A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story by Christine Hume

We could not be more pleased to announce the April release of Christine Hume’s little book A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story, a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic’s subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it. 

“What delicious diligent indolence” is what Keats called reading, Christine Hume tells us in her mesmerizing new book on dyslexia, A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. Leave it to Keats, and now Hume, to come up with a wonderful definition not only for the mysteries of dyslexia, but also for poetry and the human mind. “As you read,” she tells us,” can you hear my voice in your head? Does this sentence reach for your hand across the table?” This is a small sample of the wonders to be found here, a book/essay/poem/colloquy on the nature of thinking as well as feeling, on the voice in our heads powerful enough to reach across the table of time to offer comfort, and such delicious indolence. ” – Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize Winner

Order A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story HERE