I’ve been on a bit of journey, educating myself about the connection between reading, writing, and thinking. This started in earnest with More Than Words by John Warner. While I was reading it, the author mentioned Maryanne Wolf’s two books, Proust and the Squid – The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and this book saying “Wolf’s books explore her significant concerns about us losing our reading abilities, or even worse, raising generations of kids who do not have access to the kinds of experiences that are uniquely available through deep reading.” I was particularly interested in this book and how it looks at and compares reading in print to digital reading.

She immediately states that there is no going back from digital reading. Further, she doesn’t recommend such a course. She sees tremendous value in digital reading. It’s just that she doesn’t want us to lose the ability to read deeply that those of us in older generations learned by reading in print. She explores, through chapters she writes as letters to the reader, the way the brain learns to read. She has a few recommendations for teaching reading. One of these is to teach reading in print and reading digitally as different skills and for different purposes. This allows readers to move fluidly between both kinds of reading and teaches them when each style best serves the reader’s purpose.

This book is essential reading today. It is a voice of sanity in the reading wars and the conflict between those advocating reading digitally and those who demand we read in print. Hers is the voice saying that this isn’t a question of “either … or” but rather one of “both … and”. It should be required reading not just for every English teacher but for every teacher across the curriculum.

My rating: 5/5

In addition to my usual review, for this book I have decided to share the quotes that I highlighted while reading it. I hope between the short review and these quotes, I will entice my readers to buy the book and read it.

“When we retreat from the intrinsic complexity of human life for whatever reason, often as not we turn to what conforms to the narrowing confines of what we already know, never shaking or testing that base, never looking outside the boundaries of our past thought with all its earlier assumptions and sometimes dormant but ready-to-pounce prejudices.” — Letter Four: “What Will Become of the Readers We Have Been?”

“It is not that I prefer internal to external platforms of knowledge; I want both, but the internal one has to be sufficiently formed before automatic reliance on the external ones takes over. Only in this developmental sequence do I trust that they will know when they do not know.” — Letter Four: “What Will Become of the Readers We Have Been?” The “they” referred to are undergraduate students.

“The will that is necessary to answer these questions begins with a deeper examination of our own reading lives, begun in the last letters. Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read? Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy? Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning? Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished? Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information? Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available? Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self? Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book? What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?” — Letter Four: “What Will Become of the Readers We Have Been?”

“At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.” — Letter Four: “What Will Become of the Readers We Have Been?”

“… the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin places such attention-flitting, task-switching behavior within the context of our evolutionary reflex, the *novelty bias* that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: ‘Humans will work just as hard to obtain a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate…. In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addition loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which want to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.’
“Levitin claims that children can become so chronically accustomed to a continuous stream of competitors for their attention that their brains are for all purposes being bathed in hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, the hormones more commonly associated with fight, flight, and stress. They are only three years old, or four, or sometimes even two and younger—but they are first passively receiving and then, ever so gradually, actively requiring the levels of stimulation of much older children on a regular bases. As Levitin discusses, when children and youth are surrounded with this constant level of novel, sensory stimulation, they are being projected into a continuously hyperattentive state.” — Letter Five: The Raising of Children in a Digital Age {Is this the source of so much youth anxiety?}

“Knowing research about the development of literacy is a very good thing; knowing what to attend to in one’s own child overrides everything I can ever say—or write—about any medium or any approach.” — Letter Six: From Laps to Laptops in the First Five Years: Don’t Move Too Fast

“European children who began instruction in what we would consider first grade acquired reading more readily than those who began a year earlier.” — Letter Seven: The Science and Poetry in Learning (and Teaching) to Read

“In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.” — Letter Nine: Reader, Come Home

“If we in the twenty-first century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well.” — Letter Nine: Reader, Come Home

“The great, insufficiently discussed danger to a democracy stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full Intellectual powers in forming those views. The vacuum that occurs when this is not realized leads to ineluctably to a vulnerability to demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes an falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making.” — Letter Nine: Reader, Come Home

“Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, 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 reader, writers, and thinkers.” — Letter Nine: Reader, Come Home