Reading 2008: What Was I Thinking?

Posted 25 January, 2008 in Reading Life |

Often I buy books on the basis of their covers. While this may strike some as unconscionably shallow, an attractive cover design or dust jacket helps to render the book as physical object more artful somehow, and contributes to the sensuous pleasure of reading. Far more than simply serving as a protective sheath for the pages within, a well-designed cover attracts the eye, raises questions in a reader who is unfamiliar with a book’s contents, and brings a frisson of recognition to a reader who is familiar. Handsome covers transform the book itself into an objet d’art, something that can be given pride of place on one’s bookshelves and is almost guaranteed to elicit questions or remarks from curious bystanders when one reads in public.*

By contrast, unattractive covers (or unattractive text design, for that matter) act as the literary equivalent of a cold shower. They are a complete turn-off. Just as I’ve bought books on the basis of their cover design, I’ve refrained from buying books that I would otherwise have been interested in reading because of their unattractive or off-putting jackets.**

By and large, the old cliché “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is, in my experience, utter bollocks.

There are exceptions. Case in point, the very handsome new edition of Dracula, which is part of a series of rereleases under the Vintage Classics (UK) imprint. Other titles in this series include Jake’s Thing by Kingsley Amis (reviewed in these pages not long ago), The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. These editions, with crimson spines and gorgeous covers, are little masterpieces of graphic design, and prompted me to pick up a number of titles that I’ve missed out on over the years, including Bram Stoker’s Gothic vampire classic, which I took home at the beginning of January and immediately began devouring with all the ravenous delight of, well, of a vampire.

It did not take long to discover two things about Stoker’s book, which I had never read before. First, the author had issues. I mean, serious issues. I don’t know whether Freud ever wrote about the man, but if he didn’t, he should have. The novel is a case study in Victorian repression and male sexual anxiety. Witness, for example, the scene in which Jonathan Harker — whom many consider Stoker’s alter ego in the novel — encounters three hyper-sexed female vampires during his early stay at Castle Dracula:

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer — nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited — waited with beating heart.

At which point — i.e. for those of you who aren’t paying close enough attention, the point of consummation — the Count himself bursts through the door and drives the hungry succubi off. This is a clear case of the less virile male being cowed by both aggressive female sexuality and more potently virile masculinity. Added to that is a note of repressed homoerotic desire, evinced in the Count’s imprecation to the women: “Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!”

Like I said: issues.

The second thing I realized fairly quickly is that Dracula is really, truly, staggeringly boring. Stoker’s formal conceit of constructing his novel as a compendium of letters, journal entries, and the like becomes wearisome very quickly, and in truth it took me close to three weeks just to approach the halfway point in the book.

At which point, fate, or my subconscious, intervened. As I was engaged in a furious round of cleaning my office, I inadvertently piled a stack of papers for recycling on top of the volume, which I then scooped up and tossed in the apartment building’s industrial-sized blue bin.*** Didn’t Freud once say that there are no such things as accidents?

I do miss that gorgeous cover, though.

Following Dracula, I picked up another book that had fallen through the cracks in my literary education: André Gide’s The Immoralist. The story of Michel, who marries Marceline and quickly develops tuberculosis (any association between these two events is strongly encouraged by a reading of the novel). After a period of extended convalescence, Michel decides to pursue a life of unabandoned sensual excess, devoid of any moral code to guide him or encumber him.

Again, fairly salacious stuff. However, despite my having finished the book (it runs to a lean 171 pages), I find that I have very little to say about it, since Gide’s muted and contemplative style — which does seem to be at odds with his material — left me cold. I’m not sure I can remember a book that I felt more indifferent towards. Ironically for a story about unbridled excess, Gide’s novel left me feeling nothing at all.

The foregoing is a longwinded way of apologizing for the lack of original reviews here over the past three weeks. At the end of last year, you may recall my pledge to spend my discretionary reading time in 2008 on books that I wanted to read as opposed to those other people told me I should read. It’s not that I haven’t been reading since the start of the new year, it’s just that my scheme, which seemed so sensible at the time, hasn’t worked out quite the way I anticipated it would.

So, we’re changing gears. Next up is a new book, Stephen King’s Duma Key. With a little bit of luck, I’ll be able to find something in its 600+ pages that will rouse my interest or my ire. The first sixty pages look promising, but that may just be a result of my French lit hangover. I hope that I’ll be in a position to let you know soon.

Oh, and by the way, I put my aesthetic sense on hold where the King is concerned. It has a truly hideous cover.

