10 April 2012
Stop What You're Doing and Read This!
(Vintage, £4.99)
Reading, says the academic Maryanne Wolf, in this book of essays by various authors about reading, is an extraordinary thing. Our brains are not hard-wired to read. But, over the past few centuries, they have learned to improvise.
To understand reading is to understand what an awesome thing the human brain actually is. But is the way we read under threat? Nicholas Carr, in another essay, thinks it might be.
Is the modern world asking us to read in a different way? To put this in context, Socrates worried about printed text in the same way that we worry about the internet.
Absolutely fascinating, with contributions from Blake Morrison, Zadie Smith and Carmen Callil, among others.
