Sublime

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities

young novice readers tend to move through three short, fairly predictable steps. First, they make errors that are semantically and syntactically appropriate, but that bear no phonological or orthographic resemblance to the real word (“daddy” for “father”). Once they learn some rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, their errors show orthographic

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Every speaker is learning how to write exquisite layers of social nuance that we once reserved for speech, whether we mark them by switching alphabets, switching languages, or respelling word." p.57

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

More speed means less comprehension.

The first is the fact that although it took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet, today our children have to reach those same insights about print in roughly 2,000 days. The second concerns the evolutionary and educational implications of having a “rearranged” brain for lear

When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information; and the ability to learn