I’ve got something like another 1170 books to read over the next forty-five years. I admit that I’ve made that projection based on a few loose ideas. It presupposes that several things will come to pass: the predictions of a fortune-teller who told my seven year old self I’d live to 75; that I’ll continue to read, on average, a book a fortnight; and a probably naïve assumption that reading, in something like its current format, is an activity people will continue to do – that eBook sales having surpassed paperback sales on Amazon, as is currently being reported all over the media – won’t in turn be surpassed by sales of some sort of information chip we’ll all have inserted into our elbows or under our eyelids or up our nostrils.
But pretend we’re on stable ground here and that my projection is likely. 1170… it’s quite a big number. But it’s still only a fraction of all the books available to be read. Last year Google projected (and I’m fairly confident they didn’t rely on any palm-reading or crystal ball gazing to come up with their number) that there were 129,864,880 books out there in the world. So if all publishing had stopped last year when Google made their projection, with my 1170 books, I would only ever be able to read 0.000009 per cent of the whole. As it is, publishers continue to release new titles and so my little fraction, as each year slips by, will become smaller and smaller. What’s my point? Even though I have a lot of books to choose, there are so many more to choose from. I’d like to minimise my future fractiousness by using my fraction for good – well for my own good. On good books, as I judge them.
Generally I choose what I’m going to read next by one of two methods. First on recommendation (and here I’m lumping together reviews, word-of-mouth and book prizes) and second by looking at a book’s cover and deciding whether it, umm, speaks to me.
Which brings me to what I’d like to say about last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. I judged it by its cover and it fell short. Really. I picked it up in bookshops in both Auckland and London and speak to me it did not. The back cover mentions recently widowed men reminiscing in an apartment, a mugging outside a violin shop, and a change in a character’s sense of self. The front cover includes a coat rail, a hat and a coat. Neither did anything for me. And then, of course, a panel of five literary types gave it a prize. But still I didn’t want to read it because the cover image was boring and the text on the back made me feel somehow removed from its topic.
In December, it arrived under my Christmas tree, wrapped and with a label bearing my name, so I read it and it is, of course, very good. It is about everything the back cover mentions. It’s about old blokes reminiscing, it’s about two widowers and one never-married wanna-be widower and their friendship. More than anything, it’s about anti-semitism and being Jewish. Granted, as a Pakeha kiwi girl of no particular religious background, had Bloomsbury put that on the back cover, I could still have said it had no personal relevance for me. But this is a book that deals with issues that we all think are important and relevant. It could be called The Gaza Question (though perhaps three old men discussing Gaza also sounds like a turn-off). It’s not. The Finkler Question is, as all the post-prize media suggested, very witty. Its characters are wonderfully, awkwardly human. The only point I can put my finger on that ties my feelings about the text into my feelings about the cover is that occasionally, like Jacobson’s main character Julian Treslove, I felt on the outer: unequipped to pass judgement on some of the issues raised (for example Finkler’s leadership of Jewish pro-Palestinian group ASHamed Jews). At times, I also wondered whether the traits described as quintessentially Jewish were described wholly in jest, half in jest or in all seriousness. But despite these feelings, and its dull cover, The Finkler Question won me over. While I was reading it, I wanted to have with me always so that I could whip it out and continue reading whenever a spare moment arose.
So what am I getting at? Is it that I should stop judging books by their covers? I don’t think so. As evidenced by my reticence to read The Finkler Question even post Booker win (often a prize win makes a book a sure thing in my eyes), the cover test is pretty important to me. There is something wonderful about standing in a bookshop surrounded by colour and design and finding myself drawn to a book. Maybe the e-book format will help with that, but until my reading becomes wholly Kindle-based (note to self: first buy a Kindle) I think a fair whack of my 1170 future reads will be chosen by their covers. Which probably means I’ll make a few mistakes, but also means my bookshelf will, at least in my own eyes, be quite, quite beautiful. I suppose the only real point I could say I’m making (though I’m not – I’ve only just thought it through) is that occasionally it might be worth buying someone a book you’ve enjoyed that they think they won’t like, just to see. Or perhaps don’t – after all, they’ve probably only got another 1000 books to read.
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