A review by drkottke
Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf

3.0

Much of this book is a wonderful presentation of research into the reading brain to the lay reader, picking up where the sublime Proust and the Squid left off to offer a research-informed rationale for Wolf's concerns about the effects of digital media on the cognitive affordances of deep reading. There are clear, full-throated arguments for the value of deep reading, for the development of a biliterate print/digital reading mind, for a lovely circus-based metaphor for understanding the reading mind, and for what is lost in the push for faster consumption of an increasing volume of texts. Maryanne Wolf has exactly the sort of smarty-pants writing style that I fancy in my own scholarly and professional writing; Dostoyevsky and Proust featured prominently in multiple research papers in grad school, which is why Wolf's writing appeals to me so much. YET … 3/4 of the way through the book, a certain debunked urban legend about prison beds and third grade reading scores rears its ugly head, and there's no citation. That's irresponsible, and unfortunately causes this otherwise enthusiastic reader to call into question other assertions that go without detailed citations. On that same page, the shibboleth about fourth grade being the hinge between "learning to read" and "reading to learn" also gets traction. No, good early literacy instruction with informational texts supports children learning through reading, and the increasing complexity of hybrid texts encountered in later content area instruction requires readers to continually learn how to read. Skip that chapter, and it's amazing.