judge a book by its cover

Well, this is just my life here.

I ditched the Bantam edition of “Huck Finn” and when I returned home fished out a second copy I owned. But the experience was exactly the same. The cover of the Signet Classic was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buck teeth prominent, clutching an apple, with a perky little newsboy tam cocked at a saucy Depression-era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to both Jerry Mathers of “Leave It to Beaver” and Britney Spears. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.

I had this same edition of Huck Finn and always thought that it was a fifties-ish era treatise on How Young Boys Should Behave. Of course then I was assigned to read it in high school and loved it.

It all added up. Until now, I’d thought that I had set these books aside for so many years because they were too daunting or, in the case of Thomas Mann, too dull. Now I realized that what these books had in common was that they were ugly. Really, really ugly.

A 1997 edition of “The Bad Seed” comes adorned with a photograph of a macabre doll that bears an odd resemblance to a girl I sat next to in fifth grade. A girl who creeped me out.

(From nytimes)

My favorite book from adolescence, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, features a hideous glamor painting of Charlotte leaning against the deck rails of a ship, her face full of longing and what looks like lust. It quite resembles a Harlequin romance novel. The truth is that there is no romance whatsoever in this book, not even a love interest. (Charlotte Doyle is a tale of revenge and murder on the high seas.) I introduce this book to my class by declaring the cover art horrible and then proceed to read the first sentence, which is a MUCH better introduction. ("Not every thirteen year old girl is accused of murder, brought to trial, and found guilty.")

Being an English teacher, I convince my students to read a book for two nights until they pass judgment, but I must confess that I, too, stop at the cover.