Non siamo nati per leggere, ma siamo dotati di un cervello straordinariamente plastico. Cosi' apprendiamo dalla storia e dalla scienza del cervello che legge, raccontate da Maryanne Wolf in questo lucido e appassionato saggio, dove si intrecciano riferimenti a discipline diverse quali neuroscienza, linguistica, psicologia, storia e pedagogia....

I learned a lot from Maryanne Wolf's history of reading, starting with the meaning of the title: The squid taught us (in the 1950s) how neurons fire and transmit to each other and gave later scientists the wherewithal to become neuroscientists. Proust saw reading as a way for humans to discover myriad realities, to go where no man has gone before (at least until Captain Kirk arrived on the scene!)

The book begins with a short history of writing systems, starting with the first, which was in reality an accounting system: clay tokens enclosed in clay envelopes, impressed with markings to show what commodity was being tracked. There is some scientific instruction about how our brains work as we are reading (I learned that people reading in Chinese, Japanese and English use different parts parts of their brains while reading, because of the basic natures of the three languages). Each section is introduced by a passage describing how famous writers (Hermann Hesse, Graham Greene, Sartre) felt about reading.

I learned too that the human brain was not designed to read, that reading is accomplished by "recycling" brain structures that were originally for other purposes. There is a very interesting section which speaks about what happens when the brain is not able to re-invent itself, when it cannot learn to read properly, and why dyslexia is often accompanied by great talents of a different nature (artistic, organizational, athletic). This part was particularly interesting to me as most of the members of my family (on my father's side) suffer from dyslexia, including my brother, my half brother and his three children.

Ms. Wolf leaves us with some questions about the future of reading.

p 220-221:
When all is said and done, of course, Socrates' worries were not so much about literacy as about what might happen to knowledge if the young had unguided, uncritical access to information. ... Will unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge, and thus curtail the more difficult, time-consuming, critical thought processes that lead to knowledge itself? Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another's inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?

An interesting book. I was, as Socrates cautioned against, forced to read it rather quickly as it must go to the next participant in the book ring. I will re-read it at some point.

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another quote: p 138:
"...For young readers who are moving from simply mastering content to discovering what lies beneath the surface of a text, the literature of fantasy and magic is ideal.

Think of the many images that Tolkien uses in Lord of the Rings to portray good and evil. The worlds of Middle Earth, Narnia, and Hogwarts provide fertile ground for developing skills of metaphor, inference, and analogy, because nothing is ever as it seems in these places. To figure out how to elude ring-wraiths and dragons, and how to do what is right, calls on all of one's wits. During their different journeys, Huck and Frodo learned to choose virtuous actions, however powerfully they are challenged. And so do the young readers who accompany them all the way."