I never know quite what I’m going to stumble across when scanning the headlines of the Morning Updates from The Bookseller that accumulate in my Gmail Inbox. Most of these are clearly more relevant to well-established publishing houses than to individual book readers, (or to brand new, very small publishers like my own Novel Press) but the Feed Reader comes up with more variety – the one that caught my eye is from last Thursday’s update, with the heading: A week without books, from The Guardian World News.

Bibi van der Zee is a bookaholic who was going cold turkey for a week. She gives an amusing account of how she copes with the deprivation, but I was more interested in the wider questions that she raises when she wonders if her reading habit is ‘actually is some kind of drug’

I was aware that ‘that our brain experiences what the characters we are reading about experience’ and it was no surprise to learn about a piece of research where scientists got people to read while they were in a brain scanner. ” When readers were engaged in a story, the researchers found that, at the points in which the story said a protagonist undertook an action, the part of the brain which was activated was the part which the reader himself or herself would use to undertake the action”

What I hadn’t really taken on board was the fact that, ‘For most of our history, reading has been done by just a few specialists, and aloud.‘ In the fifth century, Saint Augustine was famously perplexed by the weird habits of Saint Ambrose: ” When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

We take it for granted now that fluent readers don’t have to sound out each word. Take a look at this article and remind yourself how novels have changed our attitudes to reading, using them as recreation and an escape from stress.

Reading is such a part of our lives it’s hard to imagine a time when a reader like Ambrose was able to astonish onlookers with his eyes scanning the page. I love the way that this was expressed – especially ‘his heart sought out the meaning ‘.

I don’t read anything like as much as I used to – maybe only one or two novels a month. I feel a pang when I visit some readers’ blogs and read their enticing reviews, adding them to my mental t.b.r pile - but what with my money-earning job, my own writing, and now my publishing venture, Novel Press, there really isn’t much time left over.

At least I know I can last a week without reading. It’s almost a year since I wrote any poetry and I do miss that.

Would you find it hard to give up reading for a week? If not, what would you miss most?