In college, when other girls talked about their deep dark fantasies – “I want to be trapped in an elevator with a mysterious stranger” or “I want to be caught alone behind the grandstand with a mysterious stranger,” I would always nod silently, pretending to empathize when really all I was thinking was, “What the hell?” Of course, that was what they were thinking after two bottles of Boone’s Farm and a tendency toward confession inevitably led me to reveal my own deep dark fantasy: “I want to be trapped…in the classical history section of Barnes and Noble. With a highlighter.”
“And a mysterious man?” they’d ask hopefully.
“Is he carrying a good reading lamp?”
And then somehow I’d never get invited back. But whatever. This is just my long way of saying, I’m literature’s bitch. And I blame it all on the book cover designers. The ugly truth is that I’m drawn to the shallow end of the book-buying pool. I want my books, like my men, to be quiet and to not smell like mold and not give me papercuts. But mostly, I just want them to be pretty.
The other day, I had Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, in my hands at Barnes and Noble. I read the first ten pages. I loved it. I was ready to lay out my $14 but as I walked toward the front of the store, I saw that the same book was on sale for $3 less but in a different edition. While the edition in my hand had a beautiful, delicate cover, the sale version had the movie poster, all bombastic and overwrought, with a big picture of Kal Penn smack dab in the middle. Despite the presence of Kal, who is dreamy, the cover was hideous and the paper quality seemed poor. I stood there debating – do I save $3 and try to live with an ugly cover or do I behave like an incredible idiot and pay $3 more just to have the pretty? The inner turmoil was too much. I put both copies down and bought a beautiful new novel whose title I can’t remember because once I got it home, I realized it wasn’t any good. Attractive but dumb – just like every guy I dated in tenth grade.
My home library is filled with books like that – gorgeous covers that conceal books in which I have very little interest. At times, though, I must admit that buying those books actually has opened new doors for me, expanding vistas I otherwise might never have explored. I know an awful lot about the aftermath of World War I because of the elegant imagery on the cover of Margaret MacMillan’s book, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. I know about Ernest Shackleton and I know about the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the odd but enduring friendship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt – all because I couldn’t say no to a book’s pretty face.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that maybe I shouldn’t always dismiss the value of my shallow side. For every accidentally-read chick-lit tome, there’s an Everything Is Illuminated or a complete collection of Dorothy Parker stories to be discovered and savored. That seems like something with which even my college fantasy man – the one with the really good reading lamp in that dark Barnes and Noble aisle – could agree.
