As a young child, I was first inspired to learn to read when my older sister, Miro, herself an early reader, suddenly and inexplicably abandoned my company in exchange for Nancy Drew’s. I was eager to understand what was so compelling about this girl with the pert blonde curls and her Old Clocks, Hidden Staircases, and Mysterious Letters. And thus began my childhood entrée as a bibliophile—and as an adult, a lover of books about books and reading about reading.

Maryanne Wolf is a professor in child development and the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. She and her colleagues study the neurological origins of language and reading, the developmental implications of dyslexia, and the design of new interventions and their effects on behaviors in the brain and in the classroom.

Within the first chapter of Proust and the Squid, Wolf describes the act of reading as: “a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.”

To illustrate this, she compares a short excerpt from Proust, in which he strings together a number of evocative glimpses of a summer day, to Monet’s impressionist painting of a sunrise. Both novelist and painter use fragments to create composites more vivid than flawless reproductions; readers and viewers are engaged by actively contributing their own experiences and insights to the synthesis of the whole, and through this process, experience both text and painting in more direct, palpable, and authentic ways.

Wolf expresses concern as to whether we’ll be able to retain this constructive dimension of reading as we shift from more traditional print-based presentations (in which pacing and narrative are tightly controlled) to our new Google-based reality, in which we are overwhelmed with dense amounts of information instantaneously presented on screen. She questions whether there will be sufficient time or motivation to process information inferentially, analytically, or critically—and what this may mean for children who are now faced with multi-tasking and metabolizing ever-increasing amounts of information.

What’s perhaps even more troubling is just how uneven the playing field can be for young children without access to vibrant language environments. How often a child is held and read to is a strong predictor of later reading. Wolf cites a study that found that the average middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than his or her underprivileged, “linguistically-impoverished” counterpart by age five.

“Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage […] Children who never have a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelmingly against them.”

In our apartment, you’ll find stacks of books, magazines, and catalogs in every room. Some are perennial favorites—read, re-read, and referenced on a regular basis—while others have yet to be cracked since arriving home from Amazon or the local bookstore months, sometimes years, ago. We subscribe to a half-dozen magazines, but average at least four weeks behind on the weeklies, particularly those as dense as The New Yorker. We cancelled our subscription to Time Out, simply because the frustration that resulted from reading about the show we missed or the exhibit that just closed became unbearable.

(Mis)Readings attempts to document that which I’ve actually read. Page for page, every word ingested from books and magazines is replicated in its original typeface and layout. Colors and images have been eliminated. Headlines and drop caps loom large against vast expanses of white; credits and small point legalese rarely appears. What results is a visual record of my own predisposition toward content—that which is omitted is, perhaps, equally, if not more, significant as that which appears on the page.