Reflects on reading as a lived experience and a scholarly field by bringing together two modes of writing, the academic and the autobiographical, for the first time Maps an unbounded, extra-disciplinary space of enquiry into the history of reading, crossing literary studies, critical theory, media history, law, philosophy, and neuroscience, while engaging with an array of major thinkers from Bertrand Russell, Walter Ong, and Marshal McLuhan to Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu Discusses a range of writers across the long-twentieth century, including Rabindranath Tagore, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Salman Rushdie, and J. M. Coetzee Addresses a conspicuous lacuna in reception studies by showing how some writers aim to create a new kind of reader and makes an original contribution to the debates about 'world literature' and 'post-critique' The Double Life of Books confronts a central challenge for the history of reading: how to investigate and then describe the elusive process of what the leading book historian Robert Darnton calls 'inner appropriation.' It does so by bringing two voices together for the first time: the so-called 'ordinary reader' who began life as a devotee of Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat and the literature professor who writes about the history of media and reading. Ranging across world literatures in English since the 1890s and drawing on the latest research into the neuroscience of the reading brain, The Double Life of Books is at once an exercise in materialist autobibliobiography, asking what it means to be a living reader in our multimedia age, and a sustained reflection on academic professionalization, raising new questions about the limits of disciplinarity and critique.