Reader, Come Home (Maryanne Wolf)

The author seems to say that digital reading is kind of like fast food. 

She starts off with a chapter on how the brain learns to read....and it was tough for me to slog through that. Truthfully, most of it was tough to slog through. I read it out of principle....I can handle tough text! However, I found her to be very wordy. Long sentences. Obscure words. It really wasn't easy reading....does she do that to make her point? I don't know. I think she could have said what she said in half the words though. 

She says that we are losing our ability to read deeply, to ponder on great words and thoughts and to build on them. Social Media has done this to adults so what is it doing to children? She says that we are reading just as much as we ever did, maybe even more, but we are skimming and missing the meat. People are less empathetic. They're easily led down conspiracy theory holes. They aren't thinking. I'm not a huge fan of e-books myself - but I don't agree that by themselves, reading is doomed. She doesn't offer much for a solution, especially with children. I guess I'm going back to Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer and Beers and Probst's Notice and Note for those kinds of tips. 

Goodreads says:

The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.


A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.

Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:


Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?
Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?
With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?
Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?
Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society?
How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?
Who are the "good readers" of every epoch?
Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.

Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.