What I’ve been reading this week.

I haven’t forgotten about this already, I swear. I was feeling under the weather this weekend, and didn’t have the energy to post. We’re back to our regularly unscheduled program now, or should be anyway.

Just to touch on briefly what I’ve been reading, here’s a weekly(ish) roundup! I’ll try and do this weekly, but we’ll see how things go. I have post ideas lined up, I just have to actually, y’know, do the thing about writing them.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (pg. 343/1276)

I’m making good time through this book, despite it being so long and taking some time off the last few days to rest. It’s a surprisingly easy read for it being both a classic book and so long, but I suppose if it were boring and dense I wouldn’t be bothering with it. The plot lagged a little in the beginning while the author set the stage, but now that Dantes is well on his path of benevolence and revenge it’s moving fairly quickly. I’m super interested to see how he deals with the people who wronged him, as up until now he’s just been visiting kindness on his friends and benefactors. I also am very unfamiliar with the plot past this point, so I’m excited to fill in this huge book-shaped hole in my classics knowledge.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (pg. 146/607)

On the other side of the coin, I’m slowly making my way through this book. It’s a good book, but deep, and requires my two brain cells to do more than they’re accustomed to in order to really get meaning out of what I’m reading. Because I was sick I put this one on the back burner a little bit, but I’m eager to put some serious time into it. I’ll be up front and say that it isn’t grabbing me as much as other Murakami books have, but someone on my Instagram post (@eric.in.words) pointed out that it’s a book that you don’t realize you like it so much until you’re done with it. I pondered that for a minute and realized that that’s my feelings for a lot of his works. They aren’t in-the-moment grabbers, but books you think a lot about when you’re done. It was encouraging to hear, and I’m planning on enjoying the ride and assessing my feelings about it when I’m done.

And that’s really all I made progress on this week. I also have an audiobook on hold, but because I haven’t really gone anywhere (thanks COVID-19!) I haven’t really had an opportunity to finish it off.

Thanks to my cat Cleo for being such a patient book prop.

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I’m here to ruin the magic of book covers.

The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” doesn’t really mean a whole lot in the literary world. Books live and die by how eye-catching and unique their covers are, how well they stick out to consumers browsing bookshelves. Imagine the last time you were in a bookstore, library, or otherwise browsing books. Was it a particular color, a particular style, a particular layout that made you pull that copy off the shelf? I’d like to say that I’m immune to all the gimmicks publishers use to get someone to buy their books, but I’m just as guilty as the next person of being suckered into pulling a book off a shelf solely based on the cover.

I never really stopped to consider what goes into the making of a book cover, and maybe assumed (naively?) that it was like any other art form — each was its own unique snowflake in a blizzard called a bookstore. But then my friends started reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (which I also read back in 2017) and one of them pointed out that the cover looked familiar to another book they knew of. Suddenly, the magic of book covers was ruined for me. And now I’m here to ruin it for anyone else who was like me, with literary blinders on.

What I learned from probing a bit deeper into this strange new factoid I had stumbled on is that, much like anything else in the modern world, book covers rely heavily on templates and stock photography. The same small cohort of photographers crop up time and time again in the credits of book cover images, and their photographs are added to stock image packages that many designers pull from. These stock images are then applied again and again, because if it isn’t broke, why fix it?

Like most things in life now, the essence of a book cover has been distilled and watered down by marketing professionals everywhere to include only the basic items necessary to appeal to the most adults possible (curiously, children’s and YA books seem immune to this formulaic approach). Book covers go through trends, where some years the fad is handscript titles with simple handmade illustrations (think John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars), other years the single-object-on-white-background is appealing (Malcom Gladwell says hi). When marketers and book designers tap into these trends, they tend to run with them, and run them into the ground. What we’re left with in today’s world of same-ism are a lot of covers that start to become indistinguishable from each other.

My dad had a wall of books when I was growing up, mostly pulp sci-fi from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I remember looking through a lot of those book covers and wondering at how different they all were from each other. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this trend of book cover cloning before, but now that it’s been pointed out to me, I can’t unsee it. Certainly there’s exceptions to the rule, but the bestsellers all have similar covers. Probably for a reason.

Interesting related links:

Entertainment Weekly: Books with strangely similar covers

Eye on Design: Why do so many book covers look the same? Blame Getty Images

The Atlantic: Book cover clones: Why do so many recent novels look alike?

The New Yorker: The decline and fall of the book cover

What I’ve been reading this week.

