Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

"Proust and the Squid" is the title of this book, but I am not certain why. Here, Maryanne Wolf sets out to describe how reading came into being, the human brains adaptation to accommodate that process, and how children learn to read. This is well worth the listeners' time and will reward the effort, but it has little to do with Prouse (or squid for that matter).

That said, there are passages which are technical. Those are handled well by Wolf and I hope that she will continue to write for the general public. Over time, she will develop a lighter style. Her topic is certainly important to all of us and she needs to heard.

I personally want to hear more about her theories concerning how access to Google, the World Wide Web and other technology will change our culture and how we process information. She hints at changes that might be on the horizon, but left me wanting to hear more.

The second half of the book is devoted to dyslexia. I benefited greatly from hearing what she has to say. However, the second half did really link to the sections which preceeded. The first and second sections were related to "reading" but could have been separate works. I hope that she will develop a book on dyslexia alone. She speculates that the human brain has adapted to accommodate reading. The dyslexia is a through back to the past. I would like to know more.

I was amazed at how captivating would a book on reading be, at how enlightening some of the facts about the culture and the neurology of reading are.
I was amazed at the number of times I have cited this book since reading it. It seems to be relevant to so many areas of our lives and our culture, as if reading is a metaphor for everything else.
I highly recommend this gem of a book. The writing is great, the reading is great, the lesson learnt is amazing.

I bought this book because it was on sale, but found it to be quite a gem. If you're interested in the history of reading, or have kids learning to read I would highly recommend this book.

Sadly the premise turns out to be misleading. I thought this would be a book about the neuroscience of the brain as it related to reading. That does come up in this book, but primarily this is a book about child development. Oddly, it's not the kind of book that would be targeted toward parents or teachers or other researchers. I'm not sure who she thought her audience would be. It seems to be the sort of monograph on a particular field by someone with so much enthusiasm that she just can't help herself. I have to admit that there were quite a few bits of the book that I found mildly interesting. However, so much of the book felt repetitive, if not obvious, that it was hard to get excited about it. One of the interesting things was that she paid serious attention to Socrates's concerns about the potential dangers of reading. Most of the time, she seems more concerned with diagnosing and rescuing children with reading disabilities. However, just the fact that she was open to discussing the pitfalls of reading in overall intellectual development is a point in her favor. For someone who spends so much time on the problems of dyslexia, there is precious little discussion of what can actually be done about it or how effective it is. One thing I really liked about this book is the quotations she came up with at the start of each chapter. Of course, in an audiobook, it is sometimes hard to tell where the narrator is lapsing into a quote. In particular, this one from Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." The title continues to baffle me. The Proust thing almost makes sense, but what's up with the squid? Better she should have given it a typical monograph title: "A review of the current state of research on the early acquisition of reading skills among young children in the first 7 years of life with digressions on the historical origin of writing, personal reflections on the rewards of reading, observations on related work in neuroscience, with special emphasis on dyslexia."

It was excellent, but all of my audiobooks have been excellent so far. It was technical, not a story really, but it was time and effort well-spent.

I have never listened to Kirsten Potter before, but I thought she was perfect in her reading of this book.

I was very excited by the information in this book, both about the brain and its elasticity and about the reading process itself. Enthusiasm was almost a constant emotion as I listened to the book and learned amazing information.

I have already started listening to it again, and I ordered the book so I am able to read it for myself (over the summer when I am not teaching and have more free time). There were numerous times I wanted to highlight passages and annotate!

I was enthralled with the topic--reading and the difficulties presented by it--but it was so incredibly dull that I didn't listen past 2 hours. I hope I never hear the word "multi-syllabary" for a long time.

This book was slow, getting into it. Then I began to really like it, but I could not get over one annoying thing about this book. I found it a bit showy that the author felt compelled to say, BCE or Before Christ Existed instead of just BC. The first few times, it sounded discordant to my ears and I kept listening but finally I gave up for that simple fact... to keep hearing Before Christ Existed. You can call that petty, but I call it a case of an author trying to be too pc or what have you. If it was just BC, or even read as "BCE" in the audio, that would have been fine, but you keep hearing in 56 Before Christ Existed. Sorry, but I tossed the audio because of that. I am petty, but just be aware of this thing as it might bother you as well. Otherwise narration and everything else is fine.

This book is about learning reading and writing, from the past to the present, ending with an explanation of learning disorders. Much of it is very good and interesting, but the reader sounds like her target audience is small children. It's a danger to listen to while driving because it puts me to sleep.