This is my hundredth blog.

I started with an idea that I should write about reading, and that there were many facets to that. In my mind that includes things as disparate as the pleasure and value of reading to children, my tactics and experiences teaching medieval literature, the puzzles and delights of reading older forms of English (and, indeed, other languages), the nostalgia and grief of reading to my ailing parents, the joys of mystery novels and epic poetry, and the neuroscience of reading.

In practice, I didn’t even stay within these sprawling boundaries. And that’s fine. And whether you’ve read one of these, several, or ninety-nine, I thank you from the bottom of my bookish little heart.

Tonight I’m thinking about neuroscience and magic, and one particular chapter of Maryanne Wolf’s recent book, Reader, Come Home. A doctor once quipped to me that knowledge was just witchcraft until science explained it. That spoke volumes to me—it doesn’t make it more real to have a scientific explanation of something that has worked for centuries. It might make it more repeatable, but it also might not.

When Mem Fox, the Australian literacy expert and author of wonderful picture books, wrote about children acquiring literacy, she called her book Reading Magic. Early in the book she tells an anecdote about her child learning to read in the first two weeks of kindergarten and asking the teacher what her secret was. When the teacher said there was no secret, that she must have been read to at home, and that was all it took, it seemed like magic. Osmosis. Skills absorbed without effort.

So learning to read can seem like magic. But it’s also trackable, if one cares to, and it’s reproducible. Children learn to read quickest in a text-rich environment and when people frequently read and talk to them. If reading time is pleasant and enjoyable, that’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine-magic happen without our noticing.

When we grow up, though, reading is no less magical. When we read fiction or poetry, when we let ourselves be affected, nay—transformed--by a story or experience a character has, that is strong magic indeed. We are becoming more human.

But it doesn’t happen on its own. We have to become the cauldron (of rebirth). 

In her chapter on the components of deep reading, Maryanne Wolf says we need some basic ingredients. First, we need the ability to form images in our heads, to concretize the words we read in to ideas and scenes. In speaking to twenty or so classes full of English majors in their Senior Symposium, I am here to say everyone doesn’t need to see images, but everyone needs to feel the words taking shape in their heads somehow, in to a scene or a concept.

Wolf also says we need the ability to empathize—to take on another perspective, to live for the course of the book in the head and heart of its characters. This ability is crucial. If you can’t imagine yourself in the position of some of the characters, the events will wash over you, but not change you fundamentally.

Lastly, she says we need background knowledge. That is, we need stories to understand stories. Italo Calvino notes this in his essay, “Why Read the Classics?” when he argues that people get more acquainted with books’ “instructions for use” as we get older, and therefore we get the most out of books in our maturity. His point, too, is part process, or “instructions” and part content, as he argues that we all are little libraries or constellations (pick a metaphor) of all the things we’ve read and experienced in our lives. The richer our experience, the richer our reading can be.

What I notice about all of these requirements for what Wolf calls “deep reading” is that they all magnify themselves in the very process of reading. The better reader you are, the more you get out of a book—both in terms of how much you understand and enjoy the book at hand, and of how much better you will read the next book you encounter.

Every time you imagine a scene, you get better at it, quicker at it, more nuanced. Every time you empathize with a character, you make it easier for yourself to find another character to “become.” And every time you read a book, you add to your inner library of texts, contexts, and associations, so you read the next one with more understanding and insight. My favorite example of this last one is my students who happen, because of that magnificent alchemy that university life affords, to read two books they think are totally disparate—say a medieval epic and a current political science text book—and they find striking similarities between them that help them read both texts more deeply. This happens all the time, and it’s magic and science and serendipity.

So I am not worried about the demise of reading. We may change how we read, but as long as we let our reading change us, we’re golden.

For the hundredth time, thanks for reading.

More Board Books for Babies and Wee Folk

About a year ago, I wrote a blog about what books are my go-to gifts for baby showers. Today I became a great aunt. It’s time to talk baby books again.

Last time I was talking about the ones I couldn’t imagine a wee one growing in to toddlerhood without. little less color/number introduction and lullaby.

So in the interest of expanding libraries and celebrating baby Jackson, here goes:

 I am a Bunny by Ole Rissom and Richard Scarry. This is a slow-paced, low-action sort of introduction to a cute little rabbit and, by extension, the natural world. He’s wearing overalls and is completely adorable. A quiet-time, sweet moment, snuggling book.

Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton. Speaking of snuggling. But it’s Boynton, so it’s bouncier, and you probably have to sing. My kids are teenagers, but they still remember the Snuggle Puppy song.

