G.K. Chesterton

You can judge a book by its cover

I love books.  They are an important part of my life.  And I hate bad books … may be a little more passionately than the average person perhaps. And I reckon I’ve stumbled on to a great way of easily avoiding really crap books.

Around 5-10 years ago I started to notice that certain books attracted me time and time again.  I found myself being drawn to these books like iron filings to a magnet or my son to mischief, or whatever other metaphor you might choose to use.  I’ve tried to break the habit to avoid the risk of reading some clone of a book I had read previously, but I just can’t help myself; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, genre, author, book reviews or recommendations.

I have come to realise that a sure fire way of choosing a great book is to choose it purely by the cover (or the title).

I know it’s superficial, but I am absolutely convinced I’m right.  Perhaps I am superficial but all you have to do is go into one of the big chain book stores (if there is still one near you) or online to see the range of covers available and you will start to get the idea – Jackie Collins vs. Haruki Murakami; Stephen King vs. Peter Carey; or Mills & Boon vs. Penguin Classics.

Obviously a lot of marketing effort goes into making sure books attract people to buy them … but it has to be more than that.  The conclusion I have come to is that the cover of the book is a reflection of how much the publisher(s) has fallen in love with the story – they have gone out of their way to make sure the design is as high quality as the story; the story deserves a cover where just as much effort has gone into getting it right as went into getting the story right.  They care enough to pay a real designer or artist, rather than a marketer, to use the story as inspiration for the creation of a unique work of art; a visualisation of the story in images rather than words.

The title of a book is just as good a guide, and a great title often goes hand-in-hand with a a great cover, which I hypothesise goes hand in hand with a great book.  How could you not buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Torday), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom), The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka), The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Magnus Mills), Legend of a Suicide (Vann), From the Mouth of the Whale (Sjón), A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakmi).  A real mix of genres, themes and eras, but all spine-tingling great books.

In fact the inspiration for the name of this blog is my favourite book title of all time, But Soft: We Are Observed by Hilaire Belloc. In five simple words it conveys so many layers of meaning, even if, by today’s standards, the phrasing is a little anachronistic (it was written in 1928). It’s almost atmospheric; I can’t say it without whispering it: imagining myself in a dark room of a quiet house, my pulse starting to race in the realisation I may have been discovered. And when was the last time you saw punctuation in the title of a book? The only other one I have on my bookshelf is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.  The use of the colon shows just how powerful grammatical devices can be.  It forces the reader to think about the title, to look ahead, wondering why we have to be careful or quiet, who “we” is and who has observed us. It lays down a challenge to a prospective reader – I dare you to not pick me up and start reading. I love it.

So have a think about how you buy books and next time you’re in a book shop, or more likely, scanning Book Depository or Amazon, don’t fight your intuition, be superficial and let the cover or the title choose you.

Books don’t grow old

I have been thinking about why I like old books recently; those eternal masterpieces of language and ideas from decades or centuries past.

It could be that I am a snob and a book wanker, but I do remember reading ‘Norwegian Wood’ by Haruki Murakami in 2007 when I came across a great passage about why one of the characters only reads books by authors who have been dead for 30 years:

“That’s the only book I trust”, he said. “It’s not that I don’t believein contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.” … “If you only read books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.”

Now that I have some inspiration, forgive me while I evangelise for a while…

Why do so few people bother to read old books? We seem to have a fascination with ‘newness’.  For fear of being left behind, we aspire to own new cars, constantly update our wardrobe, trade up to the latest flat panel TV, upgrade our iDevice, even find a new spouse.

Sometimes it is for very good reasons like the fact the ‘things’ we are replacing no longer perform the way they once did or simply wear out. Other times it is simply to do with envy, greed or a superficial desire to conform or consume.If you look around you, most of the ‘stuff’ we buy is actually designed to be replaced.

But books never do. They are timeless. They never become superseded. There is never a latest and greatest version promising better viewing angles, smoother skin, increased prowess. Sure, the context can become a little outdated, and the language changes, but even modern books can do that. But they never stop being just as good as they were … assuming they were good in the first place obviously (there are a lot of crappy books out there).

Effectively books are the only thing we buy for our minds, our bodies and our homes that don’t wear out and never need updating.

I know it can be pretentious to rabbit on about ‘classics’, but this a poor reason to ignore them. In fact, we ignore them at our peril. Why run the risk of missing out on great stories and important lessons that have the potential to make a real impact on your life, or just simply provide entertainment?

I couldn’t imagine missing out on books like: ‘Utopia’ by Thomas More, which gave me an insight into the mind of a polymath; ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which was a fascinating tragedy about mediocrity; everything by G.K. Chesterton who has given me both entertainment (‘The Man Who Was Thursday’, ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’ and ‘The Flying Inn’) and beliefs I hold dear articulated in a way I would never be capable of (‘What’s Wrong with the World’ and his collected essays); and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole which is a masterpiece of two distinct stories – one an absurdly comic work by a tragic genius, the other about a loyal mother dealing with her grief for a lost son.

I think we ignore these old books first because we have created a world that distrusts anything older than yesterday; second because we make reading old books so painful at school (I will never read Dickens after been forced to read that monster of a book, Great Expectations); and third because so few bookshops actually sell, or more importantly, promote them.

I don’t know the answers to these problems, but perhaps we start in the home. Track down the odd old book and read it and surround yourself in your home with them. Show them to your spouse, your friends, and most importantly to your children – so they can develop a respect and love for the ideas of the past and pass these lessons on to others.

A great, if a little pessimistic, old saying applies really well here – ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Perhaps we should spend less time aspiring in vain for newness and the latest ‘stuff’ or to fix old problems with new solutions, and instead look to literary masterpieces of the past for inspiration, motivation, entertainment, great ideas and paths to fulfilment.