Reader, Come Home

It's an interesting book with many curious points, but what repeatedly struck me throughout was its contrast with the book I read immediately before it: Umberto Eco’s How to Write a thesis. I couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast between each author's politics. Maryanne Wolfe clearly views things through a liberal, neoliberal lens. Umberto is pretty sympathetic to the ideas of Karl Marx and other noted socialists through history.

Wiith Reader, Come Home, many passages caught my eye supporting my conclusion. Here are just some examples:

“If the brilliant futurist Ray Kurzweil is correct, it may be possible to have all those external sources of information and knowledge implanted within the human brain, but at present this is technologically, physiologically, and ethically not an option.”

Ironically, I was just eviscerating Kurzweil to others, and his proclivity to make predictions and claims that are “citation needed” honeypots. I don’t personally find him to be a "brilliant futurist" myself, but he has done some interesting inventing. (More ironic, I’ve been reading a lot by him as research for my little novel writing project, but more on that in a bit.)

"A recent biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance failed to mention that Musk is contributing significantly to the new Adult Literacy XPRIZE, but vividly pointed out that in Musk’s lexicon, the word impossible is translated as Phase One.

That aged like unattended milk left on the kitchen counter for a month. I’ve said for years and years that Elon Musk is a modern day Thomas Edison: a patent troll predisposed to suing his competitors, all while claiming his next genius invention is just around the corner and will come out in just a month … or maybe two months … a year? Yet it never comes. Or when one actually does, it’s the Wankpanzer, or the Vegas hyperloop. Everything else is a government subsidized defense contract filled with engineers poached from NASA.

“Money literally talks in the early language and cognitive development of our children, as demonstrated in the extensive analyses by the University of Chicago economist James Heckman and his colleagues.”

And as soon as someone writes celebratory passages about any of the Chicago School of Economics money warlocks, my eyebrows climb way, way up. I then think of Nobel winner Milton Friedman and his help with Pinochet and American imperialism in South America. James Heckman doesn’t appear to be as offensive as Friedman, but I did spend a bit of time with his biography, which left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

There are more, but I don’t want to belabor the point any more than I have. Not that I hate Reader, Come Home at all. The book is mostly great, so thanks for the recommendation. Who, after all, wants to read a book where they agree with every single point?!

Do we read more deeply with physical books? That's one of the conclusions of this book, and I wasn't so convinced by it. I think reading on a mobile device, a tablet, or on a computer is totally different from reading using an e-reader with e-ink technology. The author discusses research that pointed out the importance of the "physicality" of books, the shape, the visual sense of how many pages there are in the book, and how all those cues are important for reading. There are interesting discussions on how technological native children will develop their reading skills. Are they going to be able to read long books? And get a deep understanding of the contents and ideas? Or the way they consume digital information will make them shallow readers? As an avid e-reader myself, I don't think there is a difference between reading a physical book and an e-book in terms of the level of understanding. The environment and distractions around me are a better indicator of how much I'm engaged in the reading. This book started a good discussion about the future of reading. And how our brains might change or adapt to different mediums.