What makes a good book?

On book covers, and why I'll never buy a Kindle

Originally published on Fingertips in February 2010

Amid the advances represented by Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle, I’ve felt like something of a Luddite lately as I’ve made my way through assorted battered paperbacks.

But unlike a Luddite, I have no inclination to get my hands on this new technology in order to smash it to bits. I'm happy just to be left alone with the many piles of unread books lying around my house – the product of having eyes bigger than my bookshelves and spending too much time browsing in charity shops – but also because I love books not just as literature, but as objects in themselves.

I don’t know what an iPad feels like, but it can’t feel much different to an enlarged iPod, which feels cold and soulless. I’d always rather put on a CD album and flick through its sleeve notes than listen to it on my iPod and read about the album online.

But even more than CDs, books have a unique, tangible side to them. Every book is different, be it in size, thickness, hardness, smell, or feel.

As I wrote about the new design of the Granta magazine – a deceptive name as it’s actually produced in book format – on one of my now-abandoned blogs back in 2008:

“When I picked it up, I felt drawn to it. Its matt cover is seductively calm to hold and as your hands brush the gloss cover image something akin to arousal flutters through your fingers. This new Granta is engaging more of my senses than the old Granta. It has a new smell, and these thicker pages sound different as I turn them. Maybe I should lick it.”

Just as important as the feel and the smell of a book is its cover.

Covers can define a book, can set the idea of a book firmly in our heads before we’ve read it, and be the first trigger points when we remember a certain book.

Penguin’s cover designs

Penguin’s changing approach to cover design is documented in Phil Baines’s book Penguin By Design.
With the arrival of the 1960s and Alan Aldridge as art director, the company’s covers became less generic and more about expressing an individual book’s ideas.

This was seen in the cover for Aldous Huxley’s Island and has continued into the present day thanks to designers such as David Pelham who developed the idea of giving authors’ books a particular look.

Take for example the Evelyn Waugh covers that he oversaw, which for some readers may define the books as much as the texts themselves.

Wayne Gooderham discussed this last year on the Guardian Books Blog:

“Obviously, the text is the thing, but the cover of a book can surely influence our reading of said text. I’m sure there are many readers of Breakfast at Tiffany’s who cannot help but picture Holly Golightly looking uncannily similar to Audrey Hepburn thanks to the cover photograph’s tyrannical hold over our imagination.”

The perfect cover

He goes on to discuss the search for the perfect cover, and that for him the first Faber and Faber paperback edition provided just that for Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.

Yet my copy of New York Trilogy is a later edtion, and this for me is the perfect cover: with its simple blurred shot of a quintessential American image, it represents pure Auster – something American, undoubtedly, but seen through the squinted and suspicious eyes of someone who has spent years spent feasting on European literature.

To me, Gooderham’s preferred cover just looks tacky, like GCSE art work. It doesn’t feel beautiful and real yet slightly unsettling in the way that Auster’s writing does.

But I'll let him sing its praises, beacause the point is that books are objects of beauty that hold an individual allure. Your copy of a certain book is your copy, and every crease in the spine that you’ve fingered for hours while reading it is yours alone. Every faded page or every coffee stain is yours.

Like an animal marking out his territory, you have marked this out as your book, and the cover is a part of that. The dirty stain that my copy of John Banville’s The Infinities acquired after I put my bag in a puddle is for me an ineluctable and significant part of the cover design, and this individuality is something that a Kindle or an iPad cannot provide.

My Kindle and your Kindle are (or would be, if I had one) the same. They look the same, feel the same, smell the same.

With the arrival of electronic readers, the pleasures that one can take in developing a bookcase, rearing it and watching it grow as a part of your home – and as a part of you – are slowly being forced out the door.

My book collection is precious to me, and God only knows what would have happened if it had all been stored on a Kindle or iPad that I’d let into contact with a puddle.

How a novel should be?

Review: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

This book is definitely not going to be to everyone's taste, but then Sheila Heti would be the first person to acknowledge that. For, as Heti says on page one, "you can admire anyone for being themselves", and that is really what this book is about; although more importantly it is the way that this book is concerned with this topic that makes it so monumental and has resulted in it receiving so much praise (although apparently not on Amazon).

"How Should a Person Be?" is not concerned with living up to traditional expectations of what a novel should be, it is concerned only with saying what it wants to say, and saying it in the best way the author can find to say it. It is a memoir-cum-novel-cum play about a female writer (also called Sheila) trying to write a play and failing, trying to hold together a friendship and partially failing, and trying to understand how a person should be, and finally understanding it (sort of) through her failings. By stripping away many of the pretences of traditional fiction, Heti finds a way of drawing the reader into her world, taking the reader along with her, through her failings and her despair and her sufferings and out the other side. And it is this highly personal, self-flagellating method of story-telling that helps to get across the book's message: "A life without failure, suffering or doubt [is] empty of those things that make a human life meaningful." A person should be someone who is happy to fail, who is prepared to keep on failing, to face up to their failings (as Heti is doing with this book, which is not the play she set out to write), and to learn from their failings; rather than someone who keeps running away from their failings in the hope of finding a place where they never fail, suffer or doubt themselves, because that place doesn’t exist.

