Customer Reviews
Fascinating subject, disappointing book - By: Mr. Peter Biddlecombe, 04 Jan 2009 
This book addresses some fascinating topics, but my impression was that it skimmed the surface. There are three subject areas: how writing systems developed, how we learn to read, & why some of us don't read well. All to be coveredin 229 pages? It can't really be done. The explanations about the workings of the brain didn't satisfy my curiosity, & the brain features shownin the various diagrams didn't seem adequately explained, so the diagrams were not 'worth a thousand words'. (At a fundamental level, the location of the various lobes of the brain is never illustrated exdplicitly.) I was happier with the material about writing systems, but then that's something I've read about before.
You will learn lots from the book, but I felt that I could have learned more.
An entertaining explanation of the reading process - By: A Common Reader, 28 Jun 2008 
In Proust & the Squid: The Story & Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the reading brain, describes how our brains manage to read. Reading is not an innate activity, but it is an invention, & only a few thousand years old at that. It does not come naturally to humansin the way that walking or eating does & on the first page of this book, we learn that it is only because of the remarkable "plasticity" of our brains that we are able to achieve an understanding of the written word.
The book is divided into three parts. Firstly the history of how humans learned to read, secondly how reading is learned & how it develops, & thirdly what happens whenin cases like dyslexia, something goes wrongin the "learning to read" process.
The reference to Proustin the title refers to passages from Proust's writingsin which he describes the pleasure of reading, the memories that are evoked by thinking back to special books from childhood (how Proustian!), & the "reading sanctuary", that place of escape, a refuge from the world & its troubles. If Proust is a metaphor for a particular approach to reading, so the squidin the title refers to early neruo-scientific investigations of that creature which found how neurons fire & transmit to each other, adapting when things go wrong, repairing & compensating along the way. The squid analogy refers to the way reading required something new from existing structure of the brain, only possible because of the "plasticity" referred to earlier.
Wolf describes how reading actually changes us. We interact with books, both making them our own (everyone reads a textin their own way), but we are also permanently changed by them. "We bring our life experiences to the text, & the text changes our experience of life". Whenever we read, our original boundaries are challenged, teased & gradually placed somewhere new. An expanding sense of "other" changes who we are.
The section on the development of alphabets & reading systems is fascinating. Different types of brain activity are needed to read say Mandarin Chinese than are required for the Western alphabet. The style of writing shapes the culture to a degree, & certainly changes the reading experience. "Learning to read changes the visual cortex of the brain. The expert readers visual areas are now populated with cell networks responsible for visual images of letters, letter patterns & words". The eye moves ahead with a Western text, but moves leftward with a Hebrew text, gathering advance information about the text before it even reaches it.
The section on dyslexia was less interesting to me, but no doubt with be of great interest to educators & parents of dyslexic children. I am sure however that these chapters fit well into the book as a whole because they do actually illustrate what happens when for most of us, reading works flawlessly.
For those, like me, who are interestedin "books about books", & the reading process Proust & the Squid would be an excellent addition to their library, a book to refer back to & to re-read. It is a little difficult to takein all the scientific material about brain processes, but there is much of immediate interest, the more complex neuro-science being available for study at a later time.
The mystery behind being able to read (or not) explained. - By: A. Brady, 18 Apr 2008 Maryanne Wolf provides a fascinating insight into how we learn to read & the amazing things our brain does to make it happen. She also gives a comprehensive explanation of all the things that can go wrong. We expect our children to masterin a couple of thousand days (from scratch as our brains aren't wired for reading at birth) what it took humanity several thousand years to develop. An important book for parents, teachers & anyone interestedin one of humanities main achievements.
Literary, Historical, Biological, Cognitive, and Futurist Insights into Reading, Creativity, and Brain Development - By: Donald Mitchell, 05 Oct 2007 I was attracted to this book by the title: What could Proust & a Squid havein common? As it turned out, squids make only two cameo appearancesin the book on pages 5-6 & 226 (probably to justify the titlein references to the early use of squidsin neuroscience studies & for conjecture about passing along genetic traits that make survival more difficult), but Proustin pretty mainstream throughout the book as a resource & reference for describing the richness that reading can bring to individual experience.
Professor Wolf has written a multidisciplinary book that is mind-bogglingin its breadth. You'll learn everything from how writing & alphabets developed to why Socrates disfavored reading to how mental processes vary among dyslexics who are reading different languages to the best ways for diagnosing & overcoming reading difficulties.
Yet unlike most multidisciplinary books, this one is very brief & compact. But that compactness is misleading; Proust & the Squid is a challenging book to read & contemplate. Only good readers with a lot of backgroundin literature & neuroscience can probably grasp this book. What's more, there are vast numbers of references that you can pursue if you want to know more.
The writing style makes the book denser than it needed to be. Professor Wolf makes matters worse for lay readers by insisting on the correct scientific names throughout, when the ordinary names would have made the material easier to grasp. As a result, at times you'll feel like you are taking a coursein disciplinary vocabulary. At other times, Professor Wolf engagesin a penchant for long, abstract sentences: "What is historically humbling about Sumerian writing & pedagogy is not their understanding of morphological principles, but their realization that the teaching of reading must begin with explicit attention to the principles characteristics of oral language." This sentence could be rewritten as "Most impressively, Sumerians developed a written language that made reading easier to learn by visually reproducing what was spoken." Obviously, her rendition is more creative . . . but I like mine better.
Here is what was new to me: Reading involves complex mental processes that are not natural to the brain's earliest functions. As a result, new neural connections need to be developedin the right order if someone is to be a good reader. Various brain scan tests have illuminated this finding & those neural pathways are well illustrated & describedin this book. But there are different ways that those neural connections can be made, some of which will make reading difficult.
The book's strength isin providing you with a sense of how humans learned how to develop written language & read it rapidly . . . & gain greatly from reading. The book also is goodin the area of making the case for those who can't read aren't deficient, rather than are differentin ways that offer other potential advantages such as creativity. If someonein your family doesn't read well, you'll love that part of the message.
Where I thought the book was weakest wasin worrying about the implications of highly condensed (and possibly inaccurate) online information substituting for traditional reading of books & articles. To me, it seemed like much ado about nothing. Human curiosity will always drive forward learning, something that Professor Wolf doesn't address. Provide that curiosity with more tools & resources, & more learning will take place. Here's an example. Today I was finishing my proofreading of my latest book. In the past, I had researchers diligently check each quotation for accuracy & source. Inevitably, there would be mistakes that weren't caught & made it into my books. By using the internet to crosscheck the sources this time, I was able to do the task much better &in less time . . . correcting many mistakesin the reference sourcesin my library. Having had this experience, I'll probably do more seeking of quotations directly from the internetin the future . . . & that will probably improve the quality of my quotations.
Bravo, Professor Wolf!
