Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
Dear Fellow Readers, I must admit my bias toward Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf. What joy I found in those pages! It is organized into a series of personal letters, inviting her readers to ponder the complexity of the reading brain and reconsider our view of the reading process as we yield to our digital future. I was inspired to shift my thinking about how I read. I grew up with undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD and anticipated that this research-based text would be unreadable, but instead, these engaging letters validated my reading experiences and those of my students. I hope that you, as an educator or a parent, will be enticed to pick up a copy to enjoy at your leisure. Sincerely, Your Reviewer To read deeply and fully, Maryanne Wolf tells us we must pace ourselves and let the full imagery, ideas, and choice of words percolate so that we may agree or disagree, enjoy or feel repulsed, and speed up or pause as we engage with the text. We must be able to train our brains to become flexible enough to use our digital resources while also slowing down and experiencing a text at the pace needed to fully contemplate and consume the ideas within. Slow down I did. Wolf is a renowned scholar whose life work has focused on dyslexia. Soon after publishing her seminal text detailing the history of the reading brain, Proust and the Squid (2008, HarperCollins), she realized the digital age is making as much an impact on our intellectual capacity and reading habits as the transition from the oral tradition to writing. Yet, in 2008 there was little research on how this shift toward skimming and informational snippets would impact the reading brain. In the intervening years, Wolf has focused her research on what may be gained and what might be lost as screen reading becomes the norm. In this book, despite the seriousness of the topic, Wolf builds upon her current neurological research, presenting her findings as a whimsical circus analogy. Aided by wonderful illustrations by Catherine Stoodley, Wolf becomes the ringmaster, spotlighting the various independent neurological processes that move us from attention to interpretation of a text. Becoming biliterate readers, balancing both digital and physical resources, is an essential theme of this book. Wolf guides us strategically through the developmental processes of reading and the effects of digital interactions on our neural wiring. Critical to the reading process is the rapid-fire collaboration of the executive circuits of attention, organization, and visualization of letters, words, and ideas. The reading brain evolved as humans increased their intellectual capacity. Many of the networks that originally distinguished the details in objects and faces have evolved to differentiate the physical features of text (p. 28). With the advent of social media, attentional networks are being rewired, impacting how information is processed. Wolf discusses the research substantiating different types of readers, including those who prefer print, screen, or ear reading. “With no genetic blueprint for reading, there is no one ideal reading circuit” (p. 18). She indicates that, “it is very possible that some children with dyslexia are better served by becoming digital readers early on,” allowing them time for “maximum exposure to the sounds, grammatical functions, and meanings of the words they read in various contexts” (p. 181). Wolf guides our understanding that digital, print, and audible texts each require different strategies to easily move between “pages” when they need to “look back” to deepen our comprehension. Wolf recalls her unexpected frustration when she challenged herself to return to classic literature, encountering “unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me” (p.99). Only after concerted efforts to re-rewire her reading circuits did Wolf finally feel she was home again, matching the pace of her reading with the pace of the action in the book (p. 101). Wolf concludes the book with her most personal letter, inviting readers to come home when encountering a worthy text by settling one’s thoughts in anticipation of the words within. To possess cognitive patience is to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention. You read quickly (festina), until you are conscious (lente) of the thoughts to comprehend, the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember, and, when fortunate, insights to unfold. (p.193) Dear Maryanne, Thank you for inviting me home. With appreciation, Your reader, Cindy Wolf, M. (2018). Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
