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

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

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

This book has gone on and off my list many times. Originally published in 2020, it won both the Locus and Nebula awards for best novella, so I added to my list. But when I thought about actually reading it, it didn’t appeal and came off. I finally read it as the podcast Writing Excuses used it in their “Close Reading” series discussing tension. The way they talked about it, finally got me to read it. I listened to the audiobook on my travels as a soccer referee.

The narrator tells of her adventures fighting monsters that look like human members of the Ku Klux Klan. These are the same monsters that caused her trauma as a young girl. Now she takes her revenge hunting and killing them. But something seems a little different when a new kind of Klan monster shows up. And they seem to have a plan for her she knows nothing about.

This is a supernatural horror about the terror of racism and its effects. There is a bit of gore, but the horrors are more visceral and emotional. I think the author is trying to bring home to the read the tangible feelings of fear and hopelessness for these victims of hate and discrimination. It succeeds well.

My rating: 4/5

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

For March my book club reads women’s fiction or a book written by a woman. We selected this book. It was published in 2018 and proceeded to win numerous awards including the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards for best novel. I finished it the night before our book club meeting this past Wednesday.

The book is an alternate history. In the spring 1952 with Dewey as president (not Truman), a meteor strikes and wipes out the entire east coast of the United States. The damage to the whole planet is so bad that the world immediately starts making plans to get off of it. Elma is the main character and narrator, a female computer (one who does math, not a machine) and former WASP pilot who dreams of becoming an astronaut.

The book starts with a bang, literally. You are dropped right into the action as the meteor hits in the first few pages. A number of the computers in the new space agency are former WASPs eager to get into space. The male leaders are eager to maintain the status quo while Elma’s husband is the image of support. In this way, it was a bit cliché for me. And certain aspects of the story seemed a bit drawn out. Overall I really enjoyed the novel. It always kept me wanting to find out what happened next. I will definitely be reading the next book in the series.

My rating: 4/5

Clarkesworld Issue 222, March 2025

I finally finished reading the March issue of Clarkesworld last week. Here are my brief review of the fiction there.

From Enceladus, with Love by Ryan Cole (4,970 word) — A young teenager stows away on a ship to find her mom on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, where she is a miner. Everything changes when the ship wakes up. A fresh look at a newly awakening AI. (My rating: 5/5)

Pollen by Anna Burdenko, translated from Russian by Alex Shvartsman (5,330 words) — A family is the lead mission to a planet with psychedelic pollen. It hard to say much more without spoiling it. An emotional story of a family dealing with a difficult situation. (My rating: 4/5)

Mindtrips by Tlotlo Tsamaase (7,730 words) — A young woman with a traumatic past is forced to take therapy pills to deal with it so those in authority can figure out what actually happened to cause her mother’s death. Explores the ethics of forcing other to take mental health meds. (My rating: 4/5)

Those Uncaring Waves by Yukimi Ogawa (18,140 words) — A pattern maker who helps to heal people’s pain tries to help a person whose own skin patterns have damaged her mental health. A deeply moving story of helping others for its own sake as well as the importance of having difficult discussions. (My rating: 5/5)

Hook and Line by Koji A. Dae (4,150 words) — An old medium on a generation ship tries to find a way to stay connected to the spirits of those who boarded the ship on Earth. A story about reconciling the past with the future. (My rating: 4/5)

The Sound of the Star by Ren Zeyu, translated from Chinese by Jay Zhang (3,820 words) — A man visits a number of planets where their stars all affect how sound works. For example, on one sound stays available in the atmosphere almost forever. A very unique exploration of sound in our lives. (My rating: 5/5)

Funerary Habits of Low Entropy Entities by Damián Neri (3, 500 words) — A crab-like explorer who subsumes the minds of the dead he eats, finds a dead human, eats it, and builds a spaceship to leave one of Jupiter’s moons. This feels like a scientist wrote it without considering his layman audience. (My rating: 2/5)

The average rating for the stories in this issue: 4.14 out of 5 stars.

More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner

I regularly read John Warner’s newsletter “The Biblioracle Recommends”. I thoroughly enjoy his takes on reading and writing there. So, when he started mentioning a book he was working on about the intersection of AI and writing, I was intrigued. I bought a copy on the day of release (4 February 2025) and recently finished reading it.

