Review of Daniel Cassany's book (2019). Laboratorio lector. Para entender la lectura. Barcelona: Anagrama. 209 pp.

Abstract

In this work, Daniel Cassany offers us some suggestive reflections on different aspects of reading, beginning his presentation with a quote from the writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: "The less you read, the more damage what you read does" (p.9 ), and closing the work in its epilogue with an eloquent quote by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in honor of a verifiable fact by every avid reader: “You never finish learning to read” (p.205). Its list of sections seems ordered by criteria of progressive complexity; and, in each of the twenty sections of this work, it gives us a thought from the mouth of others, perhaps in coherence with the construction of intentions that it describes, –as alluded to later– within section “8. Intentions ”(pp.85-86). The starting point of the work responds to a logical justification of the word "laboratory" in the line of the experimental meaning related to scientific research, after transcribing a reference to its entry or voice in the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy ( DRAE). “I imagine it as a large, white room, with lots of light and full of private furniture: refrigerators with biological samples, drawers for storing delicate instruments, sophisticated microscopes for observing tissues, tables full of test tubes, and scientists and fellows in white coats and silicone gloves, working quietly, sitting on stools. (…) And that is exactly this book, except in two details: that it is not about chemistry or medicine and that there is no room. ” (p.9) With this almost plastic metaphor, Daniel Cassany has created an atmosphere as a communicative situation that easily mimics the reading fact seen as a sum of small microscopic details that are there, waiting to be discovered when the skills and sensitivity of the reader let you get there.