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Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

By Dwight Garner in New York | China Daily | Updated: 2014-08-06 07:19

Like a TED talk or a lesser Alain de Botton book, Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read is friendly and shyly philosophical, filled with news you can almost use.

It explores a simple but confounding question, one the author wrests from theorists, literary and otherwise, and presents this way: "What do we see when we read? (Other than words on a page.) What do we picture in our minds?" Mendelsund looks at these questions from 1,000 angles, zooming in and out as if surveilling them with Google Earth.

Because the author is also the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf, What We See When We Read is heavily and often whimsically illustrated. It's redolent of X-Acto knives and drawing tables and graphic design software and clunky eyeglasses.

Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

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