'I Liked the Book Better'

My experiences of reading fiction

In my last essay, ‘Reading to Escape’, I explained the important role that books played in my formative, childhood years. How reading fiction gave me a way to escape my life in the ‘cult’, allowing me to disappear into other realities, as well as discovering a lot about this one that I would have otherwise been sheltered from. These books helped me become the person I am today, gave me an intellectual and creative freedom I otherwise would have been without and kickstarted my insatiable thirst for knowledge that I have maintained throughout my adult life. 

But I have learned something about myself that has put a dampener on the act of reading fiction in recent years. Something that has not quite made me resent it, but at least stained my perception of it. It didn’t make me feel bitter, as I typically try not to wallow in my own misfortune or identify with my own grievances. I’m not a victim of it, I’m not oppressed by it or because of it, and it hasn’t held me back in any way. But I am saddened by it because it means I cannot experience the full magic of reading fiction as my fellow man. 

What I am talking about is Aphantasia, which is a neurological condition that I first discovered I exhibited in my mid thirties when my sister told me she had it. I found the subject so fascinating that I obsessively researched it for years and eventually wrote my dissertation on it. The introduction of my dissertation explains the condition comprehensively and concisely so I won’t get into too much depth here. If you wish to learn more I recommend either reading my dissertation ‘Introduction’ or checking out this summary on the Aphantasia Network’s website. 

Broadly speaking, aphantasia describes when an individual cannot create mental imagery in the ‘mind’s eye’ space within their imaginations and it affects anything from 1% to 5% of people. If you know a hundred people, there’s a high probability that a couple of them have it.

Imagine an apple. It is red. It is in a white fruit bowl. That bowl is resting on a square, wooden table. 

If you had a representation of any of that as ‘sight’ in your thoughts which simulated the perception of ‘seeing’ an apple, or bowl, or table, or any of it, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s mental imagery. 

I can’t do that; at all.

I am a ‘5’ on the scale featured in the picture above. (it’s like that for auditory imagery too. No music in my mind. No internal monologue. No sound at all). I have only ever seen black when I close my eyes and try to think of something visual.

If I have to start driving to some new location for work, I need to use GPS for months because I have retained no visual details about my route and only vague descriptive notions about it; ‘I passed a fuel station on my left at some point’ or ‘I made a right somewhere in the second half of the drive’. On a return journey from a novel place my partner will say things like ‘I remember passing that tree with the weirdly shaped branch’ or ‘I remember we passed that house because the fence is an odd colour’. It blows my mind. I don’t recall any such detail. In fact, it takes me a long time to memorise anything at all. 

I can’t picture my son’s face or anyone’s else's face for that matter. A lot of people discover this condition when grieving a deceased loved one because they seem to ‘get over it’ much quicker than the rest of the family. The prevailing theory to explain this is that it is because they are not haunted by the face of the deceased, not constantly reminded by flashes of imagery of the life that they had spent with those that they lost.

This is my experience. I seem to the onlooker to get over the death of loved ones remarkably quickly, but I don’t, I’m just not bombarded with constant reminders of what once was. It’s more a case of them being ‘out of sight: out of mind’ for me which is demonstrated by how instantly and powerfully that grief returns when I see them in photographs. I still struggle to look at pictures of my Dad who passed away 18 months ago and my grandmother who passed over two and a half years ago. When I see those pictures, the grief punches with an overwhelming cascade and it seems as if they died yesterday. ‘Out of sight: out of mind’ has utility, but it’s more like ignoring and suppressing the problem rather than actually dealing with it and getting over it.

But the main reason I am bringing this condition up is the realisation I had that normal people experience reading fiction in a different and much deeper way than I can. 

I had never understood why people would say of a film adaptation of a book they have read: ‘Yeah, I preferred the version in my head. - The characters didn’t look like I imagined them. - Film universes can never live up to the ones you build in your head’.

Rhetoric of this ilk always seemed hyperbolic and symbolic of metaphor to me and I inevitably would dismiss it because I didn’t understand it at all. (Similar to my reaction to statements like ‘Picture yourself on a desert island. - Imagine your audience in their underwear. Try counting sheep’). That is until I learned that my experience of reading fiction is atypical and that these people really had built an entire world of imagery in their minds to compare the film against when they had read the books initially.

 When I read Dune as a child, I would escape my ‘cult’ life to the far off world of Arrakis. I would follow Paul and Chani as they navigated the desert, fought the Harkonnens or evaded sandworms. I would be alongside Paul as he sat the Mother Superior’s Gom Jabbar test, or when he fled the city into the barren wasteland, or when he relented to being worshipped by the Fremen as the messiah to serve his own ends. 

But I never ‘saw’ any of it. In fact, from my point of view, I always found that fiction books were too long because they wasted so much time on visually descriptive language. I just wanted the facts, the plot. I wanted books to ‘get on with it’ and cease spending so much time telling me every pointless detail that the characters were looking at and that I had no hope of ever seeing. 

The example I always use is this: JRR Tolkien was a master of creating fictional worlds and would use visually descriptive language to great effect.

Imagine you are reading The Two Towers, and Merry and Pippin have just escaped the Uruk-Hai by sneaking into Fangorn forest. Tolkien could describe the woods in great detail so the reader knows what kind of situation our two hobbits are faced with. He could go on for paragraphs describing how much light is filtering in from the treetops, how foggy or misty it is, the shapes of the trees, the roots snaking around on the ground under foot, the debris that has fallen from the trees, the relative size of every object in relation to the hobbits, et cetera. 

After these paragraphs, all I would have ascertained from them was ‘Merry and Pippin are in a dark forest. They’re scared’. That’s it. That’s all the useful information I would have mined from those paragraphs. The rest would have felt utterly superfluous to me. 

But I now know that that stuff is an integral part of the fiction reading experience for most people and I no longer begrudge or bemoan it being there. But I notice it more now, instead of skimming past it in search of more practical plot points like I used to. Now, it makes me sad that I cannot use this visually descriptive prose to build the world up in my mind and thus inhabit the story on a deeper level. 

Because of this, I’ve found myself gravitating more and more towards non-fiction books as I have gotten older. Not that I have gone off reading fiction, it is still my first literary love and always will have a special place in my heart. 

But I find myself less able to endure the slog of reading pages and pages of descriptive language and thinking ‘I can’t use this’ or ‘I can’t enjoy this in the way the author intended’ or ‘fiction is for people who can visualise’. That sucks.

I’d give anything to be able to see what these worlds and characters would look like in my mind. Given how avidly I read fiction as a child and a young man, I would have probably never slowed in my habit with age. I bet I would have lived a far different life, one where I spend every spare moment on some distant desert planet, or as a detective solving murder cases or fighting orcs on a battlefield. 

At least I still have the movies. I can’t imagine my own version of Middle-Earth or Arrakis, but I can share those of Peter Jackson’s or Denis Villeneuve’s, and I am endlessly thankful for that.

It also means that I disagree with people who say the books were always better than the films. In my experience, movie adaptations are always better than the black nothingness that I had in my head when I was reading the books. Thank god for movies.. and thank you for reading

The Common Centrist