Character appearances

       Book-cover designer Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read (see the Vintage publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) has been getting a lot of pre-publication attention, including Q & As at The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy and The New Yorker's Page Turner, and there's now an excerpt up at Slate, What Does Anna Karenina Look Like ?
       I'm fascinated by all this attention -- and a similar recent preoccupation with the question of 'relatability' in books (see, for example, Rebecca Mead on The Scourge of "Relatability").
       I've never wondered what Anna Karenina looked like, nor did I ever form any sort of reasonable picture what she did when I read the novel; ask me to describe any character in any book I've ever read and I'm unlikely to be able to give you even the vaguest idea of what s/he might look like; I might remember a missing limb or recall that a character is particularly fat/thin/tall/short, but that's pretty much the extent of it. I don't mind rich physical character-description in the books I read, but it's basically noise to me; I sort of take it in but I certainly don't process it in any meaningful way. I don't want to visualize characters -- and I think I almost never do.
       Mendelsund warns:

Incidentally, one should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one's mind. This is a very real hazard.

       It makes me laugh -- that's not how my mind, or eye, or mind's eye, work. Admittedly, I'm not a very visual person (and couldn't for the life of me describe even people I've known for most of my life; I'm also bad at recognizing people generally) and that's never been a big part of the reading-experience for me. I suspect it's also the main reason why I have such disdain for comic books (meaning also graphic novels and all that stuff), where the physical is not only spelled out (which I can ignore) but actually drawn out for me, demanding I see characters in a very particular way (not helped by the fact that the drawings tend not to be particularly realistic). Similarly, it's probably why I prefer my book-covers as plain as can be, preferably entirely without illustration -- because illustrations have nothing to do with the text, for me.
       'Relatability' similarly confounds me -- I have no interest in reading about characters I can relate to (and, honestly, I very rarely encounter one where that seems even conceivable) and it's not important for me to in any way 'identify' with a character. I don't think I could name a fictional character I identify with: they all seem entirely 'other' to me (which is one of the nice things about the worlds literature opens: I could imagine nothing more boring than books filled with characters resembling me, or in which I can see myself (and I think I'd give up reading fast if that's what I kept finding in books)).
       Probably something to examine more closely -- as, no doubt, it also influences how I see read the books I read (and review for you ...).