Entry #1 6/20/13 while traveling from Colorado to New York on our annual summer visit to my parents beach house. I will try to focus on school...

So, this had been a book that was much mentioned as one that I should read.  I picked it because it had name recognition.  From the title, it seemed a bit pretentious. I knew I was supposed to know who Proust was, he is a French novelist, and I was bothered that I did not, so I did not care to read the book.  However, I am so glad I chose it.  The first sentence got me, “we were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago.” ( ). This was fascinating news to me as my seven year old asked me a similar question like how do we know how to speak or who invented reading....  I would have said that we were born reading, but of course, early cave men did not read...duh. I am usually strapped for words when my son asks a question that seemingly has no answer unless I had was better at retaining any past knowlege, but I am sure this was a question I had never pondered and certainly had never been explained to me.  My son is very good at stumping me.  I usually say “that is a Dad question” as he is a much better bullshitter than me and he lives by the motto “often wrong, but never in doubt”.  Need I say more...

So, Wolfe had me at the first sentence.  We were never born to read.

Wolfe aslo makes the points that we are what we read and to understand humans we should know what they read and when as this is so highly critical in shaping our brains as to be the nuts and bolts of who we are, depending on how our brain was programmed according to what we read and our language.  This seems like the basis for Gee’s theory of how we acquire our primary discourse and of Rosenblatt that we make meaning  and respond to the ink blots on the page depending on our experiences.  Wolfe cites a researcher David Swinney who asserts that depending on who we are and what our experiences have been “bug” can mean a wealth of different things.  This book is already so meaningful and encapsualtes all the theories of how we learn how to read.  Another example of this is the book that many toddlers hear by Dr. Seuss titled O’ the Places You’ll Go ,if read to a youngster who has not been outside of her neighborhood, will have a decidedly different meaning than to a younster who knows what travel entails.  The neurons we use early on, especially in acquiring language, then in learning to read are shaped and grow depending on the particular language and words we aquire.