For a recent review in The Oxford Literary Review Supplement, Dominik Zechner discusses Powers of Reading by Peter Szendy. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“If reading Peter Szendy’s Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks left me humming a song by the Talking Heads, this effect corresponds to the very heart of the matter. For Szendy, reading is indeed an event of the senses, but contrary to popular intuition, its privileged sense is not the eye but the ear: one hears the act of reading, listening for its pitch and timbre, the velocity of its soundwaves. A privileged verb in this regard is ‘to auscultate,’ which names the medical technique of listening to the internal sounds of the body, typically using a stethoscope. Perhaps we must imagine Peter Szendy’s eyes closed as he sounds out the corpora of Hobbes and Goethe, Italo Calvino and László Krasznahorkai, listening for heart murmurs and unusual bowel movement. Readers familiar with Szendy’s oeuvre will not be surprised by his auscultative method, because it directly connects to the author’s extensive work in sound studies.”