Proust and the Squid

I must admit I read this book quickly, but I also found it very interesting. The chronological approach is really helpful in breaking down the steps of written language development whether originally or for each individual child. I had always wondered what the steps were going from an alphabet where each "letter" represents a word or part of a word to an alphabet where each letter represents a phoneme. Also, the approach of giving many examples was particularly helpful. In the child-development section of learning how to read, the example of the word "elemeno" in the alphabet song particularly struck me because I, when I was learning the alphabet, also thought that that was an individual letter or a word in the middle of the aphabet or something of that nature. I already knew how to read by the time I thought back to the alphabet song and actually realized that "elemeno" was not a word or letter, but the letters l, m, n and o. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that is that the "name" of each individual letter is composed of perhaps more phonemes than the letter itself represents in terms of sound. Also, the fact that the author Maryanne Wolf used her own child as an example really brings the facts to life. I suppose that not many authors would be able to use a personal example as legitimate data but because she is already an expert on the subject, Wolf gets away with it well. However, despite using some gee-whiz examples, Wolf doesn't seem to provide enough background science and the book takes on the feel of a layman's text instead of a serious book in the field of the subject. It was a very good read, though.