What we see when we read A phenomenology ; with illustrations

Mendelsund designs striking book covers. He is also Knopf's associate art director, a classical pianist, and a columnist, and all of these creative endeavors inform his seemingly blithe yet extraordinarily discerning interpretation of the mental processes involved in his perhaps greatest passion, reading. How do we picture a character based on often piecemeal descriptions? What does Anna Karenina look like? Or Ishmael? By pairing clever illustrations drawings, collages, reproductions, and diagrams and a confiding, first-person narrative, Mendelsund coaches us in the mental gymnastics involved in simultaneously reading and thinking about what happens when we read. He celebrates the polydimensionality of reading, which stokes our imagination as we co-create the story by drawing on our own inner image library. Mendelsund even illuminates the central wonder of literature, its evocation of feelings and its articulation of what is meaningful and significant. Offhandedly brilliant, witty, and fluent in the works of Tolstoy, Melville, Joyce, and Woolf, Mendelsund guides us through an intricate and enlivening analysis of why literature and reading are essential to our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the spinning world.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Knopf associate art director Mendelsund, praised for creating the "most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction," here takes readers on an investigation-heavy on graphics, relatively light on text-into the optical world behind words. With humility, humor, and acuity, the book proposes that, much as a piece of fiction might describe a character or world, we can't ever know for sure what the author actually envisioned-and that's just as well, because the original conception might not be nearly as appealing as our own. Mendelsund depicts reading retention as a process of visual mutation, during which we edit and keep only what holds significance for us, rather than preserving realistic and fixed pictures. Thus, Flaubert changes Madame Bovary's eye color throughout the novel, and Tolstoy does the same to Karenin's ear size-not at random, but in proportion to Anna's dissatisfaction with him. Using such graphic aids as charts, photographs, and paintings, Mendelsund demonstrates why authors regularly leave out details and contradict themselves. Though his central point-that it's fortunate that we cannot see the novel's images like we do a film's-may seem simple in retrospect, readers will exponentially expand upon their understanding of linguistics and imagination through this well-crafted guide. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"A proposition is a picture of reality. a proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it." --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus "I don't think I shall ever forget my first sight of Hercule Poirot. of course, i got used to him later on, but to begin with it was a shock... i don't know what i'd imagined ... of course, i knew he was a foreigner, but i hadn't expect- ed him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what i mean. When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! he was like something on the stage or at the pictures." --Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia "Writing ... is but a different name for conversation. as no one, who knows what he is about in good compa- ny, would venture to talk all; so no author, who under- stands the just boundaries of decorum and good breed- ing, would presume to think all: the truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself." --Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman "Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do, deceiving elf." --John Keats, Ode to a Nightengale PICTURING "PICTURING" i could begin with Lily Briscoe. Lily Briscoe--"With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered up face..."--is a principle character in Vir- ginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse . Lily is a painter. She is painting a picture throughout the course of the narrative--a painting of mrs. Ramsey sitting by the window reading to her son James. lily has set up her easel outside on the lawns and she paints while various players flit and charge about the property. She is nervous about being interrupted, about some- one breaking her concentration whilst engaged in this delicate act. the idea that someone would interrogate her about the painting is intolerable. But kind, acceptable mr. Bankes wanders up, exam- ines her work, and asks "What did she mean to indi- cate by the triangular purple shape, 'just there'?" it is meant to be mrs. Ramsey, reading to her son, though "no one could tell it for a human shape." Mother and child then--objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty--might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow... Mother and child: reduced. We never see this picture (the picture Lily paints in Virginia Woolf's novel.) We are only told about it. Lily is painting the scene that we, as readers, are being asked to imagine. (We are asked to imagine both: the scene and its painted likeness.) *** This might be a good place to begin: with the picture that lily paints; with its shapes, smudges, and shadows. the painting is lily's depiction of the tableau in front of her--her reading of it. i cannot see the scene that Lily is attempting to capture. i cannot see Lily herself. The scene and its occupants are blurred. Strangely, the painting seems more...vivid. *** FICTIONS What do we see when we read? (Other than words on a page.) What do we picture in our minds? There is a story called "reading." We all know this story. It is a story of pictures, and of picturing The story of reading is a remembered story. When we read, we are immersed. And the more we are immersed--the more we are preoccupied--the less we are able, in the moment, to bring our analytic minds to bear upon the experience we are absorbed in. Thus, when we discuss the feeling of reading, we are really talking about the memory of having read.* And this memory of reading is a false memory. *William James describes the impossible attempt to introspectively examine our own consciousness as "trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks." Excerpted from What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.