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The Process of Reading

Conversational Reading has a post on Carlin Romano’s review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, a book on the “unnatural yet wonderful” process of reading.

Because “the act of reading is not natural” in the sense of “genetically organized,” the brain must “rearrange itself” to do so, a process Wolf explains on a neuronal level as she explicates the “plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design.” She reminds us that our ancestors invented reading only a few thousand years ago and that the advanced brains of expert readers today would not resemble those of Sumerians who deciphered cuneiform script, because complex and challenging reading changes the brain physiologically. That is why we must teach children to read, while we do not need to teach them vision or speech (as opposed to how to see well and speak well).

Antibooks. That’s the solution. It we just publish books people don’t really have to read, or memoirs about fake-memoirs, we’ll all be millionaires . . .



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