Peter Dixon & Marisa Bortolussi. The Analogical Reader: A cognitive approach to literary perspective taking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 255 pp. US$ 125.00. ISBN 978-1-009-34418-0 Hardback

Peter Dixon and Marisa Bortolussi’s The analogical reader is a thoughtful scholarly book on how we can read the minds of other people in our interactions and understand the minds of literary characters in works of fiction as we identify with them, have empathy with them, and are transported into stories that we read. The book includes reflections on specific works of fiction from the Nineteenth Century to the present. Among other topics discussed are narration, authors’ portrayals of characters, readers’ resonance with books, the making of inferences, the issue of projection, and challenges to the theory presented here.