Sheep in a Shop by Margot Apple. She’s done a number of “Sheep” books, and they’re pretty uniformly delightful. This one is about a birthday party, so a good first glimpse of these sheepies. Lots of rhyming, bouncy, alliterative verse and silly humor.

 Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. A classic Tour of the Farm book, it introduces lots of animals and the noises they make. You need other books by her (Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but this one is charming too.

 Peek-a-boo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. A window book featuring a sweet, British family with a delightfully messy house. And when your house is a wreck because you can’t do laundry fast enough to keep up with a new baby, it’s somehow cathartic to see someone else’s messy house.

George Shrinks by William Joyce. Joyce is brilliant, not least in his adapting stories from one medium to another, but this little fantasy about George and his baby brother’s day being complicated by George’s sudden diminutive size is hilarious as well as witty.

Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola. This is a well-known folktale about a magic pot that works with a controlling spell, and doesn’t work if you don’t know the magic words. It’s a common enough trope, and this is a good first version for little ones.

Time for Bed by Mem Fox. We need one lullaby book, and we definitely need one from Mem Fox. She’s a champion for literacy and for reading aloud, and the books she writes are great for hunkering down on the couch and sinking in to a story. This one is an animal book and a lullaby and a lovesong to language.

Happy reading, my friends, and happy snuggling, and if you are fortunate enough to have a baby on your lap and a book in your hand, may you make the most of that magical encounter.

The Meta Blog, or How Reading About Reading Is Making Me a Better Reader

So this is a “Reading About Reading” sort of musing. I’ve recently read Maryanne Wolf’s marvelous new book, Reader, Come Home, which is part Neuroscientist Explaining For Lay Persons How Reading on the Internet is Changing Our Brains, and part Clever Plan to Evolve Purposefully in the Face of a New Shift in Text and Literacy.

I’ll say a bit about this book, a bit about where I’m going from here, and then offer a reading list I’ve given myself and would love to talk about with similarly interested humans.

Reader, Come Home is a written as a set of letters, a real, old-fashioned epistolary book, evocative of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. It is also a series of love letters to the genre of the novel, which she worries may be in danger. But mostly in this book, the author explains the science of reading.

In a brilliant metaphor of the circus, Wolf illustrates the multiple centers of the brain involved in reading, and shows how they represent an adaptation of using multiple centers in quick succession and simultaneously. Reading involves the “circus rings” of the Vision, Language, and Cognition centers in the brain, but also Motor Functions and the Affective center. Suddenly those memes about your brain on television (barely any activity) vs. your brain on books (huge chunks of your brain lighting up) become clear. It takes a lot of work to read, especially to read deeply.

This is enough, frankly, to set my mind whirring for days, but thankfully she’s got a trajectory that kept me moving forward. She’s discovered that our reading patterns have shifted in response to all those hours skimming news on the Internet, zipping from article to vine to clickbait, and that while we are capable of reading much more, we are losing our ability to read deeply.

Reading deeply (she shows a serious predilection for novels that this medievalist finds limited, but forgivable) has been linked to increased empathy, to stress reduction, to critical thinking, and even to happiness, but our ability to sustain deep reading is waning. Even people who have been excellent deep readers are becoming less so in the onslaught of internet reading.

But she offers some hope, too. She advocates training up the next generation as “bi-literate” by which she means able to switch modes given the medium. Little children should be read to from print picture books, and in school they should learn how to use and manage electronic texts, while continuing to develop a relationship with print. (There are lots of reasons to love print, but I think that’s for a different blog.) In this way we can grow readers who navigate the internet without losing their ability to read deeply, for there are simply too many benefits to being able to read deeply.  

You can imagine, for a person who writes a blog on reading, that this book has been a bit of a head cannon. I am puzzled by the idea that we’re not able to read deeply, given the publishing world’s continued success, and my English majors’ habits, but maybe we’re reading “lighter” fare? (Maybe not. I need to be convinced of this. Someone quick—do a study for me.) I am comforted, too, by her findings on children reading print books, as someone whose very favorite moments of child-rearing involved storytime. And I find comfort as a literature professor who aims every year to get more young people intoxicated by the stories of the Middle Ages.

Science now says we need to read. And we need to give it our full attention.

So, naturally, I’ve started another list of books to read in my copious spare time:

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Why Read? By Mark Edmundson
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs.

Apparently I’m not alone in my interest here. But before I get to these, I have a mystery novel I’ve been putting off for too long. Happy reading, y’all.