Book Reviews
[Mendelsund] has a wide range of reference…and he quotes with care…Mr. Mendelsund is an adept memoirist…He can be a canny close reader…The best critics and philosophers slide, necessarily, to and fro on the scale from butterfly to pedant. To his credit, Mr. Mendelsund keeps his tone light while thinking deliberately about fundamental things.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
A playful, illustrated treatise on how words give rise to mental images.... Mendelsund argues that reading is an act of co-creation, and that our impressions of characters and places owe as much to our own memory and experience as to the descriptive powers of authors.... [What We See When We Read] explore[s] the peculiar challenges of transforming words into images, and blend[s] illustrations with philosophy, literary criticism and design theory.
Alexandra Alter - New York Times Book Review
Mendelsund, throughout this thought-provoking book, helps the lay reader contemplate text in ways you hadn’t thought about previously.
Los Angeles Times
A conversation piece, created to entice repeated thumb-throughs.... [The author is] a highly regarded book-jacket designer.... Reading is often considered (especially by those who don’t love to do it) a passive activity. But Cambridge native Mendelsund...makes a nice case that it is, in fact, a kind of active collaboration.... What We See When We Read, itself a work of conceptual design, unfolds the author’s ideas about what makes reading a creative, visual act all its own on pages—some packed with text, others just a line or two—that incorporate sketches, clip art, images of classic book covers and more.
Boston Globe
The liveliest, most entertaining and best illustrated work of phenomenology you'll pick up this year. An acclaimed book-jacket designer and art director, Mendelsund investigates, through words and pictures, what we see when we read text and where those images come from. His breakdown of the reading and visualizing processes yields many insights.... Playfully, he offers us a police composite sketch of Anna, based on the description in Tolstoy's novel.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Mendelsund has creatively combined nuggets of philosophy, the notion of the "reader," and art to expand playful, abstract ideas on what readers process to produce the multitude of feelings and meanings within a reading experience.... This work was written for those who enjoy fully the creative experience of reading, and who read about reading. —Jesse A. Lambertson, Metamedia Management, LLC, Washington, DC
Library Journal
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.
Booklist
(Starred review.) In this brilliant amalgam of philosophy, psychology, literary theory and visual art...Mendelsund inquires about the complex process of reading.... In 19 brief, zesty chapters, the author considers such topics as the relationship of reading to time, skill, visual acuity, fantasy, synesthesia and belief.... Mendelsund amply attains his goal to produce a quirky, fresh and altogether delightful meditation on the miraculous act of reading.
Kirkus Reviews