Postscript to You CAN Tell a Book by its Cover

Tags

A Girl Named Zippy, Angle of Repose, Book Covers, Book Titles, East of Eden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Emma Donoghue, Harper Lee, Havel Kimmel, John Steinbeck, Khadel Hosseini, Robert M. Persig, Room, The Kite Runner, The Life of Pi, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Wolfe, Wallace Stegner, writers, writing, Yann Martel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I hit publish on yesterday’s post, “You CAN Tell a Book by its Cover,” and realized I forgot to mention the most obvious point . . . the TITLE of the book. Duh. I wrote about the artwork, synopsis, and book reviews on the jacket, but what about the title!?! However, in many cases the title doesn’t tell you a darn thing about the book.

Simple titles have caused me to pause and pick up the book as I did with Room by Emma Donoghue. Others have me curious, such as The Life of Pi by Yann Martel and Khadel Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. I’m not a mathematician or a kite flyer (I’m not at all anti-kite flying), but I had to see what those books were about.

Book titles grab your attention as much, or maybe more so than the cover art. I got to thinking about some of our more unusual book titles. For example:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The titles above tell us nothing about what is inside the book, but don’t they make you want to pick them up? Maybe my examples are things everyone on the planet has read already, but when you step back and look at them with an “I never-read-that-book eye,” the titles are rather obtuse. They don’t hint at what the book is about or scream, “This book is about unrequited love,” or “How my dad worked on social injustice.”

These titles fall short of summarizing the plot with a lovely grace. But you pick them up. Hmmmmmm……what is inside?

What book titles made you buy the book solely based on the title? Why?

Want an example from me? I bought A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Havel Kimmel because I wanted to know why she was called Zippy.  Charming book by the way.

Happy weekend everyone!

Steinbeck Revisited

Tags

John Steinbeck, Stanford University, Tortilla Flats, traditional publishing, writers, writing

I forgot to mention something in my post yesterday about John Steinbeck. He went to Stanford University off and on for five years but never graduated. I wonder why. Sources say he started out studying English but when switched to marine biology. Do you suppose Mr. Steinbeck flunked English? That would have been cruel irony. According to the San Jose State University Center for Steinbeck studies:

“To please his parents he enrolled at Stanford University in 1919; to please himself he signed on only for those courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, and a smattering of science. The President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, “had no other interests or talents that I could make out. He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else.”

Steinbeck left college to write and worked odd jobs to support myself. He had three unsuccessful books before gaining critical acclaim for his l935 Tortilla Flats, some ten years after he dropped out of Stanford. My point here? If you are a writer you must have patience. Even if you are the next John Steinbeck.

I’ll leave you with a Steinbeck quote I love.

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech

Tags

Carmel, John Steinbeck, Monterey, Nobel Prize for Literature, writers, writing

John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors and I am lucky enough to be visiting his old stomping grounds – Monterey and Carmel – this weekend. The area is rich in agriculture, sweeping scenery, and amazing seafood. The beauty of the area is enough to nourish a writer’s soul and inspire great writing.

On the drive here I read up on our friend John. I didn’t realize (or remember) he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm he said, in part:

“The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

Whoa. I had to read what Mr. Smarty-Pants Steinbeck said several times to get his point. It is a pretty deep comment and I’m not sure I agree with the last sentence about “perfectibility of man.” Does that mean I don’t have “any membership in literature”?

What do you think he meant by the line? Do you agree?