*Reading in public is a favourite activity of mine, in large part because it exists at the nexus of private and public life: the reader is engaging in a private, not to say intimate, activity, and the observer is transformed into something resembling a voyeur. You would think that sitting at a bar with an open book in front of you would be like hanging a sign around your neck that says “Do not disturb,” but in fact the exact opposite is true: people can’t help but ask what you’re reading, and from there, if the reader is willing, it’s not that much of a leap into an entire conversation. Single readers out there, take note.

**In this regard, the easiest way to get me to pass over a book in disgust is to slap a movie tie-in cover on it. Anyone out there who knows how to get their hands on a pre-tie-in edition of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, please do let me know.

***This is one reason why this post is not constructed in the manner of a review or a full critical analysis. I do not review books that I haven’t finished, since that would be an abdication of critical responsibility. So, what I present here are merely half-formed thoughts based on a partial reading of the text. Whether I return to the text in the future is an open question.

6 comments to “Reading 2008: What Was I Thinking?”

Panic, January 25th, 2008 at 2:23 pm:

• Oh yes, Stoker was a misogynist (though Mina is the strongest character in the book, which is interesting in itself) and a xenophobe, and had a morbid fear of syphilis and new technologies, all of which combine in the “virus” of Vampirism. He was the perfect embodiment of fin de siècle angst. I love Dracula for all this complexity, and if you’ve read and enjoyed Victorian literature, it’s not all that bad.
  In my opinion anyway.

  Are we gonna have to fight about Victorians now? ;)

Steven W. Beattie, January 25th, 2008 at 2:37 pm:

• He had reason to fear syphilis: he died of it.

  Re: the Victorians. Bah-ring it.

August, January 25th, 2008 at 2:48 pm:

• I often purchase books because they have attractive covers, and often put books down because of unattractive ones (although more often because of poor typesetting, narrow margins, or tight gutters), and I see very little wrong with that. The reading experience involves more than simply the content of the words on the page. A cup of tea or coffee and a warm blanket with a well-made book can certainly increase how much I will enjoy a book, just as the constant frustration of having to squint or adjust the spine or the chill in my feet will decrease my enjoyment of it. It’s one of the reasons I think I’ll never be able to get behind products like Amazon’s Kindle; they tend to miss the fact that reading a book is an experience that is about (or at least involves) more than the mere transmission of information.

Panic, January 25th, 2008 at 3:10 pm:

• Ha! I’m sure I knew he had Le Pox at some point, but all this knowledge came to me such a loooong time ago. Some things will slip…

  Given that all countries blamed other countries for syphilis, I’d suspect that had something to do with the xenophobia, though colonial England wasn’t all that culturally sensitive to begin with.

  Ok:
  I LIKE VICTORIANS!
  Your turn.

Alex, January 25th, 2008 at 6:40 pm:

• It’s interesting what you say about Dracula, Steve. I remember it being a real struggle to get through. It doesn’t get any better, by the way. I don’t think I’ll ever try it again. And yet it grows in your mind. I guess it has a sort of mythic force to it. Same as Frankenstein, by the way. I think Germaine Greer wrote an essay on Frankenstein a year or so ago where she pointed out the obvious, that it’s an incredibly shitty book. I can still remember friends of mine in grad school re-reading it in order to teach it and just being amazed at how bad it was. Not at all how they remembered it.

  Same thing goes for some movies. Everybody loves Blade Runner. Cult classic and all the rest of it. And it’s taken on that same kind of totemic cultural status. So many other movies seem to have been influenced by it. Like Dracula and Frankenstein it has this archetypal status. But try sitting through it. It’s awful. You spend half the time looking at your watch just wanting it to end it’s so boring.

  Then, a day later, all you remember is that it was a great movie.

August, January 26th, 2008 at 1:37 am:

• I looked up Greer’s essay, and it seems she missed the point on more than one occasion by a rather wide margin, although I can’t say that I’m shocked by that particular revelation. (She also made the point that feminism cannot dominate the modern English department, because “women’s studies is now gender studies”, a statement which is asinine for several reasons, but whatever.)

  Frankenstein is not a book without flaws (there is no such thing), but it also closer to the genre of the Romance, which is superficially identical to the novel, but with different conventions, and Greer seems oblivious, and many of the flaws she points out can be attributed to using conventions from that different tradition of long-form prose. I’ve read it five times now, and again, it does have flaws, but I find it to be a deeply satisfying book, akin to a fine meal prepared by an excellent chef.

  Bladerunner I’ve seen more times that I can count, on both large and small screens, and my watch is not what I’m looking at. It’s not a film for everyone, but audiences generally have a difficult time with films that move at a slow pace, which Bladerunner certainly does.

  I can understand the cultural status of both works very easily. Dracula is definitely boring, but the tale, stripped of how Stoker tells it, is one that I find incredibly compelling.

  And the Victorians, well, it really doesn’t get much better than Dickens!

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