Our brains were never naturally trained biologically to train how to read, yet reading has become one of the most essential human activity and drives our progress. Definitely for me, reading and writing is one of the most important activities which stretches its arms from my personal growth, my career and my leisure. Yet, I know very little about how our mind works relative to reading. Sometimes I am guilty of feeling conflicted about reading — does it really change who you are? I picked up this book to understand my reading and the purpose of it better. By far this is the best book about literacy that I have come across.
In the first part of the book, Wolf ran through the brief evolution of reading — how it first started from the necessity of commerce, the Sumerian cuneiform and how taxing reading was at the very beginning as there were more symbols to learn and there was less structure. The Sumerian cuneiform begat the Greek alphabet which had its own diversity based on different Greek dialects, but met its strongest opposition in Socrates who believed that the written form of language will make the mind dull. Socrates believed that the written word is a one way street, like a punching bag that doesn’t punch back. He also believed that when oral traditions are recorded, it will make people lazier to remember and will dull their intelligence. I don’t know if his criticisms of the written word still rings true today.
The second part of the book covers how the reading brain works for those learning to read. In some ways, this book resonates with my experience of running a non-profit school in a Cambodian village which focused on literacy. Teaching children how to read is tremendously difficult — especially when the sounds of their language is markedly different from the sounds of the English language. We didn’t teach children how to read by rote, but still putting the importance of the sounds of the alphabet and how those how alphabets come together to make the sounds, and how that sound symbolises something tangible in their own experience — like a ‘cat’.
When Wolf uses the breakdown of the word ‘cat’ as an example, with each of the alphabet contributing to a separate sound that comes together (c/a/t), I remembered writing the word in huge letters with my best rendition of a cat right next to it. Then I would wipe out the ‘c’ and replaced the consonant with ‘b’, ‘f’, ‘h’. I was tremendously happy when the children understood the purpose of the alphabet. They tend to pick up things quickly after that. In the book, Wolf suggested to start by using consonants with longer sounds, such as ‘sat’ as opposed to ‘cat’, because the longer sound sticks. I wished that I had the knowledge of this book before I started the school.
Wolf describes in detail how the reading brain works, by showing which parts of the brains are affected by reading, how it makes connections and how those connections are strengthened overtime. Although for an average reader this section may be too detailed, you’d never feel lost in navigating through the connections our brain makes in order to construct meaning. We teach ourselves how to read by tricking our own wiring by combining what you see (the lines of the letters in the alphabet -> words -> sentences) to how it sounds (phonemes, syllables and the way you sound out sentences in your brain) to the meaning of the text.
The final part of the book describes what happens when the brain’s wiring just does not connect properly, otherwise generalised as dyslexia. Wolf identified how broad and complex dyslexia can be, as reading deficiency can happen in different layers of reading. For example, readers who have hearing defects will have more trouble in reading as they won’t be able to project the sound of the words in their minds. Some readers would be able to see the sentences, but the connection to the semantics (construction of meaning) is damaged so that the reader can only see mere letters on a page.
However, those who suffer dyslexia can be successful. Some of the most influential people in history have suffered from some form of dyslexia — Edison, Einstein, Picasso, Gaudi and Da Vinci. Dyslexic individuals may lack the analytical and linguistic ability of the left brain, but will greatly compensate for it with the right side of the brain, contributing to creativity and problem solving. While throughout history we tricked ourselves how to read in certain ways, those who suffer from dyslexia have to find other creative ways to trick their brain how to cope with reading.
I personally think this book is a necessary read for educators and those who love to read, as it provides an amplitude of fascinating insights. Wolf wrote from the point of view of an academic as well as a mother with a dyslexic child. By the time she wrote the book, she had already built and used a huge body of work on literacy. Proust and the Squid comes from a very real place, and has so far been one of the best non-fiction reads this year.
