I have forgotten how to read. It isn’t the first time. I have forgotten before and I will forget again. In other words, I am still learning how to read.
“Read,” like “love” or “think,” has a thousand meanings pressed into one deceptively elementary verb. We use it in a way that tends towards simplicity. It is the connection of sounds and concepts to standardized squiggles, to trails of ink on squares of paper, scratches carved into sticks, glowing lines of curved neon, careful stitches poked through a tight canvas. It can seem a basic skill, at least to those who have left the learning of letters behind.
Watching my son learn it now, I begin to understand how daunting a task it is, even given a phonetic language with a small alphabet, even with all the plasticity of a child’s brain at his disposal. Learning to read is a years-long series of internalizing rules and their many exceptions, of tiny modulations and adjustments. At first I thought it would be a matter of recognizing 26 letters. Then I saw that he must navigate upper and lower cases, print and cursive, different typefaces and hands, the sounds rendered by certain combinations of letters, umlauts and double S’s, unmarked short and long vowels, and the vagaries of foreign words and their unpredictable pronunciations.
The nature of that mysterious threat to Molly and her family twists and turns as the book progresses, each revelation unlocking a new set of questions, flipping Molly’s, and the reader’s, expectations on their head. This is compelling, masterful plotting, and Phillips tells the story in a crisp, sharp style.
The Need is the kind of book that, especially as a parent, keeps you up at night in more ways than one. It’s unsettling in the best of ways, a wake up call to your limbic system.
“You must keep hold of your friendships, Lissa. The women. They’re the only thing that will save you in the end.”
Such is the advice a mother gives her daughter in Anna Hope’s profoundly intelligent and humane third novel, Expectation, about the disjunct between the lives we once imagined for ourselves and the lives we end up living.
Toward the end of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language,” the linguist Gretchen McCulloch acknowledges a paradox at the heart of her book. On the one hand, books about usage tend to enshrine language in a set of rules, and woe to anyone who tries to break them. On the other, the “new rules” floating in the digital ether are constantly changing; anything tethered to the material world of dead trees can’t possibly keep up.
McCulloch doesn’t have a problem with this. “Rather than thinking of books as a way of embalming language, of rendering it fixed and dead for eternity,” she writes, “we can think of them as maps and guidebooks to help people navigate language’s living, moving splendor.”