Powers of Reading 

by Peter Szendy, translated from the French by Olivia Custer (Zone)

Nonfiction

In this elliptical meditation on the nature of reading, Szendy draws a connection between Phaedrus reading aloud to Socrates, the reading regime of Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” and audiobooks. He argues that the solitary, silent type of reading that has become the norm is “an interiorization of the reading aloud that prevailed” for centuries. “When I read silently,” he writes, “I listen to myself reading.” Much here is theoretical, but Szendy’s ultimate purpose is to point toward a new “politics of reading,” one that will empower the “readee,” or “the one for whom one reads,” amid the proliferation of digital devices and techniques that are “shaking up our experience as readers.”