We're almost halfway through "National Just Read More Damn Novels Month" (NaJuReMoDaNoMo), and I haven't even started my novel yet. The city library didn't have Perrotta's Abstinence Teacher, so I grabbed another book from the New Fiction shelf: Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me Yet.I was interested in reading this since Lethem did a reading of You Don't Love Me Yet last April at Moe's in Berkeley, and had the Bye Bye Blackbirds "open" for him portraying the band from the book. The BBBs covered the song "You Don't Love Me Yet" (the Vulgar Boatmen's not Roky Erickson's) and even wrote a song called "Monster Eyes" from Lethem's lyrics provided in the book. The reading and performance is archived at the Moe's website.
I didn't make it to the reading (other plans that night or something), but had the book circled as something to read, and there's no time like nine months later. It's just over 200 pages long, so I might have a fighting chance to finish it before the end of January. I know it's not fair to judge a book or (an album) by it's cover, but I'm prejudiced against any books with pictures of the author on the cover, especially when the author is some hipster dude that buttons his shirt all the way to the top. I'm also prejudiced against novels that have the words "a novel" written on the cover. So this book has two strikes against it going in. I'll try to finish it by the end of the month, but might have to find another novel for January if this one doesn't capture my interest.
3 comments:
I'm curious why you dislike a novel self-identifying as "a novel". Particularly in the, admittedly unusual, case of a novel featuring a photo of its own author on the cover - lest we misconstrue it as a memoir or some such, the clarification should be helpful.
Writing a novel that self-identifies itself as "a novel" just seems like overkill. it's nowhere near as annoying as calling a record album "a novel" like Pete Townsend did in 1985.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to judge a book - or a record - by its cover. After all, the designers of the cover spent quite a lot of time and money trying to convey a particular impression by means of that image, and if that impression is wholly obnoxious to me, why shouldn't I believe them? I think I've mentioned before that in my music-reviewing days, I'd give priority in listening to better-packaged CDs...and my system was pretty successful in identifying musical quality, which generally went along with graphical quality with a strong degree of concordance.
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