Book Review-Proust and the Squid By Maryanne Wolf

I read about this book some time ago. I didn't think it would be of interest to me at the time, but I bought the book anyways, as the topic piqued my curiosity enough so that I figured I might be interested later. True to form, I gained interest in the subject over time because of my interest in cognitive sciences. As I became more interested in how our brain learns, I came to appreciate the complexities of how human do what we do, which led to my interest in reading and this book, as reading is one of the most complicated skill to acquire.

Parenthetically, I was also reading Mortimer Adlers’ How to Read a Book (Adler, 1972) and Alberto Manguel’s  A History of Reading (Manguel, 1996) in parallel with reading Proust and the Squid. The three books covered the topic of reading from differing vantage points, so they complemented each other well in my mind, giving me great perspective.  I am now reading Marianne Wolf's second book Reader, Come Home (Wolf, 2018) to follow up on her work. The idea was to practice what Adler calls synoptic reading; this is to train myself to think deeply as Wolf talks about, because our mind is evolving as we  think deeply as we read broadly. Indeed, reading multiple books on the same topic has been not just enjoyable but also very good training.

Returning to this book, Proust and the Squid is split into three parts. Part One describes how our civilization developed language; a critical point that Wolf makes clear is that human brains  were never designed to read. The ability to read evolved as our brain adapted to synthesize many different parts of our neuro structure to integrate invented written language into our cognition. We learned to use the parts that had other principal functions that are necessary for survival and recruiting the  disparate parts of the brain for the purpose of becoming better at reading and to gain better understanding of what we read and write. We were able to take the original functions of those parts of the brain and synthesize them into developing coherent systems of writing and reading.  This was an extremely clever and significant development in our evolution; different cultures developed these abilities independently, as the different cultures were isolated from one another, which was surprising and serves to give ample proof to the concept of neuroplasticity.  A sampling of different languages shows that some are pictographic in nature, others are based upon sounds, and other languages are based on assigning meaning to the writing rather than just be based on the sound or appearance, which demonstrates how powerful our brain is in adapting to differing cultural needs. This section naturally leads into Parts Two of the book.

Part Two is a tutorial on how the brain learned to read over time. This was the main reason for my interest in reading the book. Chapters Four through Six told the story of how reading developed throughout history and how the brain developed and evolved into the reading and thinking machine. The key point that Wolf drummed into the reader as she beautifully told the story of reading is the fact that as we read more, the better we can think; and the better we are able to think, the better we are able to read and the more we can understand through reading. A positive feedback loop between reading and thinking. abilities. Yet another important point within the Part 2 is that we are shaped by what we read and how we read; which also affects how well we can understand and analyze what we read, a symbiotic relationship.

Part 3, on dyslexia — what happens when the reading brain of some people does not work the same way for the rest of us — was the part of the book that I was the least enthusiastic about tackling. Dyslexia and reading problems were never on my radar, it never piqued my interest, yet I found this part of the book,  Chapters seven and eight, fascinating, it is almost my favorite part of this book.

I had never studied dyslexia, how the brain  deviated from its usual reading process when people are dyslexic. I had thought of it as being somewhat mysterious, being an electrical engineer,  I always thought in terms of a short circuit somewhere. Part 3 of this book not only delineated all of the results from the theories and studies about dyslexia, it also reflected back on Part 2 of the book: how we learned how to read. The referral to Part 2 made Part 3 understandable, and Part 3 reinforced the narrative that Part 2 told. The two parts created a cohesive picture. I could not help but be riveted.

Chapter 9 is the conclusion chapter, which is where the author explains herself: the reasons for writing the previous eight chapters. She lays out the specific issues that raised alarms for her as a researcher in psychology and cognition, as well as a public intellectual that is alarmed about where our  society and culture is heading as far as reading and writing are concerned.

The first eight chapters set the stage by telling the reader the story of how we came to be readers and writers.  The final chapter interlaces the major themes and details of the fist eight into a well-knit argument, which served to be a warning about where our reading evolution is headed and by implication, where our ability to think is headed.

This book changed my mind about many things;  I learned all that I could handle about how closely coupled thinking and reading are and the extrapolation of that coupling could lead us in the future if our reading skills continues undisturbed down this present path.

I am just a very interested amateur in the neurosciences, and this book allowed me to take a giant  leap forward in my knowledge and made me more conversant in the research results and the structures of how our brains deal with reading, at least well enough to become a very committed amateur to learning more. I now have a scaffolding to hang onto as I continue to explore this area of study. Which is why I decided to read Readers Come Home.

Go and read this book. It is very important and it is delightful reading.

1.     References

Adler, M. (1972). How to Read Science and Mathematics. In C. V. Mortimer Adler, How To Read A Book (pp. 255-269). New York: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster.

Manguel, A. (1996). A History of Reading. New York City: Penguin Putnam Inc.

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. NYC: Harper Collins Books.