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Loading... What We See When We Read (Vintage Original) (original 2014; edition 2014)by Peter Mendelsund
Work InformationWhat We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund (2014)
   Books Read in 2015 (1,069) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ritaer | Oct 31, 2023 |   ) mykl-s | Jul 25, 2023 | A number of the ideas in this unique volume, where text frequently takes up little space on a page and graphic representations of Mendelsund's ideas abound, were already familiar to me on a scientific level. But the magic of this book is the way it rises above lab-based observations about how our brains and senses work, in favor of exploring the delicious and highly personal experience of reading a book. A focus that is simultaneously narrow and broad. While reading this particular book I had frequent thoughts about sections I might want to comment on in a review, but in retrospect I realize that would just be wrong. This is not a book to be parsed out. It needs to be appreciated as a whole. These observations, appearing near the end of the book, provide a glimpse of Mendelsund's overall theme: "Authors are curators of experience. They filter out the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can-out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set authors provide to readers-no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed-readers' brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen and sort." How pleasant to be able to add another book to my "to re-read" shelf this early in the year. I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone with an interest in the relationship between author and reader. And words on a page. (  ) BarbKBooks | Aug 15, 2022 | As an avid reader it was a fun exploration into how our brains consume words on a page and turn them into stories and images. Each book is performed by the reader in their own minds. We are both the performer and the audience. I realized as I was reading through the examples that (unlike the author) I rarely try to actively picture people in stories. Instead I think of them as actions and character. But the author makes the point that generally characters aren't fully physically described. Usually a characteristic or two stand in for the whole. And often attributes of personality fill out the rest of the picture of the character. This was a fun, not too deep read. ( ) sriddell | Aug 6, 2022 | As my paraphrase also hints, Mendelsund suggests there is a significant difference between what we see, and what we understand. I didn't get any final pronouncement on that difference, so much as various ways (figurative, literal) of illustrating it, through reference to literary selections and made-up examples. It appears for Mendelsund the difference is unexpected; for myself, I realised I had never posed the question quite that pointedly, and didn't have a ready answer. Mendelsund argues we see a very little way into the world presented in a text, even one celebrated for fully realising that world it depicts. A great deal is never described (necessarily), and despite supplying a lot in our own head, still a great deal is not filled in (perhaps surprisingly to those of us who leave a book with a "complete" sense of place and character). Mendelsund ends with the observation that we reproduce the world, when experiencing it, by reducing it; and, by reducing our experience, we make meaning of it. And so: These reductions are the world as we see it -- they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world. They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all). [416] // Jacket copy claims that Mendelsund finds in reading a unique process, visual in operation but entirely mental insofar as the images are found already in our minds, and not supplied to us through our eyes. In this first reading, I didn't catch the significance of this argument, if indeed he makes it. Upon reflection, though, this process sounds a lot like a standard account of imagination -- for example, the origin of unicorns or other mythical creatures. In that sense, hardly a unique process. // Mendelsund offers a creative approach to examining his question: present illustrations, thereby emphasizing the visual aspect of abstract concepts, and lean on classical literature for allusions and examples. Illustrations range from representational to typographical, photographic reproductions to drawings to abstract designs. The book scans quickly, and I suspect will reward repeat readings. If nothing else, for examining whether the jacket copy is correct in its assessment of his main argument. (  )2  elenchus | Dec 28, 2021 |
 To his credit, Mr. Mendelsund keeps his tone light while thinking deliberately about fundamental things. He moves from a remembered family trip along a river, for example, to a sense that, as he writes, “Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader.” DistinctionsNotable Lists
"A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading--how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page--a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so--and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved--or reviled--literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature--he considers himself first and foremost as a reader--into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading"--
"An illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading"-- No library descriptions found. |
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