Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

It is within the context of feeding the “second wolf” that I tell you the real denouement of my experiment in rereading Hesse: I read Magister Ludi a third time. Not for any experimental reason, simply for the peace I felt in returning to my former reading life. The novelist Allegra Goodman65 wrote something wonderful about the process of unfolding that occurs in rereading a beloved book: “Like pleated fabric, the text reveals different parts . . . at different times. And yet every time the text unfolds, . . . the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next.” Each time I reread the book, I remembered something essential about the person I had thought I was when I had first read Hesse. By the end I had recaptured both why I had read the book with such joy then and, ironically perhaps, what reading had meant to me before I had become a reading researcher.