abundance: the sheer distraction and exquisite pleasure of immersion—in stories of other lives; in articles about mysterious, newly discovered exoplanets; in poems that steal our breath away.

The third life of the good reader is the culmination of reading and the terminus of the other two lives: the reflective life, in which—whatever genre we are reading—we enter a totally invisible, personal realm, our private “holding ground” where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose real mysteries dwarf any of our imagination.

“Digital media trains us to be high-bandwidth consumers rather than meditative thinkers. We download or stream a song, article, book or movie instantly, get through it and advance to the next immaterial thing.”

Internet diminish our capacity for deliberation and enfeeble our capacity for genuine reflection? Does the daily avalanche of information banish the space needed for actual wisdom?

The constant need for efficiency: “buying time” without knowing for what purpose; decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge; and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

We do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, writers, and thinkers.

The final perquisite of the third reading life is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.

Maryanne Wolf recommends teaching children first to read physical books which reinforces the brain’s reading circuit through concrete experience and then use digital screens effectively. An antidote for today’s critical-thinking deficit.

[Lissa00 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book immediately after I saw it listed because I am a devoted reader and a fan of this author's other work, but to be honest, what I got out of  it instead was a wakeup call.  As the parent of three school-age children, I encourage reading and definitely lead by example, but the siren call of the IPad can at times overrule.  According to this book, we are definitely not alone with this dilemma.  Maryanne Wolf's writing is not always easy, and requires the deep reading that she discusses, but the message comes through clearly.  The way in which we digest information is changing and as we get used to reading smaller snippets online, we are losing the ability to empathize with others and form researched opinions.  Thankfully, the author does not have only the bad news to depart but offers concrete advice for using both the digital realm and books to create multi-faceted learning that promotes close reading, analytical thinking and empathetic decision-making.  I learned so much from reading this book and as a reader and a parent, it is extremely important information.  I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

[Charlene · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this . . . have been trying to read it for months now but never got beyond page 36 so have finally, officially, given up for now.
I heard Maryanne Wolf speak several years ago & she was excellent then at conveying her interesting ideas about how the switch from oral to print and now to digital changes the very nature of our brains (as well as our culture).
Maybe my own brain has been affected because I can't follow the long paragraphs & find the information repetitive. I may try this again later -- it is a subject that I'm very interested in & maybe if I just tried a chapter later in the book, I would find it more engaging.

[John Devlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here’s my criticism of this work.
It’s follows the same prescriptive arc of every educational treatise there is: more research, new techniques, better teacher training and oodles of aspirational hope.

People always want more money, they always think there’s a fix out here, and they always end on Hope.

The idea that there’s a fix is what I call the cinema psychosis. We’ve digested so many movies we have come to believe that there’s always away around or out of any bad situation. The movie the Martian is a great example, and Matt Damon makes the idea explicit in the film’s coda where he says. “ At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is.”
No, sometimes it’s just the end. Example: Challenger, go to throttle up. No one was getting to work after that.

More cinema psychosis is the teacher. The golden, noble teacher that takes the impoverished, the apathetic, the challenged and lifts them up in a come to Jesus moment. Maybe there’s a teacher or two that you remember with fondness, but one that changed your life? No.

Most teachers went to third rate state schools and took teaching jobs bc the hours and vacation time were stellar. And hey, they liked kids too. Sure they’re the true believers, but after a few years of the same ole instruction became rote.
Tangentially, the author reifies this when she mentions the fierce ideological wars between the phonetics fans and the whole readers.

The author makes the obvious points that digital media is saturating our minds and keeping up perpetually distracted, and it’s much worse for little kids.
Sure, but her remedies miss the real failure: parents

Here’s a quote from the book that she fails to understand, ‘The noble intention of the study was to investigate the effects of providing books and digital access in libraries to underserved children and families. The results ran counter to every hoped-for outcome: simply providing access to digital tools to underserved children could actually have deleterious effects, if there was no participation by parents. The children in that study did significantly worse on tests of literacy than other children did, and the disparities between groups increased after technological devices were introduced, particularly when the children used them for entertainment purposes.”

Surprise, poor kids did worse bc parents don’t have the time, the inclination, or the temperament to backstop their kids, who then use the iPad to play silly games.


She’s being prophetic here but doesn’t want to believe,”it
would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning.”

That is what’s happening. I’ve read other works in this area and someone made the point that sure capitalism and its handmaiden Technology have transformed the world in just 300 years, but was it coincidental that the novel first appeared at the same time.
The novel built empathy. As the novel declines, as folks lose the ability to think deeply will they become less tolerant, less nuanced? The answer seems to be yes.

