You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfobladen.

Welcome to Bookworm. Today my guest is Philip Grahamulfa Bladden. Welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Philip Graham, the author of How to Read, an Unwritten Language, recently

published by Scribner's.

And I want to start by characterizing the book in a way I haven't exactly seen it characterized.

Recently, there have been very popular books that might be classified as

spiritual novels, and most of them, although bestsellers, are quite uninteresting. This seems to me

to be a sort of novel of the spiritual path, but for literary people. Do you think of it in that

way? Very much so.

Oh, good.

I mean, the second sight that the main character Michael has is a kind of a gift of seeing.

That's a burden for him as well as an opportunity as a pleasure.

I don't know how to really describe these books, but there seems to be a certain

kind of novel of generous imagination. Sometimes they find their seats, and sometimes they

fall to the floor, but they usually get picked up again.

I'm thinking of others like Peter Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, years and years ago.

Some of the novels by Jonathan Carroll, have you run into him at all?

There's sort of novels that keep being on the verge of fantasy and then withdrawing. And as a result, they have that interesting relationship that your book has to the ordinary, the possibility that the

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