The book is about more than this, although this is its key message. But as I said above, a lot of what the book is about is connected to the way the book is constructed, in fragmentary chunks, in acts like a play (Sheila's failure to write a play is her success; because she has a five act book here, so isn't that a play, even if it isn't the kind of play she set out to write, or the kind of thing normally called 'a play'?), with events and its protagonist sprawling itinerantly across North America in the same way as Sheila's mind sprawls itinerantly across the plains of life.

A traditional novel shows us a rounded image of a "traditional" person (a 19th century image of a person, living a sort of "monotrack" life), embedded in one place, living an apparently linear life. Heti understands that real people and real life are not like that anymore. With the internet, with the ease of moving around from place to place, with our atomised society, few of us really live lives that fan out into a kind of linear narrative. Rather we live, as David Shields puts it in his book "How Literature Saved My Life", a sort of collage life, taking all these myriad things that happen to us and trying to fit them together in the best way that we can.

If "How Should a Person Be?" doesn't sound like the kind of book for you, that's ok. And if it sounds like the kind of thing you might hate, that is perhaps even better. For as Heti says towards the end of this book: "The only way to go somewhere new is to do the thing I most fear." So go on, give this book a try. It might scare you, and you might despise it, but it is guaranteed to take you somewhere new.

The picture for this review, which may appear to make little sense, is a reference to the final chapter of the book

Humankind's happy misery: Review (The Silence of Animals, by John Gray)

This book develops the ideas from John Gray's 2002 book Straw Dogs, although there is no need to have read the earlier book in order to understand or appreciate this book.

In Straw Dogs, Gray set out the notion that human beings differ only from other animals in that they convince themselves that they are superior beings destined to conquer the earth and rule over all other life forms. In The Silence of Animals, he delves behind this conviction, looking at the myth of human progress that supports our false hopes for ourselves - the hope of reaching some kind of utopian salvation. A key thread in the book is the religious nature of all movements and philosophies, with humanists coming in for a particularly heavy going over - "humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith" - and atheists being asked to ask a much bigger question of themselves than those they ask of belivers: if God does not exist, why do so many people feel a need to have a faith in one? It is this idea of faith that Gray is really interested in, and he brands humanism and atheism as "secular faiths" that take humankind as their God, with the myths of progress as their testament.

The idea that we need a faith to soothe us through the thorny discomforts of life is nothing new - Marx said in 1843 that religion is the opium of the people - but what elevates this book to another plane is that Gray dissects why human beings are so reliant on myths in order to give their lives meaning - effectively reaching a conclusion that "a life without myths is itself the stuff of myth" - and why we feel the need to give our lives meaning at all. He quotes a plethora of poets, memoirists and thinkers along the way (most commonly Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche - although strangely Albert Camus does not get a mention, despite his The Myth of Sisyphus treading ground very close to that which Gray passes over here), as he pushes toward the idea that people "find meaning in the suffering that the struggle for happiness brings", that we are "attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery". 

From this idea he picks up Freud, asking why we need to pursue an idea of happiness - fundamentally reaching the conclusion that we do so in order to distract ourselves from our lives ("from the internal monologue that is the dubious privilege of human self-awareness") - and then asking why we cannot simply be happy to exist and experience life.

The book then moves into its final part, where Gray joins hands with Samuel Beckett to question the use of language (how it gets in the way of our simply existing and experiencing life) and J.A. Baker, whose book The Peregrine saw him attempt to understand the silent existence of a peregrine falcon. While animals appear content simply to exist, the human's problem is the constant quest to give meaning to existence - a meaning universally underpinned by the myth of progress.

Gray asks us to essentially take a step back from existence, to stop interfering with the world, to stop building false constructs within it and our minds, to "look with eyes that are not covered with a film of thought". It is thought, the one thing we think we have that makes us superior to animals, that is in fact our undoing - we think ourselves to death, or at least out of life.

Gray comes close to reaching the same conclusion in this book ("Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be") as he did in Straw Dogs ("Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"), but he adds a final kicker in this book: "There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed."

In the context of the book, this rings an optimistic note - that humans can reach this point of not feeling the need for redemption - but the more realistic conclusion seems to be reached 10 pages before the end: “Man, much more than baboon or wolf, is an animal formed for conflict; his life seems meaningless to him without it.” After all, we attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery.