(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Peter Mendelsund is a novelist, painter, and graphic designer.
Reading is “a story of pictures, and of picturing” (Mendelsund 2014, 8). We first learn to read with picture books, then chapter books with pictures, then “graduate to books made up entirely of words”. Do “we also need, over time, to learn how to picture narratives unassisted”? (pp. 190–1) How can we better imagine and visualise what we read?
One way is to sketch the characters and locations as we’re reading about them “in an attempt to clarify, stabilize, and make fast” the impressions you’re building up (p. 175). This encourages you to pay attention to relevant textual cues and intentionally visualise, but also to savour the phenomenological aspects of the author’s world. Similarly, the physical space, the geography of the book’s settings and locations can be mapped as you read. This isn’t an artistic rendering, but more like an architectural plan on a napkin: “a set of guidelines” for the text’s world. Our “mental maps”, say, of a house described in a novel “govern the actions of its occupants” (p. 232). Mendelsund also recommends annotating non-fiction books by underlining the big ideas so that they can be seen at a glance when you re-read them. (Mendelsund and King 2014)
We can listen to how novels tell us to read them. Mendelsund explains (Mendelsund 2014, 125):
From a novel I assemble a series of rules—not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.
Put another way, “[c]haracter traits are also instructions for use” (p. 127). In genre fiction, we’re familiar with these rules because they’re typically the rules of the genre, but perhaps part of the challenge of more literary fiction is noticing and applying these hints?
The content of our imagination is often “untethered from the author’s text” (p. 294). We interpret but also let our minds wander in a process that “is loosely associative” but “not random” (ibid.). All of the physical forms the characters of Anna Karenina or Ishmael have taken in readers’ minds differ, but are related (p. 258). The text incites us to imagine in certain ways, but leaves a lot of details unsaid. In general, characters are “physically vague”: their “features help to delineate their boundaries”, but don’t aid our visualisation (p. 30). It is this absence of elucidation, characters as ciphers, that excites our imaginations: narratives are enriched by omission because we fill in the gaps (pp. 30–1). We should attend, therefore, to the text’s prompts while making the character ours. We don’t, and can never, see what “the author pictured when writing a particular book”, so should exhibit our agency as co-creator of the work (pp. 207, 197). For instance, Mendelsund suggests that we “colonize books with our familiars and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with” (p. 211). He reads about a dock, for example, and substitutes his memory of a dock from childhood: this makes the author’s image far more vivid, but also utterly personal for Mendelsund (p. 300). This is the only way the activity of reading can work: novels are “meant to be transposed; imaginatively translated. Associatively translated.” (p. 207).
Does the appearance of specific characters matter, though? Throughout Madame Bovary, Emma’s eye colour changes, but this doesn’t seem to be significant (p. 44). However, the ears of Anna Karenina’s husband “grow in proportion to his wife’s disaffection with him”, telling us nothing of the husband’s appearance, but much about Anna’s feelings towards him (p. 36). The features of a character can “contribute to their meaning” (p. 34).
Our images of characters are not formed immediately: “[a]ll books open in doubt and dislocation” (p. 60). As we read we are “ever reviewing and reconsidering our mental portraits of characters…: amending them, backtracking to check on them, updating them when new information arises” (p. 41). In general, “much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning”: we read “seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referents” (p. 121). Yet when we remember a book, we don’t remember making these little adjustments; we remember it “as if we had watched the movie” (p. 53). What does it mean that “our memory of reading is a false memory” (p. 9)?
We use metaphors of films and cameras to describe reading perhaps because we’re terrified that “we can’t recapitulate the world in perfect facsimile”, but thinking about books in this way contradicts our actual experience (p. 345). It is why some readers despair at their memory or capacity for concentration when they’re unable to recall aspects of a novel—if our memories are video recorders, our failures of recollection prove that our minds are deficient. Instead, we should realise that the practice of reading is like “consciousness itself: imperfect, partial; hazy; co-creative” (p. 403). As our visions of books become more authentic they become less intimate (p. 206). Verisimilitude in this context is a chimera because we read as we see the world: by picturing and “making reductions”, and therefore creating meaning (p. 415). As co-creators of narratives, we should prefer our sketches to verisimilitude “because the sketches, at least, are ours” (p. 198). Realising how we apprehend the world helps us form a more realistic notion of remembering what we read that avoids striving for photographic, cinematographic memories, assuming that our memories are accurate, or ceeding too much importance to the text.
Perhaps it’s better to think about reading a book in terms of plays rather than films? For example, we see Hamlet as more of a role than a character, and Denmark as a set. Hamlet is clearly meant to be inhabited—performed—and the set can be where the director imagines it to be. We perform the books read while attending the performance (p. 214). How does our reading change if we see characters as roles and locations and sets, consider all the ways a play can differ from its text, and conceive that we’re both co-creating the production and watching it? What would this book look like on stage?
Or should we see books as roads along which readers travel? Some we drive, some we walk. How does the speed at which we travel affect our journey, our ability to observe our surroundings, and our imagining of what we read (p. 96)? Certain books seem made for brisk reading “details are scant, and what details there are appear drab—but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating” (ibid.). In others, the trajectory of the narrative matters far less than “the vistas” they might afford (ibid.). Mendulsund prefers to read through a book quickly but be forced to “pull over” on occasion and marvel (ibid.). The best books are “meant to be reread”: “The first time through, I can tear along, as fast as possible, and then later, I’ll enjoy a leisurely stroll—so that I can see what I’ve missed” (ibid.).
We also consider slowing down when the novel reaches “a confusing juncture”, where we wonder if we’ve been paying insufficient attention (p. 119). We’re faced with a dilemma: “to go backwards and revisit earlier passages, or to press on” (ibid.). Should we backtrack and “turn back the pages in an attempt to find the components of the story we’ve been missing” or “just continue reading, bracketing our ignorance and suspending resolution” (pp. 119–120)? Does the drama take precedence over the details? Mendelsund is interested in what we imagine “when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don’t understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer” (p. 121). When modulating our reading speed and seeking re-orientation, we should at least be aware that “[w]e can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding” (ibid.).
We’re taught to see past words, “to look at what the words and letterforms point toward” (p. 322). Like arrows, words both are something and point toward something. Likewise, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and whole works are arrows (pp. 330–2). Where are they pointing? We’re habituated to look only in the direction the arrow indicates, but what if we looked at the arrow itself, or in a more imaginative direction?
We can also choose to look past the pictorial—opt out of effortful visualisation–in preference to the conceptual content (p. 205):
If we don’t have pictures in our minds when we read, then it is the interaction of ideas—the intermingling of abstract relationships—that catalyzes feeling in us readers. This sounds like a fairly unenjoyable experience, but, in truth, this is also what happens when we listen to music. This relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of elements… (p. 245)
Whether he finds beauty in the visual, imaginary world that he co-creates with the text, or experiences this conceptual interplay, what Mendelsund often learns from books is compassion and to be kinder. Reading “compels one to enter other minds and hearts, which should in turn lead to some kind of empathetic maturation in the reader” (Mendelsund and Kroeter 2014). Reading is “a method for learning about the lives of others, for inhabiting these lives” (ibid.).
But it can be hard to make time for these reading experiences. Mendelsund often reads before bed and in “stolen moments” throughout the day (Mendelsund and King 2014). For reading to just happen like this, ebooks are helpful. Despite being very visually orientated, and a cover designer, he reads “sixty to seventy percent” of his books on electronic devices (ibid.). With print books, your memory of reading is predicated on events that “take place geographically on the page” and the “haptic aspect of how deep you are into the reading experience as you hold the book—that it gets thicker in your left hand as it gets thinner in your right hand” (ibid.). This is absent in ebooks, but they do allow you to “look things up easily” and are “miraculous” when it comes to reading on public transport (ibid.). There isn’t “even a trade off” between these mediums; they’re “totally different experiences” (ibid.). The medium changes the way Mendelsund views the book as an artifact, but not the way he imagines: “Text, if it’s doing its job, is transparent” (ibid.).