“So much of a child’s life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. [...] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Allen’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Allen’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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