In her fantastic book, Reader Come Home, Maryanne Wolf describes a time in her adult life when she longed to read good books. She was hungry for something substantial after realizing that a life full of 140-character tweets, sensory overload, and “hollow” reading experiences left her feeling transparent. She wanted to sink her literary teeth into something that mattered. So, she returned to a book that won the Nobel Prize in 1946 called Magister Ludi. As a young woman, she loved this book, and now that she had returned to it as an adult, something was off. In fact, she hated it.
Why?
I’ve never read Magister Ludi, but in Wolf’s words, she describes it as a book that “seemed obdurately opaque to me: too dense (!) with unnecessarily difficult words and sentences whose snakelike constructions obfuscated, rather than illuminated, meaning for me. The pace of action was impossible.”
She couldn’t read it. Her brain had changed. Now, subsisting on a steady diet of quick information and digital dopamine hits, she could not sit with a “complex” book and enjoy it. Do you ever feel that way? I know I have.
Wolf explains that she nearly threw the book out, but then decided to give it one last chance. Instead of forcing herself to try and love it, she would read for twenty minutes a day without judgment. “It took two weeks. Somewhere near the end of that many days, I experienced a much less dramatic form of St. Paul of Tarsus’s epiphany. No flash of light or brilliant insight. I simply felt, at last, that I was home again, returned to my former reading self.”
For a better understanding of how your brain works and how to return to the world of deep reading, check out Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader Come Home. I highly recommend it.
This is the book recommendation from my weekly newsletter on June 5, 2024.
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