Dec 5

Dec 5 Repair Shop – Healing Place for the Soul

The entrance to the library in Thebes in Ancient Greece was inscribed, a “healing place for the soul,” I read in an article in the New Yorker by Ceridwen Dovey from 2015 titled, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” I’ve saved this article for ages in my bookmarks and click on it from time to time. I’m doubly invested as a longtime library worker and writer in the answer being yes. The author of the article goes to a bibliotherapist, which over the pandemic I looked into training to become, and then brain fatigue and burnout got me somewhat ironically and I gave that up. But I didn’t give up reading! I felt that reading was what healed my brain in the end though I have no hard evidence to back that up. Others have thought quite a bit about the effects of deep reading and finding the right book at the right time. In the article Ella Berthoud says that when she began in the field, “Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a transformational experience.”

I love that the article ends on a line from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: “Come, and take choice of all my library/And so beguile thy sorrow.”

I’ve been re-reading Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf. I read a copy from the library and had to resist the urge to underline passages which always tells me I need my own to dog-ear and mark. Published in 2018 before many of us were thinking at all about AI and its future ramifications, it seems like a book that anyone interested and involved in literacy work should have in their pocket. An epigraph of the book:

“Reading is an act of contemplation…an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…it returns us to a reckoning with time.”

– David Ulin

Wolf talks about a study by Stanford neuroscientists that looks at, “what happens when we read fiction in different ways: that is, with and without “close attention.”” The findings showed that “just by asking students either to read closely or to read for entertainment, different regions of the brain became activated…” She gets into the science of deep reading and how the “reading brain circuit” works. She says, “within this circuit, deep reading significantly changes what we perceive, what we feel, and what we know and in so doing alters, informs, and elaborates the circuit itself.”

If you’re reading this, I know I’m preaching to the converted. You’re a believer in deep reading. And is this endangered? In 2018 there was some pretty interesting evidence around this. I’d love to see further scientific work in our time on the subject — which seems to have shifted in all sorts of ways.

Wolf says that “Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the Artist in society to that of the canary in the mines; both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.” She quotes Marilynne Robinson who warned of impending “moral catastrophe” and how Robert Darnton said we “live in a historical ‘hinge moment.’” And it feels like in 2024, some ships have sailed.

In the book Martha Nussbaum is quoted from a piece 20 years prior and it pretty much rings out right now:

“It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavours, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.”

Wolf herself then says, “I could never have imagined that research about the changes in the reading brain, most of which reflect increasing adaptations to a digital culture, would have implications for a democratic society. Yet that is my conclusion.”

In more recent thought on AI and our reading brain, you might wish to consult an article by Joan Westenberg titled, “The Death of Critical Thinking Will Kill Us Long Before AI.” It ends, “A society that cannot patiently read long-form texts struggles to make sense of the world in ways that enable wise judgment, empathy across differences, effective policies, technological progress, economic justice, scientific reason, and fact-based truth to prevail over misguided beliefs. Reviving reading comprehension may be among the most urgent priorities for the future of civilisation.”

One of my biggest goals in life is to get people not just reading but DEEP READING. I facilitated book clubs for over a decade at the library I work at and have enjoyed jawing with folks over what they’ve read and what interested them about it. Oh lord have I worked to get people beyond, “I liked this book” or “I hated this book.” I have looked at sentences with readers, and also passages and details and motifs. I have always been delighted by observations made by library people. And it is exciting when this sort of thing happens! But how to get more of it happening? Less banning of books and more deep discussions about turns of phrase, is what I’m for. In short, libraries, amiright? Bookstores. Book websites. Books, more books!

Reading is cool. Get me that on a t-shirt stat. Maybe we don’t want to endorse libraries as “healing places for the soul” anymore but at the same time, maybe?