Oatley has been quoted in the magazine Scientific American Mind (article Fiction Hones Social Skills) as saying, Reading “can hone your social brain, so that when you put your book  down you may be better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, even love.”

Most readers know how deeply they can be affected by the books they read.  What they didn’t know before is that when they get involved with a fictional character, they tend to follow their actions as though they were participating in them and develop a deep empathy with their motives and feelings.  Oatley suggests that reading is a form of mind-training – a course in how humans behave and react to each other.  Readers tend to have better social skills because they are better aquainted with the way other people think and they are more familiar with the huge variety of human behaviour than non-readers.

As I read this I thought of just one example. I  remember reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali,  about the experience of a Bangladeshi woman who moved to Tower Hamlets in London to marry an older man – not usually the sort of book which interests me.  As I read it however, I was drawn into the story and by the end of the book I found tremendous sympathy with Nazeem and her husband Chanu.  I became engrossed on the story of how the initially isolated Nazeem was changed by the people she met in London and by the end of the book my understanding of Bangladeshi immigrant culture was so greatly enhanced that I felt real understanding of the pressures faced by immigrants who don’t even speak the language of their host nation.

Oatley’s book is based on experimental research such as setting groups of people to read a novel and then testing their social abilities before and after.  But in the longer term, Oatley found that people who read were better at judging the emotional state of others and also making judgements about social relationships.  Reading fiction trains people in understanding other human beings just in the same way that reading a work of non-fiction can train you in science or engineering.

The author refers to research in which students were asked to read either a novel about the plight of an Algerian woman or an essay about Algerian women’s rights.  Researchers found that the readers of the novel had far more concern about the Algerian women’s rights than those who read the more newsy, third-party report.

But its the internalisation of what people read which was never quite understood before.  Readers personalities are subtly changed by what they read and they become better at relating to other people, particularly those who are very different to themselves.

I can relate to this in my own reading.  Books have taught me so much – how “good” people can be driven to commit a murder (Crime and Punishment – Fyodr Dostoevsky), what its like to be autistic (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon), how its best to be reconciled to those who do us harm (The Railway Man – Eric Lomax) and countless other books which stay in my mind like icons on the wall of a cathedral.

Keith Oatley has more books in the pipeline and if Such Stuff as Dreams is anything to go by then we will be learning more about the transformative power of fiction and how those of us who sit in a corner with a book may be preparing ourselves far more for interaction with the real world than those who think reading is a waste of time.

This gives the book a distinct lack of unity – sure, some of it is clever, but at other times, this reader at least thought, yes, but this isn’t really why I came here.  The book is subtitled “Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them”, and in a loose way, I suppose that’s fair enough, but I expected more unity of purpose, with more material written specifically for this book rather than a a collection of previously published lectures and articles (although occasionally enhanced for this volume).

I’ve no problem with bringing together collections of previously published material, but I do think the publishers should make this clear on the cover because in this case, I could find quite a bit of the book online and find out whether it was something I wanted to read.  As it is, the book is very selective in its appraisal of Russian books and the people who read them and hardly serves the purpose of its subtitle at all.

I wanted more of what it says on the tin – a book about reading Russian literature, something more comprehensive, with a bit of planning behind it. I got instead large chunks about Batuman’s intellectual and academic development including tortuous stories of how she ended up learning the Uzbek language, or how she moved from one course to another while at college – or even tales about her various boyfriends (an uninspiring bunch to say the least!).  Dare I say, that some of it seemed remarkably self-congratulatory – a sort of “look how clever I am”, but maybe that’s my English perceptions getting in the way – American reviewers seem not to have picked up on this at all.

The book contains a pretty good essay on the Russian writer Isaac Babel; and a long lecture on The Death of Tolstoy which can be found online on the Harpers Magazine archive.  Other items were previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere.  Sometimes you get elongated versions of other articles – for example, one chapter, The House of Ice builds on an article previously published in the New Yorker and is devoted telling the story of how in 2006 a replica of Empress Anna Ioannovna’s ice palace built in St. Petersburg.  Its all very interesting, a sort of first person travelogue, the sort of thing which would be published in Granta magazine, but its hard to see its how it fits into a book about Russian literature.

Three chapters are devoted to Batuman’s time in Samarkand where she was learning the Uzbek language.  Its all very funny and contains many amusing anecdotes such as how she learned to choose water-melons in the market by listening to them talk.

