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

by Maryanne Wolf

With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life. They would never discover Dinotopia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or Pemberley. They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds. They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves. And most important of all, they might never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge whole cloth from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own.