About

Reading With Aphantasia started from a simple question: what does it actually mean to read without a mind’s eye?

Hi, I’m Helena. I have aphantasia, the cognitive experience in which the brain doesn’t form voluntary mental images, and I’ve been a reader my whole life. When I first learned there was a name for the way I process books, I wanted to understand it properly. That curiosity became this site.

My background is in law, but my interests have always been pulled toward understanding how the mind shapes the way we move through the world. Years spent travelling and meeting people from different walks of life have deepened that curiosity considerably, as has running this site. Plus, it’s also given my travel photos somewhere to finally shine. Running things took a back seat for a while due to health reasons, but Reading with Aphantasia is back, and with a clearer direction than before. Here you’ll find writing on aphantasia research, reading as an aphant, and the broader role literature plays in human experience.

I’m also building a community book finder, a database where readers can discover books based on criteria that actually matter to aphantasic readers: how visual the language is, whether a story is character or plot driven, how description-heavy the prose is, the perspective it’s written in, and more.

As for me, I’ve noticed that strong, well-drawn characters matter most. Using fantasy as an example, emotive writing and a clever premise will draw me in, but if the characters feel thin and politics don’t play a central role in the plot, I find it difficult to read on. If there’s a lot of descriptive prose, I’ll probably skim it, unless I think analysing it might give more depth to the story. Poetry has never been my thing, but lit fic, speculative fiction, fantasy, and romance are tried-and-tested favourites. You might be the opposite! This database is as much about exploring as it is about reflecting what’s worked before, and I’m hoping it’ll help us branch out into books we might not have picked up otherwise.

Every aphantasic reader is different, and that’s really the point of the book finder. What works well for one person’s reading experience might not work for someone else’s, so rather than a single ranked list, you’ll be able to choose which filters matter most to you and browse books accordingly. Each book will also carry an overall Aphantasia Friendly Rating, a general score based on common anecdotal and research-backed findings about what tends to suit aphantasic readers well. Think of it as a useful starting point rather than the final word, since you can still filter and rank by whichever criteria matter most to you.

Readers of all kinds welcome 🙂