Warner is a former college writing teacher and currently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. His book addresses the concern that many have of how the growth of generative AI tools (like ChatGPT) may affect writing and how it is taught. In short, the author’s view is that we are looking at the question the wrong way. In fact, he says that AI can’t read or write. Sure, it produces text through an automated guessing process that churns out grammatically correct text. But that isn’t writing. Only humans can read and write. About the concern of using ChatGPT in education: “Students using ChatGPT to complete assignments that don’t mean anything to them and seem unconnected to learning is only sensible. This is not a character defect of students but the sign of a bad disconnect between schooling and learning.”

The other main idea that I really connected with is that writing is a process not an output. “The economic style of reasoning [that stresses efficiency above all else] crowds out other considerations—namely, moral ones. It privileges the speed and efficiency with which an output is produced over the process that led to that output. But for we humans, process matters. Our lives are experienced in the world of process, not outputs.” Human beings aren’t efficient. Trying to make them so turns us into machines and automatons. This book is well written and essential reading in today’s world.

My rating: 5/5

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Back in 2017 the movie The Shape of Water was released to box office success and critical acclaim. In November of that same year, this novella, originally published in 1982 and long out of print, was republished. It then found its way onto my list of books. This past week I had some longer than usual drives to scholastic soccer matches that I officiated, so I listened to it on audiobook.

An amphibious creature escapes from a lab where it was being tested on, tortured, and abused. The titular Mrs. Caliban hears about it on her radio as she does her housework. She and her husband are somewhat estranged though still living together. They lost a son to an operation gone wrong and another to a miscarriage. While Mrs. Caliban is preparing and serving dinner for her husband and a co-worker, the monster shows up in her kitchen. She befriends him, hiding him in her son’s old room as her husband never goes to that room or even that part of the house. Mrs. Caliban and the monster have an affair and work on a plan to get him back to his own home in the sea.

Numerous themes and ideas are explored in this short novella. Naturally relationships and fidelity, but also what it means to be a monster and the treatment of non-human animals, including the ethics of eating meat. None of this is heavy handed but occurs in the natural course of the storytelling. Despite being written over forty years ago, it feels surprisingly contemporary. What I appreciate most is that it doesn’t really give answers, though these are implied. Instead, it is a book that questions many things that we often take for granted without even thinking.

My rating: 4/5

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

Every year, Locus magazine does a review issue in February. In it, their editors and reviewers list their favorites of the year. One of those reviewers this year was Alexandra Pierce. She recommended this novella. I picked it up on her recommendation as a well-written story that explores deeper issues.

The story is that of an unnamed boy and woman. The boy lives below decks on a sort of chain gang about a generation ship. The woman is a professor aboard that same ship in a caste that is just slightly above that of the boy. She gets the boy out of the Hold and brings him to the university. He struggles to adapt there while relying on the Practice that he was taught in the Hold by an old man.

This is a tale of class and hierarchy in society. It moves rather slowly and the writing is dense. It borders on being for English teachers only but never quite tips into that territory. Clearly the author is not just talking about space. This is a metaphor for all human societies. And what the author has to say in her exploration is well worth reading this short book.

My rating: 4/5

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

I have heard of this book off and on over the last few months. Most recently, John Warner mentioned it in his newsletter article about who should read his new book. What he wrote there finally put this book on my list to read. And my recently launched Daily Dose of Empathy project got me to read it.

The book is a review of the neuroscience and evolutionary history of how the human brain changes in order to read using practical examples of modern reading acquisition. Humans are absolutely not built for reading. But the brain being so adaptable, it literally changes in order to learn to read. And when people struggle to read (e.g. dyslexia) what differences are there in the brain? This book looks deeply into those differences and takes a first stab at trying to figure out the why of how this happens.

While this book is written in easily approachable language common to all modern nonfiction, it deals with the complex topic of neuroscience in general and the brain specifically. While I read a lot of that detail, much of it was more complex than I was interested in fully understanding. The book is so well written that I didn’t find that an impediment to reading or enjoying the more accessible information that I gleaned from reading it.

