I don't read a lot of full-length books in recent years generally, but as a child I read tons of fiction... I was about to say "...so I don't think I have any trouble," but actually, come to think of it, most of the books I liked as a child were things like Redwall or Warriors, where all the characters were distinct species of animals and things like that.
If the characters are all humans, I think it's difficult to remember who's who because they're just random collections of syllables (names) tied to a set of facts — "Kirk, a human man, is a captain", etc. I think, though, that this may be more of an aphantasia/faceblindness thing (I have no "theater of the mind" and can't picture characters to distinguish them) than an autobiographical memory thing.
On the subject of memory, I will say, though, that perhaps I lack an interest in fiction books nowadays because no fond memories of reading them stick with me; even though I can recount the plot in excruciating detail, the most I might be able to say after the fact is "I liked/disliked that book" in a general sense, and that's just a memorized fact about my immediate feeling at the time. With a nonfiction book on the other hand I acquire information that can be useful to me afterwards.
Hey! I have aphantasia and read fiction books often. I have some trouble in reading stretches of text that describe details about an environment or character and I often skip to dialog. My reasoning is that there's little need for these details if I can't visualize them.
Ha! This came up on Saturday. I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies…
What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
Compare this to technical books though. I’ve got a large collection and I’ve read through most, and can almost tell you what chapter a subject is in within every book, but tell me to “close your eyes and imagine…” I truely thought “close your eyes and imagine” as a figure of speech!
> I have Aphantasia and I have never read a novel in my life. Even high school texts I read the summaries or watched the movies…
> What’s the point of read a novel when you can’t picture a scene or characters in your head!
That's interesting! I don't have aphantasia but I think I meet the criteria for hypophantasia, and I find it's a major obstacle to enjoying some, but by no means all, novels. Scenes that are heavy on literal visual description are a tedious slog, but plenty of novels focus more on characters, ideas, and/or plot. And I don't find that my lacking a sense of what the characters look like, or failing to see the action in more than a vague and patchy way, is a big problem in those cases.
(I can even get something out of visual description if it's very impressionistic -- the book that comes to mind is A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr -- but of course that could be entirely down to the gap between aphantasia and hypophantasia.)
I wonder if you could enjoy a very dialogue-heavy novel, or a literary novel that focuses mainly on the inner lives of the characters. If you can remember, which ones did you start and give up on, before you gave up on novels completely?
Every time I've picked up a novel to "try again", it's just blank, and I think a heavy dialog book would just make my head explode.
It's funny though, listening to Snow Crash last year was the first fiction audio book I've ever listened to, and that was interesting. Especially because I only listened while running, while listening it was like I was retrieving memories - so still not "imagining with my mind's eye" but still picturing but with audio.
Well, I am very word focused and experience imagery by describing it to myself, so for me a novel is almost like replacing my internal monologue - I would say it's potentially more immersive for me to read than for someone without aphantasia.
In fact if anything I might blame reading a lot at a young age for my aphantasia.
Not at all! I'm actually an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction! I actually host 3 weekly book clubs :)
I've had some pretty extensive conversations with a buddy in one of the book clubs about this specific subject when we were talking about the ways we interpret a particular series (Malazan: Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson).
When he reads, he sees things as if they were a movie in his head. He has hyper clear visualization of all of the characters, and visual descriptors are very important to his reading because they help clarify the mental imagery that he sees.
For me, I barely remember visual descriptors at all. I have to relate the way certain characters act in a series based on their personalities and relationships to others and visual descriptions of story elements (from character to setting design) don't really matter much to me aside from importance to the narrative or theme.
As a result, I tend to focus a lot more on the meta-narrative, themes, and motifs in a story. That's not to say that he doesn't (we often discuss those things), but we have drastically different experiences when reading. It really enhances the book club, because our perspectives and the things that resonate with us are so different!
For example, combat scenes can be incredibly visceral for him, whereas for me it's more or less a means to an end when it comes to narrative impact. I think in terms of the implications of the results, but he enjoys the fights themselves. I also tend to focus a lot more on the philosophical musings in the text, whereas he finds that dialogue heavy scenes can be a bit boring or less impactful.
Hope that provides some clarity on what reading for someone with aphantasia can be like! Happy to answer any further questions if you have any!
Related, this was recently published by the author (who has aphantasia) — a post describing a self-made Kobo enhancement that uses text-to-image generation to assist imagery-rich fiction. Here's the HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39842710
