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Tips for reading with facial blindness? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by thottistic@alien.top to c/books@metacritics.zone

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I have partial facial blindness which makes it hard to picture faces that aren’t super familiar and I can’t create new faces in my head. I end up picturing faces of people I know and celebrities.

It becomes frustrating when I’m reading as the faces morph constantly into my head. I constantly stop to get the faces right. Sydney Sweeney ended up as 2 characters when I read “Bunny” lol. I also get a biased view of the characters this way. It makes it really hard to enjoy reading nowadays. Any suggestions? Different strategies for picturing or reading without picturing?

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[–] PencilMan@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I used to get really hung up on visualizing everything in books like they were little movies for my brain. Then I realized that’s a real disservice to literature as an art form and also wastes a lot of time while reading, so now I just let whatever comes to mind come and let everything else live there in the text. If it’s important, the author will tell you, but rarely does what a character look like matter more than their dialogue or their actions or their personality and thoughts.

[–] Logan_Maddox@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

yeah, I usually think of books the same way as someone telling me a story

like, if my mom goes "and then I went to the bank and saw Judy there" I don't picture the bank and Judy, I just kinda acknowledge the existence of both in my head, idk how to explain it

[–] thottistic@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Thank you this is really helpful! That’s why I was frustrated- I was seeing actors not the artistic vision of the writer you know? I thought picturing them right was important to understand the book but yeah I like that idea of just focusing on the text not the image