My rating: 4/5

Someone in Time edited by Jonathan Strahan

I read this as member of my book club at my local library. We each read a different book on a particular topic. For the most recent meeting we read historical fiction that takes place prior to the twentieth century. I kind of cheated with this one. It is short stories and only some of them go that far back in time. But it seemed to be a hit when I told them about it.

The editor was able to get stories from a lot of well know contemporary authors of science fiction. The theme of the anthology was time travel love stories. The book’s title as a call out to the 1980 move Somewhere in Time was totally on purpose. There were sixteen stories in the book. Here are my brief synopses and ratings.

“Roadside Attraction” by Alix E. Harrow — After his girlfriend breaks up with him, a young man loses himself by going to the past over and over only to find his destiny in the present. (5/5)
“The Past Life Reconstruction Service” by Zeb Cho — A movie director recently dumped by his boyfriend keeps seeing him as he explores his past lives. (5/5)
“First Aid” by Seanan McGuire — In order to take care of her younger disabled sister, a woman prepares to go back permanently to Elizabethan England. (5/5)
“I Remember Satellites” by Sarah Gailey — When a time traveler draws a short straw job that leaves her permanently in the past, she has to leave behind a girlfriend to become a divorcée who causes the future King England to abdicate. (5/5)
“The Golden Hour” by Jeffrey Ford — A time traveler stuck in time reconnects with his time-traveling wife. (3/5)
“The Lichens” by Nina Allan — A woman in northern Scotland during the time of Culloden encounters a scientist from the future looking for a buried spacecraft. (4/5)
“Kronia” by Elizabeth Hand — Lovers who grew up a mile apart find each other through time. (2/5)
“Bergamot and Vetiver” by Lavanya Lakshminarayan — A woman from the 2500s travels back to the Indus Valley Civilization where the future’s leaders use her to steal water the man she falls in love with. (4/5)
“The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente — A woman tells the tale of her romance with the personification of the space/time continuum. (4/5)
“Unbashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse” by Sam J. Miller — A young man regrets not walking his first love home, finding out the next morning that he has been murdered for who he loved. (4/5)
“Romance: Historical” by Rowan Coleman — A young neurodivergent woman mysteriously connects with a man from 1914 in the bookshop where she works. (5/5)
“The Place of All Souls” by Margo Lanagan — Two people who found each other connected in the space between times, find each other and struggle about what to do about it and how it will affect their families. (3/5)
“Timed Obsolescence” by Sameem Siddiqui — A man pursues a fling during multiple visits to the past only to find that his behavior there has affected his present. (2/5)
“A Letter to Merlin” by Theodora Goss — A woman from the future inhabiting the body of Guinevere in an attempt to keep the timeline on track writes a letter to Merlin who is also inhabited by someone from the future. (4/5)
“Dead Poets” by Carrie Vaughn — A female academic drinks from an ancient cup dreaming of meeting Sappho but instead goes back to 1536 to visit Sir Thomas Wyatt in the Tower of London shortly after the execution of Anne Boleyn. (4/5)
“Time Gypsy” by Ellen Klages — A woman goes back in time to meet her scientific hero only to fall in love with her and discover that her advisor in the future isn’t what he seems to be. (5/5)

The average of these ratings give the book as a whole a rating of 4/5.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, Translated by Eric Ozawa

Once again, I was on the road for a soccer tournament. And once again, I was on the hunt for an audiobook to listen to during my drive. I dug into my list of novellas and came up with this one. It is has been on my list so long now, I have no record or recollection of why I added it.

A young woman’s boyfriend casually mentions that he is getting married… to someone else. The young girl is so devastated and embarrassed, that she quits her job where she works with her ex. Shortly after that, her uncle invites her to live in a small room over his used bookshop in Tokyo. Having nowhere else to go, she accepts. Naturally, her experience there and the space she has from her past mistakes gives her the room to grow.

As an American, there was a lot that I struggled to relate to. The main character feels a little too naive. But perhaps that is cultural. It certainly wasn’t enough to ruin a wonderful story. Between books and the love of her family, she starts to overcome her past. She also learns about her uncle’s past and their relationship grows. This is a sweet and relatable coming of age story set in another culture.

My rating: 4/5