What We See When We Read: A Review of Peter Mendelsund’s Exploration of Reading

There are books about reading, books about books, and then there are books that make you stop in the middle of reading them and think, Wait a minute… how exactly am I reading this?

Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read falls very firmly into that third category.

At its simplest, the book is an exploration of what happens inside our heads when we read. When a novel tells us that a character has brown hair, do we actually see brown hair? Do we picture an entire face? Do we construct a detailed version of the character in our minds? Or are we doing something much stranger and less visually concrete?

Mendelsund spends the book poking at those questions, and the result is an entertaining, occasionally strange, and surprisingly thought-provoking examination of the reading experience.

And perhaps appropriately for a book about seeing things while reading, What We See When We Read is not presented like a traditional book.

The pages are filled with illustrations, diagrams, unusual layouts, typography, blank spaces, visual jokes, and all sorts of creative formatting. The physical presentation becomes part of the argument. Mendelsund isn’t simply telling us what reading looks like inside our heads; he’s constantly trying to demonstrate it.

That makes this a particularly fun book to read.

So What Do We Actually See?

One of the central ideas Mendelsund explores is the strange relationship between words and mental images.

If you read a description of a woman walking down a street, your brain presumably does something with that information. But what?

Mendelsund spends a considerable amount of time examining this through Anna Karenina. Anna becomes something of a laboratory experiment for thinking about fictional characters. Tolstoy gives us descriptions of Anna, but every reader inevitably constructs some version of her.

And that’s where things get interesting.

My Anna Karenina isn’t necessarily your Anna Karenina.

Even if we’ve both read the same words, we’ve experienced the character differently. We may have completely different ideas about Anna’s appearance, movements, voice, personality, or even the way she occupies physical space in our imagination.

The same thing happens with practically every fictional character we encounter.

When someone says “Harry Potter,” “Sherlock Holmes,” or “Huckleberry Finn,” most readers immediately have something in their heads. But how closely does that mental image correspond to what the author actually wrote?

And more importantly, why does our brain fill in all those gaps?

Mendelsund is fascinated by that gap between the words on the page and the experience happening inside the reader’s head.

Reading About Reading

One of the things I enjoyed most about What We See When We Read is that Mendelsund doesn’t pretend to be some completely objective scientist observing the human brain from the outside.

A lot of the book is based on his own experience of reading.

That actually makes the book more interesting to me.

As I was reading his explanations of how he visualizes things, I naturally started comparing them to how I visualize things. And that’s probably one of the best things a book like this can accomplish.

It made me think about my own reading habits.

When I read a description of a person, do I actually picture the person’s face? Sometimes. Other times, apparently not. I might have a vague sense of a person without ever consciously constructing an image.

Sometimes a setting is incredibly vivid. Other times, I know where the characters are supposed to be, but I couldn’t draw the place if you gave me a pencil and an hour.

And sometimes I realize that I’ve spent twenty pages reading about a character without ever deciding what they actually look like.

Mendelsund’s book made me notice those things.

That’s one of its greatest strengths.

A Different Way of Reading

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the book is the comparison it encourages between Mendelsund’s reading experience and my own.

His internal process isn’t exactly the same as mine.

It isn’t completely different, either.

And that middle ground is fascinating.

Reading this book is almost like getting a glimpse into another person’s brain while they’re reading a novel. Obviously, Mendelsund can’t literally show us everything happening in his mind, but he gives us his interpretation of the process and then uses words and images to recreate some approximation of it.

It makes you wonder how many different versions of the same book exist.

There is the book the author wrote.

Then there is the book the publisher printed.

Then there is the book Mendelsund reads.

There is the book I read.

And there are potentially millions of other versions being created simultaneously inside millions of other readers’ heads.

We all read the same words, but we don’t necessarily experience the same story.

That’s a pretty remarkable idea.

More Than Just a Book About Pictures

Despite the title, this isn’t simply a book about visualization.

Mendelsund also digs into memory, attention, language, character construction, descriptions, perspective, and the ways readers interact with fiction.

And because the book is so visually experimental, the format itself becomes part of the discussion.

Sometimes the pages are almost asking you to slow down and examine them rather than simply turning the page and continuing. The design forces you to become conscious of the act of reading.

That can occasionally make the book feel a little strange.

But I think that’s intentional.

A conventional presentation probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well here. If Mendelsund had simply written 300 pages of straightforward prose explaining how readers visualize fictional worlds, it could have become a very dry academic exercise.

Instead, he makes the book itself an experiment.

The One Thing I Took Away

The biggest thing I took away from What We See When We Read isn’t necessarily a specific fact.

It’s an awareness of how I read.

That may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t.

Most of us read without thinking about the mechanics of reading. We pick up a book, look at the words, and allow the story to happen.

Mendelsund makes you step back from that process.

What am I actually picturing?

What am I ignoring?

How much of this fictional world am I constructing?

What does this character actually look like in my mind?

Am I hearing their voice?

Am I imagining the scenery?

Am I seeing the action like a movie?

Or am I experiencing the story in some completely different way?

And once you start asking those questions, it’s difficult to stop.

I suspect that’s also one of the reasons I enjoyed comparing Mendelsund’s reading habits to my own. His explanations gave me another perspective on something I’ve been doing my entire life without really examining it.

Maybe I’ll even experiment with it during future reading.

Perhaps I’ll pay closer attention to the images I’m creating—or not creating. Maybe I’ll try to visualize a setting more deliberately. Maybe I’ll notice when an author gives me an incredibly detailed description and my brain promptly ignores half of it.

Or maybe I’ll just continue reading exactly as I always have.

But now I’ll be thinking about it.

Final Thoughts

What We See When We Read is a fascinating little journey into one of those everyday experiences that we rarely stop to examine.

It’s entertaining, visually interesting, occasionally weird, and filled with ideas that can make you reconsider something as seemingly simple as opening a book and reading a sentence.

Mendelsund’s use of Anna Karenina as a recurring example works particularly well because it demonstrates the fundamental problem: an author can give us words, but the reader ultimately has to construct the experience.

And every reader constructs it differently.

That’s what makes reading so personal.

Ultimately, What We See When We Read isn’t just about what we see when we read.

It’s about the fact that we aren’t all seeing the same thing at all.

And that’s a pretty damn interesting thing to think about the next time you pick up a book.

Rating: 4 out of 5

A highly entertaining and unusual examination of reading, visualization, and the strange things our brains do with words. It won’t necessarily change the way you read, but it may make you much more aware of how you read—and that’s probably the best compliment I can give a book like this.

Back of the Book Blurb

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. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

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 thinks of 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.

– What We See When We Read (GoodReads)

My Initial Review First Time I Read This

Back in October 2019 I first read this, and wrote this review:

This was a very entertaining read into how the mind views and thinks and “sees” things while we read. Filled with pictures, interesting ways to read each page (the layout and format) and the general bits of information you expect from the title.

He bases a lot of the book on Anna K. from Tolstoy and how we image and view her. And its interesting just how we think about characters when we read. He bases most of the book on his own ideas and own thoughts on reading and his own way of reading, with some bits of a ‘whole community’ as well.

Its kind of fun to see how he reads and internalizes what he reads vs. how I read and how I internalize how I read and how the two are not the same. Not completely different, but not the same. I like the comparison I’m able to make between his internalizing and my own and it makes a nice contrast. Also gives me a viewpoint for future reading perhaps and see if I can do some reading on a different level or different way.

I reread this and finished it today, and the book stays the same for me.

-B. Kline

 

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