Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,

Are a substantial world, both pure and good:

Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.



— William Wordsworth

As an infant, my son Benj was aloof and never wanted to cuddle with me, but if I read to him, he would snap to attention and listen avidly. He shunned toys and stuffed animals, preferring instead to surround himself with books. He sat in seas of them, slept with them clutched between his tiny fingers and paged through them endlessly. He’d memorize chunks of books or entire poems we read to him and recite them jubilantly. So when he began actually reading at 2, I was delighted: what endless hours of joy awaited him! I’d grown up with a writer father and a literary agent mother in a book-lined apartment and had been an early and passionate reader myself. An assistant professor of English at Yale, I devoted my life to reading, teaching and writing about literature. Of course my child loved books so much he lined his crib with them.

But when Benj was almost 3, he was given a diagnosis of a rare disorder called hyperlexia: the ability to read at an early age coupled with difficulty with social interaction and verbal communication, and typically, although not exclusively, found in children on the autism spectrum. I was devastated to learn that Benj’s fondness for reading and reciting literature, which I’d taken to be impassioned and profound, was, in fact, a symptom of his disorder.

“Reading as Symptom” (the title of a piece I read), “Reading Too Soon” (the title of the standard book on hyperlexia) — these were things I’d never thought possible. How could voracious reading be anything other than an expression of curiosity, engagement and love? But Web site after Web site told me that Benj’s reading was meaningless, mechanical, a “splinter skill,” an ability that occurs in isolation and has no relationship to the general level of functioning or quality of life of the individual. I was told that Benj didn’t understand what he was reading and that his reading was akin to hand-flapping or running in circles — a “self-stimulatory” activity. He reread books not because he loved them but because he “craved sameness.” His predilection for reciting lines of Robert Frost — “some say the world will end in FIRE!” — was unappreciative and unliterary. His use of quotations to describe his experience — a fragment of a Yeats poem to depict the night sky — was “echolalia,” mindless parroting. I was encouraged to redirect him away from reading/reciting and to think of his need to read as a problematic behavior.