Now available in paperback, this final volume in the trilogy Language/Writing/Reading traces the complete story of reading from the time when symbols first acquired meaning through to the electronic texts of the digital age. The author concludes with an examination of "visual language" and modern theories of how reading is processed in the brain, and suggests a radical new definition of what reading truly is.

Preface
Everyone – young and old, past and present – has had to admit its primacy. For an ancient Egyptian official it was a ‘boat on water’. For an aspiring Nigerian pupil four thousand years later it is ‘a touch of light in a deep dark well’. For most of us it will forever be the voice of civilization itself . . . Reading.
Today’s white-collar worker spends more time reading than eating, drinking, grooming, traveling, socializing or on
general entertainment and sport – that is, five to eight hours of each working day. (Only sleep appears to claim as much time.)
The computer and Internet? Both are reading revolutions. Yet reading embraces so much more than work or web.
What music is to the spirit, reading is to the mind. Reading challenges, empowers, bewitches, enriches. We perceive little black marks on white paper or a PC screen and they move us to tears, open up our lives to new insights and understandings, inspire us, organize our existences and connect us with all creation.