This book was a Christmas gift from my partner, who selected it for me because the graphic elements reminded her of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, which she has not read, but which I've infodumped to her about multiple times in the course of our relationship thus far. Mendelsund is using elements of ergodic literature here differently than does Danielewski in House of Leaves: as a graphic designer, Mendelsund incorporates far more images into his work than does Danielewski, who (with some exceptions) relies more heavily on font, footnotes, and other formatting elements to challenge and (mis)lead his readers.

Mendelsund is much kinder to his audience than Danielewski is to his; an appropriate difference between an exploration of the act of reading and a horror novel that deals with the deterioration of space and sanity. But what they seem to have in common is an awareness of the demand that a text places on its reader. Even texts that do not require "non-trivial" effort on the part of their readers do demand some degree of co-creative effort. The reader must imagine, envision, and in some ways create the characters, settings, and scenes that the author suggests through language. There is unavoidable effort involved in translating text to a mental image, even if the effort is undertaken automatically and without a preponderance of thought.

Mendelsund's project strikes me as well-suited to this image-heavy approach, precisely because he is demanding visualization of the reader. What better way to cut out the possibility of the reader visualizing something other than what he means than to literally show the reader what he means? How better to render subjective ideas such as the speed of a book or the "shape" of an author's prose than to make images to represent them? Mendelsund relies on language-based metaphors in his writing, but his images, too, serve as metaphors, and particularly vivid ones, at that, which run less risk of misinterpretation.

Succinctly put, I really liked What We See When We Read, and I liked Mendelsund's approach. This is an interesting book on both intellectual and visual levels, and I feel that I'll return to it in the future, both to ponder and to look. Mendelsund puts forth ideas that have applications not only to my life as a reader, but to my work as a writer of fiction and poetry, and some of these, I think, certainly merit a second reading.