Maryanne Wolf

Very interesting insights into how the brain works when we are reading and how that might change when we spend a lot of time on our devices.

It raises the concern of how reading fewer books might lead to being bad at processing information or how it lowers our empathy to each other.

I personally enjoyed the chapters that try to suggest how to rear a child in this digital age because I plan to have kids. It gives advice on how to encourage them to become a successful reader from a young age and how to bring digital content into their life without making them addicted to screens.

One part that I was a bit in disagreement about was the part about comparing reading physical books and reading digitally. While I agree that reading on the phone can lead to distractions, Kindle, for example, doesn't have distracting features. Apparently, reading digitally also encourages skimming. I read mostly digitally in recent years and I never skimmed. I don't really notice much difference between reading physical or Kindle. Actually, Kindle is quite helpful in cases such as if I forget some character and want to search where they were first introduced. Hard to do that on the physical copy. I also started reading English books on Kindle when my English wasn't that good and I made good use of the inbuilt dictionary. Well, the usefulness of Kindle wasn't really the point, but from the way the author talked about the differences in reading, I was really curious to know if she ever actually tried using an e-reader.

This was a very interesting book that made me think a lot about how reading works and what it does for you. I also appreciate the advice for bringing up kids in the digital age.… (more)

Read for my book club. Easily the worst book I've read this year. (All the other book club members agreed.)

Super-repetitive. Weirdly on-topic and off-topic. And repetitive. And did I say it was repetitive? Many paragraphs were filled with unnecessary words and unnecessary name dropping. Not just research was quoted by name but phrases had to be cited. She even quoted the Pope for some phrase that she felt needed his name attached.

The writing was so bad that I tried skimming some of her text, exactly what she railed against. For me, skimming is a self-defense mechanism to deal with too much info or too many words to express something. In other words, skimming has its merits; she did not give it its due. Alas, skimming her text was equally unsatisfying. While faster, it didn't work either.

Have read the whole thing, I feel less intelligent for having done so. Her editor was clearly asleep on the job (Recommendation to publisher: Fire editors who do not know how to edit.) For a book about the science of books and reading, it is laughable that it could be so bad. (I'm not even motivated to spend more time going into detail on why it's bad. That's how bad it is.)

I will temper my review with one positive: She wrote well when she described the experience with her own son having trouble in school - and how the school didn't understand his problem and didn't handle it well. Alas, the rest of the book isn't worth reading for that one positive.… (more)