Today, I’m going to talk about a book I read a long time ago which is What we see when we read, released in 2014. It was written by Peter Mendelsund, an American art director and classical pianist.
This book is neither a novel nor an art book. Indeed, it includes big print text and illustration (made by the author), so it makes the book easy to read. Despite its 440 pages, it takes about 3 hours to read it.
You may wonder, what does it deal with? Actually, the title fully describes the topic. It asks questions about the way we read. What is the role of our imagination? Of our memory ?  Why don’t we see the same thing than our neighbor ? What happens in our head when we read ?
Through all these questions, the author never gives an answer. He just wants us to find the answer. It makes us think about the power of words and literature. He explains all of this on whites and blacks pages. In other words, he tells us how to read to develop increasingly our imagination.
What I find interesting about that, is the fact that he provides examples which are meaningful to all such as Tolstoï, Flaubert, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust… but you don’t have to read these books to understand what he is talking about. I advise you to read this book if like me you don’t have time anymore to read anything else than Sophocle and Gide!