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The cover and title draw us in, but it’s not a tenuous pull. How we choose to decorate our front is a measure of our purported content; not separate. It speaks to our tastes, a fleeting flash into our mind’s work. An author will seek out the publisher they believe best able to push their work, they’ll fight for a fine title; some concessions, give, but the author knows what their work should look like. The final choice will be cognizant of that. Even insofar as selection of an image or spine goes, there’s something of them to be found in the manner that it’s put together. I’ve seen Franzen bandied about any number of books charts for years, but nothing of his pursuit of the American epic or family trauma appealed [to me]. A friend mentioned it worthwhile to give him a go, and so my pursuit took to a store. “How to be alone” is a collection of his essays, nothing cohesive. The title has everything to do with one of the included stories, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to a particular narrative holding the rest in place. With respect to my choice of it, the title appealed, that meld with the visual setting, a lone figure buried in a book, her surrounds a blurry hold of fellow readers; the idea of that was something I connected with, connected with the the author’s selection of that front as an illustration into the way he thinks. His particular tastes as something I could relate to, would trust. And, by extension, the recommender as someone whose own tastes I connected with; it’s a flimsy circle we set around our hips, but it’s fair and correct more often than not.
There’s some truth to that in most all facets of life. One’s sense of preference is an established set of variables and rules, it’s a representation of our person to the outside. It’s not a far stretch to sell the airport bookshelf reader as a perpetrator of poor taste. This self-same man watches whatever television is on at a convenient hour, he wears a North Face jacket in black and classically blue Levi jeans, and his feet sit firm in running shoes. It’s not a stretch to imagine his eating habits and wine routines, his offered adjectives when complimenting a wife, “Well you look nice.” Nice, the thoughtless offering a magazine-reading-man learns from dating strategy garnered pages back. By the same token, I trust in the tastes of a woman who delves into books for reasons beyond required reading, and I trust that her tastes extend to her wake in life. We all have our mediums, my own knowledge of what makes great art [be that photography, painting or whatnot] is slim, but that same worldview I impose on my selection of books, I carry with me when observing other forms. I trust myself not to love the romance novel of renaissance art. I think that’s true of most people; people who talk to well-considered selection criteria in one form, are unlikely to discard the barriers to adoration in another.
This has a touch of narcissism to it; misplaced. I don’t know that I consider my own tastes better, simply that they’re a reflection of my way of thinking. Perhaps with age, and the refinement of one’s own tastes [an inevitability with iterations], we also better trust in our ability to identify others who exhibit similar criterion when consuming life.
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