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A review by atelierofbooks
Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf
DNF. I'd probably enjoy this far more as a podcast series...which I'm sure says something damning about my brain the digital world.
I don't dispute that Wolf has very valid concerns about our brains' development in the digital age but this reads like a shallow literature review. Telling me what Wendell Berry, Marcel Proust, Emily Dickinson, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer thought and said is great. Just not all on one page. Almost every page in this book has a pithy quote or anecdote from three or four different literary/historical figures and it's just so tiresome I can't continue.
Some positives:
- Maryanne Wolf has a warm and compassionate voice, so she's easy to like as a writer even if you don't agree with some of her conclusions
- Neuroscientific evidence about the way our brains develop and react when we engage in deep reading (versus the short bursts of information we read from the internet)
- Valuable discussion about inequality of access to technology
What I didn't care for:
This book reminded of a line from Upstart Crow when David Mitchell's Shakespeare says,
I don't dispute that Wolf has very valid concerns about our brains' development in the digital age but this reads like a shallow literature review. Telling me what Wendell Berry, Marcel Proust, Emily Dickinson, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer thought and said is great. Just not all on one page. Almost every page in this book has a pithy quote or anecdote from three or four different literary/historical figures and it's just so tiresome I can't continue.
Some positives:
- Maryanne Wolf has a warm and compassionate voice, so she's easy to like as a writer even if you don't agree with some of her conclusions
- Neuroscientific evidence about the way our brains develop and react when we engage in deep reading (versus the short bursts of information we read from the internet)
- Valuable discussion about inequality of access to technology
What I didn't care for:
This book reminded of a line from Upstart Crow when David Mitchell's Shakespeare says,
"Young people have such short attention spans these days. And with publishing, kids have instant entertainment in the pockets of their puffling pants. Oh, you see them hanging around together, hunched over a book of 14-line iambic pentameter, thumbing away, transfixed like zombies. Not talking to each other. Not interacting socially. Lost to the world. "Get off your book of sonnets!" cry parents up and down the land. "You'll develop a hunch!" I do worry about how their brains will develop with so little variation of stimulus to challenge their imagination.".