Peter Mendelsund

You know how the sum is more than the whole of the parts? That is this book.

A number of the ideas in this unique volume, where text frequently takes up little space on a page and graphic representations of Mendelsund's ideas abound, were already familiar to me on a scientific level.

But the magic of this book is the way it rises above lab-based observations about how our brains and senses work, in favor of exploring the delicious and highly personal experience of reading a book. A focus that is simultaneously narrow and broad.

While reading this particular book I had frequent thoughts about sections I might want to comment on in a review, but in retrospect I realize that would just be wrong. This is not a book to be parsed out. It needs to be appreciated as a whole.

These observations, appearing near the end of the book, provide a glimpse of Mendelsund's overall theme:

"Authors are curators of experience. They filter out the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can-out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set authors provide to readers-no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed-readers' brains will continue in their prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen and sort."

How pleasant to be able to add another book to my "to re-read" shelf this early in the year. I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone with an interest in the relationship between author and reader. And words on a page.

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