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.