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

informative reflective medium-paced

2.25

I sought this book out for somewhat selfish reasons: to see if I could conduct a self-diagnosis on my own reading habits, and to try and determine if I too had fallen into the trap of technology-based skimming that sapped many adult reading brains from higher-level cognitive functioning. It turns out that this a) is not a reasonable test one can conduct on themselves, and b) that this book only partially deals with adult reading brains, and how to "come home" to that reading brain (the answer? Big surprise here: scroll less, read more). While I appreciate Wolf's experience as a scientist, educator, and fellow reader, the book was mostly interested in young readers and developing an "ideal reading world" where we can teach kids a biliteracy in reading digital text as well as physical text. Some bad practices snuck in here--it is popsci, after all--which soured overall tone of the book. This is most notable in a section where she takes a handful of newly-released, critically-acclaimed novels off her shelf and compars their sentence/clause density with that of 18th and 19th century novels, trying to make a point about how we, as a culture, have lost a level of language complexity and thus lost access to more complex cognitive functioning. She concedes that this is not by any means a scientific approach, nor should it be taken as such, but the spirit of it felt contrived and anachronistic for an era where the debate of "long words = good, short words = bad" has long been settled as narrow-viewed and culturally insensitive. The book itself, having come out in 2018 (meaning it was most likely written and researched over the course of 2014-2017), already feels like it belongs in a different decade--the early 2000's, maybe--where we could all be hopeful about the state of the internet. Obama and religious leaders are mentioned as important cultural touchstones (and, importantly, that have some merit in cultural commentary), Musk and Bezos make appearances as "successful tech figure" examles, and hope for our digital age is still alive and well. Could you even imagine?

As a final, petty note: Hemingway's infamous six-word story is cited and put on a platform as something novel and exhilarating, which feels like its own testament to Wolf's lack of terminally onlineness (and good for her, honestly).

For all her intelligence, research credit and bibliophilia, this book strangely feels like it is targeting a much younger audience, or at least an audience who still has hope for the internet and takes stock in the purported wisdom of a former president. Perhaps I am just cynical.