We are supposed to judge books by their covers or by the blurbs and by the author’s name. I have favorite books by authors who names I have forgotten. I willing to look at I work with and out of date cover, or an old illustration slapped on the front. I do not pay attention to the author’s ethnicity, age, or gender, or even the year that the book was written. Years ago, in the main Cincinnati Library, I picked up The Idiot because the title intrigued me.
At that time, I was young, not well read, and still reading the first chapter to evaluate books. As I read dialogue between the characters, two of them intrigued me—a man who had been isolated for years and another so infatuated with being in love that he was dangerous to the object of his love. I had never heard of Fyodor Dostoevsky before. Yet, reading The Idiot convinced me that it was worth my time to read other books by him. At one point I even looked up a movie by Kurosawa based on this book. I’ve managed to do a better ending then the original author. But, I imagine he found this book fascinating I did
Covers I tend to avoid include those with the author’s name larger than the title–a lesson I learned after picking up a few and being so disappointed that I did not finish them. Maybe, the authors had produced better quality at one time, but fame, or the quantity of books they pumped out, negative effect on that quality.
Now, when I peruse a book that interests me, I do not read the first pages. I choose randomly, often a section in the middle of the book. I don’t expect the text to grab me immediately, but a good author is able to be engaging throughout the book and not just in the first chapter.
Recently in a class, I asked a young author why he assumed that knowing ethnicity, gender and age of the artist were as important as knowing what the author wrote. He indicated that knowing the background information about the author was required to interpret their works correctly. If that is true, I wasted years reading books that I didn’t realize were written by Europeans, Africans, Central and South Americans, and Asians. I didn’t study the authors’ backgrounds first. I decided if I liked their work based on their actual writing.
Having to learn about the author doesn’t make me think more highly of their work. A good writer reaches for universal themes. The readers should be able to bring what they have as human into the writing in order to gain something from it. If I have to know about the author’s background to appreciate the book, then the author is not really doing their job.
Write about what? 