In the final chapter, Batuman visits Florence where Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot.  She moves on to discuss his novel The Possessed and after summarising the book in a few pages, she immediately lost me by interpreting the book in the context of René Girard theory of “mimetic desire” which was apparently “formulated in opposition to the Nietzschean notion of autonomy as the key to human self-fulfilment”.

Four or five pages of discussion of this theory then follow, after which Batuman recounts a little tale of how when she returned to Stanford the department’s dynamics had completely changed as new people had arrived (including the charismatic Matej from Croatia) and others had left.  We get four or five pages of the impact on these changes and a fair amount about Matej’s impact on Batuman’s life, but I can’t for the life of me see how they relate to Dosteovsky’s book The Possessed.  But then Batuman’s writing jumps around so much its just as I said at the start of this review, like following a butterfly as it moves from one plant to another: its difficult to focus in on one particular topic before she’s off on another one.  I’d have had no problem with reading about Girard’s theory of mimetic desire in the midst of a book which had been leading up to it, but to just drop it into a chapter largely discussing personal relationships within her department reads like a first-year female student at University who’s reading her text books while eyeing up the boy at the next table.

I’m very disappointed with this book.  Its lack of focus and structure completely detracts from some of the good things it includes.  It seems a cheap way of putting a book together to me and if it had been subtitled “assorted writings of Elif Batuman” I wouldn’t have bothered with it.  The lure of reading about “the Russian literature reading experience” misled me in this case and I wouldn’t recommend this book unless you’re already into Batuman’s work.

I am used to hearing how books educate, inform and enlighten and it was a surprise to read that the wholly unenlightened Adolf Hitler was “possessed by a voracious appetite for reading”.  From his earliest years after returning from the First World War battle-front in France, Hitler scoured the book-stalls of Munich to fill two book cases in his rented rooms.  He read “intently, even fiercely”, usually late into the night, and Ryback records an occasion when Eva Braun interrupted a reading session and was “dispatched with a tirade that sent her hurtling red-faced down the hallway”.

Associates  recalled, “I can never remember Adolf without books”, and “books were his world”, with reading being a “deadly serious business”.

A list exists of Hitler’s borrowings from a right-wing lending library in Munich and shows that between 1919 and 1921, he borrowed over a hundred entries ranging from early church history to first-hand accounts of the Russian revolution. The list includes an large number anti-Semitic texts such as “The International Jew – The Worlds Foremost Problem”, “Luther and the Jews” and many others.

Timothy Ryback explains that Hitler was never open to alternative views of life.  Hitler had a “theory of reading” which precluded this, comparing the process of reading to “collecting stones to fill a mosaic of preconceived notions”.  He studied books to support his ideas and to provide further evidence for the conclusions he had already drawn.  I am so used to thinking of reading as enlightenment that Hitler’s approach is somehow shocking:  it is almost an “anti-reading”, the object of which is to slam the doors on new thoughts rather than to seek the widening of perspectives which “real” reading brings.

It is almost terrifying to read of the books Hitler collected.  Every theme of those years was covered in great depth, whether eugenics, anti-Semitism, military strategy, Germanic myths, occultism.  The library abounded with title such as “Teachings on Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene”, “Terminating Reproductive Capacity for Racial-Hygiene and Social Reasons”, and “The Racial Typology of the German People”.  Clearly Hitler found a considerable amount of pseudo-scientific support for his theories.

Ryback found that many of the books in the Library of Congress collection had pencilled annotations with under-linings and double margin scores.  Some books fell open at favourite passages and have signs of frequent of sustained study.  The book “Racial Typology of the German People” shows signs of “frequent or sustained study” and “opens effortlessly to reveal worn pages and a ragged tear along the inside cover where the spine has begun to come apart”.

Many of Hitler’s books were gifts, presented with adulatory messages inscribed on the title page:  “in loyalty and reverence”,  “to our beloved Fuhrer in celebration”,  “my Fuhrer in gratitude and loyalty”, and the combination of these messages with Hitler’s hideous ex libris plate is genuinely chilling.  We read of the publisher J F Lehamnn Verlag who’s fifty-odd titles provided “the building blocks of Nazism”, some of which seem to have been specifically published as educational primers for Hitler himself.  A book containing harrowing illustrations on sterilisation are inscribed to Hitler “in great friendship”.

