As Alberto Manguel points out in his book A History of Reading, there was a time when reading silently was considered a strange habit. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “History of Reading Silently”
We were talking on our Facebook page about audiobooks and how we feel about them.
And I wanted to mention that we got a great recommendation from one of our listeners, Natalie J. Stewart-Smith, who recommended the book A History of Reading.
Have you ever read that, Grant?
No, I don’t think I have.
I don’t know if there’s an audio version or not, but it’s by Alberto Manguel.
It’s this fantastic history of reading that I’m dying to get into.
I noticed that one of the things it mentions there is that St. Augustine was considered weird because he read silently.
Oh, right. Yeah, I have heard of that before.
Yeah, you read aloud for the longest time.
Scribes who were reading through their work would read aloud.
Yeah, and so reading silently was this really strange thing.
Who would have thought?
Yeah, it was culturally weird.
I have to admit that when my son started to learn to read silently, I thought he was faking.
Are you serious?
I did. I started to quiz him about the books that he was supposedly reading.
It turns out he’s actually reading them.
Is that right?
But he went so quickly from reading aloud, which all children begin with, to reading silently that I just was suspicious.
Oh, that’s fascinating.
But apparently he’s as bright as I thought he was.
Of course. Well, that book is A History of Reading by Alberto Mangel.
Sounds great.
I can’t wait to dig into it.
Me too.
