Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

1. Wolf frames the text as a series of letters to the reader. How did this epistolary style shape your experience of her arguments? Discuss your emotional and intellectual responses to the text.

2. Reader, Come Home builds on the ideas from Wolf’s earlier book, Proust and the Squid. For those who have read both, how did this book update or change your understanding of the reading brain? For those new to her work, how compelling was her central idea that we were never born to read?

3. What did you think of the central metaphor of the “reading brain [as] the canary in our minds” (14)? How effectively did this image capture the book’s sense of urgency and its core warning about our changing cognitive habits?

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Wolf recounts her struggle to reread Hermann Hesse’s complex novel Magister Ludi (1943), realizing her brain had adapted to a faster, more superficial style of reading. Have you ever had a similar “Rip Van Winkle” moment where you noticed a change in your own attention span or ability to read deeply? What was that experience like for you?

2. How does the concept of “continuous partial attention” manifest in your daily life (71)? Consider your relationship to both print and digital media and how each medium impacts your attention span.

3. Wolf presents fiction as a “moral laboratory” where we can practice empathy by “passing over” into the experiences of others. Discuss the books that have profoundly shaped your perspective or allowed you to understand a point of view different from your own. What was it about these stories that made them so powerful?

4. Discuss the tension between building an internal “storehouse of knowledge” and relying on the immediate access of external servers like Google (8). In what areas of your life do you prioritize internal knowledge, and where do you find yourself outsourcing your memory?

5. Wolf describes how interactive eBooks can sometimes distract from the narrative of a text. Considering your own experiences with children’s media, discuss what distinguishes a digital tool that aids learning from one that is merely a distraction.

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. One of the text’s central themes is the link between deep reading, empathy, and the health of a democracy. Considering the current information landscape, with its filter bubbles and rapid spread of misinformation, how relevant did you find Wolf’s argument? In what ways might a decline in critical reading skills impact civic discourse today?

2. Wolf warns that the atrophy of critical thought makes citizens vulnerable to manipulation. How does her evidence-based concern compare to the allegorical warnings about losing intellectual freedom in classic works like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. Discuss Wolf’s use of figurative language, metaphor, and symbolism to explain complex neuroscience. How do these stylistic techniques guide your understanding of her complex ideas, and why?

2. How does Wolf construct her authority throughout the book? Consider how she balances her roles as a scientist, a humanist, and an individual to inform her examination of print and digital media.

3. Wolf’s “Digital Chain Hypothesis” suggests a causal link from the volume of what we read to how texts are now written. What is most or least convincing about this argument? Discuss examples in contemporary media or literature that support or challenge this idea.

4. Discuss Wolf’s incorporation of external research into her overarching exploration. How does she lean on the ideas, philosophies, or principles of other experts to balance her discussions of reading, digital media, and empathy?

5. Wolf identifies technological advancement as a threat to the reading brain. Discuss the solutions she offers to this cultural problem and their potential effectiveness.

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

1. Wolf coins the acronym “arcia/tl” as a mnemonic for deep reading and an antidote to “tl;dr.” If you were tasked with designing a public awareness campaign around this idea, who would be your target audience, and what creative form might it take?

2. If you were advising a school district, what is the single most important change from Wolf’s work you would advocate for in early literacy education? How would you pitch this change to the district?

3. Imagine you could write a final, 10th letter back to Wolf. What would you say, ask, or argue in response to her book?