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

by Maryanne Wolf

my neatly alphabetized bookshelf, the one filled with the books that had largely formed who I am and how I think. It scarcely mattered that I had failed my own test. No one would care or know but me. No one would be the wiser. As for any wisdom on my own part, the inescapable conclusion—which I had no intention of sharing with anyone else—was that I had changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration; I was impatient with the number of clauses and phrases per sentence, as if I had never reverentially encountered the much longer sentences of Proust and Thomas Mann; I was completely offended by the number of words Hesse felt necessary to use in every other sentence; and finally, my so-called deep-reading processes never “surfaced.” There. I had changed.