I’m still in the process of cementing a schedule for this blog, but one of the things I do want to consistently include is a weekly recap of what I’ve been reading. I think this will let me better cement my thoughts about my books, and you guys are a captive audience anyway and are subject to my whims and fancy. I’m thinking Saturday is a good day for this, mostly because today is Saturday and it seemed like a good idea today. This is how most of my ideas work, actually. I’ll try and keep it spoiler free as best I can.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (pg. 56/607)

Not the easiest author to read, but still consistently one of my favorites. Haruki Murakami’s style is very surreal, and can be a lot to unpack sometimes. Even though The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of his better known works (and highly rated), it’s taken me several years to finally sit down and read it. I’m not very far in, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I’ve never been good at deep diving into what an author really means and tracking down each obscure reference, so a lot of my experience with Murakami is at face value. Nevertheless, his descriptions and writing style of even the most mundane actions never fail to pull me in and let me live life alongside the main character. It’s not the most action-oriented book ever (so far?), but I’m still enjoying it.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (pg. 52/1276(!!!))

The longest book I’ve ever sat down to read, by quite a few hundred pages (I think the longest up ’til now was Brent Weeks’ The Burning White at 992). It’s always been one of those books I felt like I should read but never had the time to. Luckily for me, my friends at the Book Lover’s Club Discord server started a buddy read of this doorstop of a book this month, with the intent of us all finishing it by the end of June. I remain cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to meet this deadline.

So far not a lot has been going on in the book, but I’m only 52 pages in (that’s 4% for anyone keeping track at home). I’ve just been introduced to a lot of the main players, the plot has been set up by the antagonists, and partially executed. I look forward to seeing where “The Count” comes in, what/where “Monte Cristo” is (other than a sandwich), and how our protagonist handles things. I know very little specifics about the plot, so I’m going in mostly blind.

Refuse to Choose! – Barbara Sher (83%)

I made a blog post about this book specifically earlier this week so I’ll keep this brief-ish. I’ve read a lot since even the post I made, and have come away with a lot of different noteworthy realizations and practices that will maybe help going forward. I don’t really know what the end goal of this is, since I have a career goal I’m excited about and a tolerant husband who lets me indulge most of my whims, but having some additional organizational tools in my arsenal might help going forward.

In addition to the realization that I’m a “scanner”, the book also drilled down and explored the different types of “scanners” and how they tick. I’m a bit of a Sybil (major clutter problem, pulled in a million different project directions at once and act on none of them, afraid I’ll never complete anything), a Jack-of-all-Trades (good at a lot of things I try but never master any, wish I had a passion in just one thing), and a Wanderer (interested in unrelated activities/knowledge for no reason, intrigued by things other people find boring, lack direction). From these chapters, I also started creating a OneNote board outlining all the different projects I’d like to work on, and some information about each of them. I also split apart “work” projects from “play” projects because I felt like the distinction was necessary. One of the quotes the author related from someone she interviewed really hit home especially hard:

“I sat in the middle of all the things I’d started and dropped, and they seemed like a worthless waste of time.”

Barbara Sher, “Refuse to Choose!” pg. 37

This is a deep fear of mine. I’ve never really wanted fame, fortune, or a ton of recognition for anything I do, but I do desperately want to matter. I want to leave behind something that someone else finds value in, even if it’s just a small project at work (or a vanity blog on the internet, apparently). I have started so many projects that I’ve just dropped for no reason other than losing interest, forgetting about it, or getting discouraged. This book really outlined a lot of my fears in a clear way, and it’s giving me tools to address some of them. I can’t really ask for anything more than that from a book.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to this week! Have you been reading anything? Let me know in the comments!

Famous people read books too. Or pose in front of them, at least.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The New York Times did an article last week concerning celebrity shelfies. Evidently during certain speaking engagements, celebrities have been using books as backdrops and sharp-eyed viewers have been picking apart their contents. Some results are surprising, some are not.

Most of the results are rather bland (maybe Cate Blanchett really likes reading the OED?), but I did add a few books to my to-read shelf on Goodreads. Carla Hayden in particular had an interesting book spotted on her shelf called “Heart of Ngoni” by Harold Courlander & Ousmane Sako that I may try and squeeze in soon. I haven’t read anything from Africa yet.

Prince Charles’ fascination with horses simultaneously surprises me and does not. He seems like a horse guy.

The New York Times: What Do Famous People’s Bookshelves Reveal?