The author wants a bridge, a bi-literate society where people read the printed page and cycle back to digital.
She quotes, Heidegger, Socrates, and Aristotle. The elitism is risible. Her notion of the average American’s intellectual capability and curiosity, well let’s just say she’s widely overshooting the mark.

The printed page will die as digital commands more and more attention, as the distractions pile up, and many lose the ability to deep read, and the last generation who remembers the printed word dies.

Here’s a bigger change that’s coming. No more writing.
Why learn to even print. Let’s go further, why even learn a keyboard?
Alexa take a note. The tech will only get better.
Some of you reading this will bristle. But you’re not the masses of folks. You’re the 5% who love to read. Read all the time. Read on the crapper. Read in lines. Read when you were a kid walking home from school, head up only when you needed to cross streets.

Most people don’t hear the ‘music’. They just play Hearts, and kandy krush, and watch YouTube and tick tock, and there numbers will continue to grow.

[Hirdesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind-blowing read ! !

[محمد الأنصاري · Rating 5 out of 5]

لعل عنوان الكتاب حافزا قويا لاقتنائه، حافزا ملحا شديدا على عقلي القارى للابحار فيه. حينما نرى في طفولات الأجيال السابقة، ندرك أن الكتب وهواية القراءة والمطالعة بشكل خاص، تكتسب صداها وقيمتها، فالعقول لم تنجرف في ظروف الحياة المشتتة مثلما نعاني اليوم، فالعنوان طوق نجاة، ينتشلنا من غرق الشتات إلى غرق الصفحات، حيث مواجهة الخوف من البلل !

يشرح الكتاب في بداية رحلة الإنقاذ عن دوائر الدماغ القارئ، حيث يسرد عمليات الدماغ الفائضة الكثيرة أثناء قراءة كلمة واحدة ، مثل بهلوان السيرك والحلقات التي يحملها المشاركون في البهلوان. حيث أن هذه العمليات العجيبة هي السبب في قراءة كلمة فما بالك إن كانت جملا بل فصول بل كتاب بأكمله. ثم تنتقل رحلة الإنقاذ فتشمل دور القراءة في حياتنا كعزاء لظروفنا الحياتية الرتيبة، وما يجب أن تكون عليه القراءة، حيث التأني في قراءة الكلمات وسلامة الطريق، لا العجلة والسرعة الفائقة والحوادث المدمية. فما إن يدرك الدماغ القارئ أن الكلمات لها قدرة عجيبة على التأثير وما يمكن لفصل روائي في حال قرائته برؤية أخرى، حتى يتم الاعتراف بهذه الفضيلة..

يتم الحديث بشكل خاص عن الطفل، فأمثاله من الأطفال كما يشرح الكتاب، يحملون الإرث القادم للأجيال السابقة، فتم الحديث عن إمكانية التقنية الحديثة من الإفراج عن تهمتها كمشتتة لعقولنا، ولربما تأتي على هيئة تقنيات تعلم الأطفال كيفية القراءة. من خلال الأصوات والأشكال والألوان. ومن ثم تأتي الوقاية من قيدها ليأتي حضن الكتاب الورقي لهما ولحظات الاستمتاع برؤية الكلمات والحبر.

لعلي اختصر رأيي في الكتاب مثلما قالت الجملة الأخيرة " أسرع ببطء وعد إلى وطنك أيها الدماغ القارئ! " لأن قرائته تعني الكثير من العجائب المهملة أثناء تسرعنا في قراءة الكتب والروايات، وإدراكنا أن الحلقة التي يجري بها الفأر إلى ما لا نهاية. إلى سراب خادع! يعني دفع ضريبة تلك العجائب.. إنه كتاب أضاف إليَّ الكثير كقارئ. لعله يضيف الحياة القارئة إليك..

[Zsa Zsa · Rating 1 out of 5]

First of all don’t spoil the endings of books in your scientific books on books, especially if you are a lover of books yourself!
Also, if you’re trying to talk about reading, you don’t need to look down on people who can’t read or their literature is oral.
Lastly, if you’re trying to talk about humanity, don’t make it so political and on the wrong side!
Privilege privilege drenching the world
Some of her word choices were so poor, I thought the book was written in 1950s, first edition is 2018!!!

[Girl · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's... I don't know. I hoped this would be interesting (neuroscience, cognition, reading!), but instead, it was patronizing. The Internet and Twitter in particular are killing reading. Well, I beg to differ.

[Kristīne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lasiet ķieģeļus, ļoti palīdz.

[Lucy Marincel · Rating 5 out of 5]

If my memory from high school English class serves me correctly, it is an example of irony that I read this as an ebook.

Regardless of the format, I found this to be a deeply engaging book. While I did not agree with every argument, Wolf’s ideas and style of writing kept me engrossed and excited to engage with each facet of this important subject.