Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

What We See When We ReadBy: Peter Mendelsund Publisher: Vintage Books Year published: 2014 Price: $16.95 Pages: 419

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.

I'd like to be able to report that cracking and unpacking this exquisite package is a thoroughgoing joy. But What We See When We Read is so self-consciously charming that the senses frequently rebel.

Mendelsund too often speaks to us as if he is feeding nuts to fragile woodland creatures. We are told many things we already know. It's a tidy little biosphere, one that runs on tweeness of its own excreting.

The book poked me awake on Page 203, however, and began to keep me awake. Page 203 is where Mendelsund prints a photograph of the actress Keira Knightley in the title role of the 2012 film Anna Karenina and declares: "This - the picture to the left - is a form of robbery."