100 Books I Keep Keeping... 41 What We See When We Read
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What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund (2014)
"Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader."
This is a book by an artist, and it shows.
Peter Mendelsund is a hugely successful designer of deceptively simply, arresting book covers (see the gallery at http://mendelsund.blogspot.com.au/ - and this cover itself) So - as you would expect - he has an extremely visual imagination. He is also, quite obviously, a voracious reader. The two have combined in this book, which is an exploration, in words and pictures (many many many pictures, the graphics are excellent and possibly a little overwhelming of the text - if you look at the Amazon site's "look inside" function you will get an idea) of exactly what the title says. What we see in our mind's eye, which can be just as vivid sometimes as reality, when we read words paper (or screens).
Reading is, really, a very active process, we start in something of a fog (like Dickens's celebrated one at the start of Bleak House) and add details and images as they show on the page, shifting and amending our understanding of the place we are in continually and unconsciously. What I especially like in this book is that emphasis he gives to the role of the readers in creating for themselves what the author describes, how it can and always does differ from the author's visuals - always, for me, a vital and integral part of the reading process.
Right at the start, he poses a question which resonates through the whole book: What does Anna Karenina look like? and shows us a police composite based solely on the information within Tolstoy's novel (which is nothing like my impression, or I would guess most other people). He goes on to say, "How much detail an author supplies when describing the appearance of a character or a place will not improve a reader’s mental pictures," which is probably not what most aspiring writers, agonising over what physical details to put it and how to describe someone in first person, wants to hear or admit. "It is precisely what the text does not elucidate that becomes an invitation to our imaginations." The descriptions are, by the nature of the beast, imprecise, incomplete, unclear. That's a good thing.
And it is self-evidently true, isn't it? - that we all see written characters sometimes startlingly differently (see the kerfuffling every time a popular book is filmed and the casting announced, the wails so often heard of "but that's ALL WRONG!!!") Like Mendelsund, I am a very visual reader and yes, I have my own ideas on what characters and settings look like and yes, they come as much of not more from me than from the author. I have been known to reject an edition of a well-loved book entirely on the cover which shows My Hero/Heroine ALL WRONG, so this is no great surprise... sometimes the outside image (film, TV, cover art) wins, quite often it doesn't.
As he says, "We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with..." and I love his description of how, when growing up, the mental stage for everything he read was the places he knew and living in. Even books like Moby Dick were visually, if unconsciously, set in the neighbourhood... I did that too, probably still do to a great extent, though the 'neighbourhood' has expanded through travel and media, of course :)
I'm not sure that I learned anything new from this book but I like it because it made me think, sent my imagination off in defferent ways, and yes, crystallized things I probably already thought and believe about how I read (and yes, , and gave me some insight into how it is for other readers. And just in itself, I found it fun to read (and look at, as I said, the graphics...)