We Were Never Meant to Read

In the Telegraph there's a book review of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. It sounds like a fascinating book.

From the synopsis:

The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains in this impassioned book, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species.