Buying Books by the Cover

Bought:

The New Moosewood Cookbook, by Molly Katzen -- includes a great recipe for Hungarian mushroom soup.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris -- heard about him from several friends.

The News From Paraguay, by Lily Tuck -- I don't know why. It had a shiny medal on it, like it won an award and the cover was interesting.

Comfort Me with Apples, by Ruth Reichl -- I read the first few pages and it was funny. Plus I liked the cover.


Whether I read any of them remains to be seen. A week ago I bought The Botany of Desire because I liked the title and the cover, and the premise of the book sounded interesting. I'm reading that and so far I'm a little annoyed with the author's obsession with Johnny Appleseed. I sincerely wonder if he knew his section on the apple would end up being about the real Johnny. Or if it ended up being a wild-goose chase and because of the grant money he received he had to produce a book, or else. I don't know, I made that up about him getting grant money. But I wonder. I really do. I could see myself being forced to write about something that ended up differently than expected. I've done it. 8 years in college studying literature will do that to you.

When I bought that Botany of Desire book, my mom teased me that I don't read any more and that she's never seen a former English student read so little. Or something like that. I just stood there and took it, and then offered as my excuse, Stoker. I spend all my time with him. We rarely read. The last time I actually finished a book was in October, I think. Kind of sad, really. But I'll keep buying books, hoping to read, planning to read, growing my library in the event that I read. I'm obsessed with buying books. And the worst part of it, is that I buy them based on the cover. I always buy books with great covers. What they say, you can't judge a book by it's cover, is only partially true. I've read several great books based solely on the cover. I've read crap books and stopped 1/3 of the way through, having bought it based on the allure of the cover. There are great books with boring, ugly covers. But right now I can't think of any. And there are awful books with, as expected, offensively ugly covers.

What they really mean, is that you can't judge a person based on how they look. And even that's only half true. There are definitely people who are just as they appear to be.

The books. Yes. Border's was having a 3 for 2 sale. I'm a sell-out. Shopping at the megastore/chain/taking-over-the-world-one-neighborhood-at-a-time bookstore. But I had a giftcard from Stoker's brother and sister-in-law. I can't turn away from the chance to buy a book based entirely on its cover.