Quote by Peter Mendelsund

“We can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding. What happens to our imaginations when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don't understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer? "When I am reading a sentence in a book that references something unknown to me (as when I have inadvertently skipped a passage), I feel as though I am reading a syntactically correct but semantically meaningless 'nonsense' sentence. The sentence feels meaningful -- it has the flavor of meaning -- and the structure of its grammar thrusts me forward through the sentence and on to the next, though in truth I understand (and picture) nothing. "How much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning? How much time do we spend reading seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referents? How much of our reading takes place in such a void -- propelled by mere syntax? "All good books are, at heart, mysteries. (Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to tum a book's pages.) A book may be a literal mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, The Brothers Karamazov) or metaphysical mystery (Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus) or a mystery of a purely architectonic kind -- a chronotopic mystery (Emma, The Odyssey). "These mysteries are narrative mysteries -- but books also defend their pictorial secrets ... "'Call me Ishmael ... ' "This statement invites more questions than it answers. We desire that Ishmael's face be, like the identity of one of Agatha Christie's murderers: "Revealed! "Writers of fiction tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories. From a novel I assemble a series of rules -- not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.”

Quote by Peter Mendelsund