Scan barcode
dansumption's review
3.0
More a series of essays than a single coherent tract, individual chapters address the history of various aspects of reading: critical reading, student reading, reading "middlebrow" books, reading by black and other ethnic minorities, and reading in prison. There are then histories of newspapers and public relations, both of which feel rather different from previous chapters in that they are much more about what is published than they are about how it is read. Finally, there is a very angry chapter about how reading and literature are currently taught. While the earlier parts of the book are fascinating, the further I got into it the less I felt I was learning about history per se, and the more I was learning about the author's own personal bugbears. In the final chapter, there were some very well-made points about today's standardised school reading curriculum, and about trigger warnings on literature, but I felt they were marred by barely-related rants about safe-spaces and halloween costumes. Finally, as the book comes from the Oxford University Press I had expected it to deal mostly with Britain, but in fact about 80-90% of it is about reading in the USA, and while a lot of this can be generalised to the UK, not all of it can.
More...