Bookworm · Mike Schmitz and Cory Hixson

239: Proust and The Squid by Maryanne Wolf

January 2, 2026·1 hr 40 min·5 clips

Moses had to invent an alphabet just to carve the Ten Commandments so everyone could understand them.

1. Bookworm hosts Mike and Cory review Maryanne Wolf's 'Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,' a deep dive into the neuroscience of reading. 2. Mike, a university professor at Colorado Christian University, had previously read Wolf's other book 'Reader Come Home' and interviewed her on the 'Focus' podcast with his co-host David. 3. The episode's core tension is whether Wolf's heavily academic, neuroscience-first approach connects with a general audience, or only with readers already fascinated by the science. 4. Before the book, Mike explains the show has migrated its hosting to Transistor, using AI to help write the redirect regex so bookroom.fm links keep working. 5. Mike previews a live Practical PKM cohort starting January 5th, priced at $147 a quarter through Library Pro membership versus $800 for the same live cohort previously, inspired partly by David Perell's Rite of Passage cohort. 6. Cory reports a rough two weeks, with his daughter Adelaide getting pneumonia and his son Malachi breaking his foot during finals-week grading. 7. Mike shares that he bought lifetime access to a tool called Sublime for idea integration, citing its zines featuring interviews with people like Kevin Kelly on creativity and AI. 8. Turning to the book, Cory admits he would have stopped reading roughly 90% of it without the obligation to record, since the heavy neuroscience exceeded his interest level, though he calls Wolf's writing style narrative and skilled at translating academic ideas. 9. Cory flags the book's dyslexia-focused sections as genuinely valuable for readers who are dyslexic or teach students who are. 10. The hosts recall, with some uncertainty about the exact timeline, that Wolf has been affiliated with MIT and other universities over her career. 11. Chapter one introduces the idea that reading is proof of brain plasticity, since Wolf argues humans were never biologically wired to read. 12. That chapter's 'pyramid of reading' moves from surface behavior down through cognitive level, neurological structures, neurons, and genes. 13. Edward Tenner's quoted line about not letting brilliant technology threaten the intellect that produced it, and Joseph Epstein's 'we are what we read,' both stand out to the hosts as ideas bigger than the book itself. 14. Chapter two covers three epiphanies behind written language and notes writing was invented independently at least three times, including Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. 15. A detail about Sumerian women having their own dialect, translated as 'fine tongue,' and the world's first named encyclopedia, 'All Things Known About the Universe,' stand out as memorable asides. 16. Chapter three, 'The Birth of an Alphabet and Socrates' Protests,' opens with a retelling connecting Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to the invention of an alphabet everyone could understand. 17. Mike connects that story back to the Tower of Babel, framing the alphabet as a kind of reversal of humanity's scattered languages. 18. The hosts cover Eric Havelock's three criteria for an alphabet: a limited character set, coverage of a language's minimal sound units, and a clean correspondence between sound and symbol. 19. Best suited for readers interested in neuroscience, literacy education, or dyslexia, and PKM listeners curious about Mike's cohort and tooling updates. 20. Less suited for listeners who want a more practical, less academically dense treatment of reading and attention, who may prefer Wolf's 'Reader Come Home' instead.

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