Among this horrific collection of volumes, we occasionally catch glimpses of Hitler’s lighter reading – Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Don Quixote as well as most of the adventure stories of Karl May, whose adventure stories of the American West were a life-long favourite.

A fascinating Afterword describes what happened to Hitler’s library after 1945, ending with an indication that inheritors of books containing the Hitler Ex Libris plate (some of which were taken as souvenirs after the war) have found them to be a malign influence who’s effect can only be expunged by donating them to a library.

In finishing this review I will quote Alberto Manguel who in his book, The Library At Night, writes of Hitler’s library,

not all our libraries come from dreams; some belong to the realm of nightmares.  Among the volumes kept in the Library of Congress are a French vegetarian cookbook inscribed by its author “to Monsieur Hitler”, and a 1932 treatise on chemical warfare explaining the uses of prussic acid, later commercialised as ZyKlon B.  Let there be libraries that the imagination condemns simply because of the reputation of their reader.

The book is divided into three parts.  Firstly the history of how humans learned to read, secondly how reading is learned and how it develops, and thirdly what happens when in cases like dyslexia, something goes wrong in the “learning to read” process.

The reference to Proust in the title refers to passages from Proust’s writings in which he describes the pleasure of reading, the memories that are evoked by thinking back to special books from childhood (how Proustian!), and the “reading sanctuary”, that place of escape, a refuge from the world and its troubles.  If Proust is a metaphor for a particular approach to reading, so the squid in the title refers to early neruo-scientific investigations of that creature which found how neurons fire and transmit to each other, adapting when things go wrong, repairing and compensating along the way.  The squid analogy refers to the way reading required something new from existing structure of the brain, only possible because of the “plasticity” referred to earlier.

I like Wolf’s descriptions of the reading process:

. . . you engage an array of mental or cognitive processes; attention, memory; and visual , auditory and linguistic processes . . . swooping quickly across the page, forwarding gleaning about letter shapes, word forms and common phrases to linguistic systems awaiting the information . . applying highly automatic rules about the sounds of letters . . .your word meaning or semantic systems contributed every possible meaning  of each word you read and incorporated the exact correct meaning for each word in its context.

And as said earlier, the amazing thing about this process is that it is learned: children of today become adept at this process, while children of a mere few thousand years ago knew nothing of it.  Indeed, even today, there exists what Wolf calls “a little-discussed class system” which invisibly divides society.  By kindergarten, children in linguistically impoverished homes will have heard 32 millions words less than those from literate, middle-class families.

Wolf describes how reading actually changes us.  We interact with books, both making them our own (everyone reads a text in their own way), but we are also permanently changed by them.  “We bring our life experiences to the text, and the text changes our experience of life”.  Whenever we read, our original boundaries are challenged, teased and gradually placed somewhere new.  An expanding sense of “other” changes who we are.

I can relate to this, from reading books like Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, which enabled me to understand the life of a female Bangladeshi immigrant to London.  Before, such a life would have been literally a closed book to me, but by reading it, I found understanding and sympathy for people I would probably never have had a meaningful exchange with in day to day life.  Similarly, I am currently reading The Road from Damascus by Robin Yassin-Kassab and am learning much about what it is for a Westernised Syrian to be confronted by the increasing Islamisation of his society.  Only reading could do this for me.

The section on the development of alphabets and reading systems is fascinating.  Different types of brain activity are needed to read say Mandarin Chinese than are required for the Western alphabet.  The style of writing shapes the culture to a degree, and certainly changes the reading experience.  “Learning to read changes the visual cortex of the brain.  The expert readers visual areas are now populated with cell networks responsible for visual images of letters, letter patterns and words”.   The eye moves ahead with a Western text, but moves leftward with a Hebrew text, gathering advance information about the text before it even reaches it.

The section on dyslexia was less interesting to me, but no doubt with be of great interest to educators and parents of dyslexic children.  I am sure however that these chapters fit well into the book as a whole because they do actually illustrate what happens when for most of us, reading works flawlessly.

For those, like me, who are interested in “books about books”, and the reading process Proust and the Squid would be an excellent addition to their library, a book to refer back to and to re-read.  It is a little difficult to take in all the scientific material about brain processes, but there is much of immediate interest, the more complex neuro-science being available for study at a later time.