Ms. Gurdon goes to great lengths to demonstrate that classic children’s stories (her book contains a comprehensive list of these in her Notes) also provide moral lessons, cultural literacy, and the means to transform the lives of listeners and readers, moving examples of which she includes in a series of anecdotes. As for her sterling defence of the need to pass on to the next generation the treasures of our culture, she reminds her readers of Chairman Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s, during which “old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture” were unceremoniously ditched with catastrophic consequences for Chinese society. She is correctly dismissive of political correctness in all of its guises, providing quotations from Russell Baker, Ray Bradbury and others in support of her view. The correct response to an ‘offensive’ passage in a work that is a product of its time, merely reflecting the era’s attitudes and values, she suggests, should not be moral outrage and cries for censorship, but further reading. She is the mother of five children herself, and gives freely of her own experiences of reading to them over the years. Her tone is confident, cheerfully assertive, frequently humorous, and refreshingly optimistic. Her concern is primarily with reading aloud to children, but it is undeniable that the blind, the bedridden, reluctant English students, and the elderly can also benefit from listening to a book read aloud. Although she recommends audiobooks, especially for families on long car drives, she speaks only briefly of them. A more comprehensive view of the joys and benefits of listening to audiobooks voiced by skilled professionals can be found in an article by Ian Brown, Audiobooks Come of Age, which appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail on Saturday, July 13, 2019.
According to a Yale study, people who read for pleasure live an average of two years longer than non-readers. One of the study’s authors maintains that literature “can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence,” cognitive processes that can lead to fuller, longer lives. Maryanne Wolf is in emphatic agreement with him on this last point.
Ms. Wolf, an academic perhaps better known as the author of Proust and the Squid, a study of how our brain learns to read, is primarily concerned in her most recent book with what she calls ‘deep reading,’ by which she means reading that makes us feel and think long after we have finished reading a memorable book, essay, poem, or passage. “Deep reading,” she continues, “is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live our lives in a connected world.” She fears a future ruled by distracting digital devices, and cites Patricia Greenfield in this regard: “Although… the Internet may develop impressive visual intelligence, the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.” Digital dependency means that those deprived of their devices are easily bored. Even those who read on a Kindle are less proficient readers than those who read from an identical text in a book, as a European study cited has concluded. Attention spans today are already alarmingly short. Two-thirds of fourth-grade US children, Ms. Wolf reports, “do not read at a ‘proficient’ level, that is, fluently and with adequate comprehension.” What is called ‘skimming’ of e-mail, rather than careful, time-consuming analysis of content, is the “new normal” in the workplace. We are a hurried society, intent upon instant gratification, with little time for reverie and reflection, yet our survival as a species depends on our ability to ponder, to reflect, to imagine. No scientific discovery would ever have been made without the searcher’s first question: “What if…?”
