Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible. - Alberto Manguel

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.

Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.