All
you have to do, first, is flip through What
We See
to understand that this is no ordinary book. Its title tells you what
to expect, and Mendelsund delivers. This is a visual treatise on that
which is invisible- the process of picturing in our "mind's eye"
what we're reading on the page.
Perhaps,
like me, you start to feel a little dizzy thinking about this
reading-about-thinking-about-reading thing, but it's fascinating,
right? And Mendelsund has had to think a lot about how to visualize
that which words evoke, since he's responsible for some of the most
beautiful contemporary covers.
Mendelsund
puts our eyes and brains to work, offering a different text-and-image
combination on each page. Some pages contain a single word, others
are swamped with images and text, while still others offer us lines
from a novel that are curved like ocean waves.
In this way, Mendelsund calls our attention to how we read and how we
imagine the characters and descriptions in our mind's eye.
Quoting
from famous authors, philosophers, theorists, and others, Mendelsund
encourages us to be more aware of how authors introduce and describe
characters, and how we deduce things about them based not on physical
details but on personality traits.
A
beautifully-written and -illustrated book, What
We See When We Read
is a must for book-lovers.
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