You can tell a book by its cover.

Book designer/novelist Chip Kidd offered up his favorite book covers in Newsweek which got me thinking about mine.

I have to say, I wouldn’t have made the same selections he did, although when I read his reasons for choosing each, I was swayed. Mostly.

Some I like:

David Sedaris – Holidays on Ice – The cover’s got some of the darkness that edges the humor.
Haruki Murakami- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle- No good reason, just a design I like.
Dan Chaon – You Remind Me of Me – Simple, but gets your attention. Plus, the shoes are nice.
Marisha Pessl – Special Topics in Calamity Physics-  Wasn’t a huge fan of this book, but the inventiveness of the cover matches the imagination on the inside.
Rachel DeWoskin – Foreign Babes in Beijing – Sassy!
Karen Russell - St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves - A cover as offbeat as Russell’s stories.
Miranda July – No One Belongs Here More Than You. – So simple, but it works for this quirky collection. I think this comes in several versions. I know there’s a pink as well as a yellow.
Dara Horn- The World To Come – Judging by the cover it just looks like you’re going to get some good storytelling out of this book, and I certainly did. Somehow the cover manages to convey a certain goodness that comes through in the writing, too.
Guy DeLisle’s Pyongyang – I guess it’s not fair to include a graphic novel – in this case a graphic memoir – but I am going to anyway. The smiles on these accordian players are just as eerie as much of DeLisle’s visit to North Korea.
Asne Sierstaad – The Bookseller of Kabul - Love the use of color and fantastic documentary photography.

How an essay comes to be.

A pigeon falls on your windshield. Or a similarly odd, potentially transformative event happens to you. Despite the fact that you’ve been remiss in your commitment to write regularly, you feel that familiar tug… you want to describe the incident of the bird falling on your car (or whatever. insert your event here). When you begin to type you realize that there’s something else going on, something beyond actual events, i.e. a pigeon falling out of the sky on to your windshield as you hurtle down the highway at 70 mph. Whump! As you describe how the sound of the bird hitting the glass was so loud that you thought your windshield might crack and how your heart pounded and how you felt thankful that the bird was not, say, a tire, or a ladder fallen from a truck, or a boulder, you think back through the flashing reel of other events in your life involving birds and realize there is pattern, and metaphor, and the potential for an essay, were these bird-related incidents grouped in the right way and tied to other meaningful moments. You may also consider that it’s a little odd that you’ve had so many accidental interactions with wild birds, but you let this thought fly away, unexplained. There is an essay forming in your mind, and you being to chronicle other times when your life has collided (so to speak) with a bird’s or birds’. In doing so, the other stuff, the meaningful moments, the life-changing events that were already occurring when the birds found their way to you or you found your way to them, that stuff comes out. Suddenly it’s on the page, and while it may be rough and perhaps a little odd, this intersection of life and birds, it’s soon an essay, one you want to rewrite and polish and send out to magazines. And it never would have come to be without that pigeon falling out of the sky, wing over wing, beak over tail, and leaving a gray smudge on the glass, a fog through which you must travel from now on.

Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

A beautifully written book. It’s quiet, subtle and possesses a certain wistfulness that is common to a lot of modern Japanese lit. Also common to a lot of Japanese lit: a bittersweet element relating to a relationship that goes unfulfilled in some way. In this case, doubly unfulfilled: unrequited love, and a man who cannot remember those who love him like family.

Ogawa gets credit for managing to successfully write a novel about a man whose memory only lasts for 80 minutes — how does he build relationships if he cannot remember anyone from a few hours before? And I give her credit for writing a novel about math. Explanations of formulas and theorems and so on as part of fiction might turn some people off. I’ve certainly never read a novel with explanations of mathematics included (and if you asked me, I would say I’d never want to) but Ogawa makes it work.

I will say that I liked Ogawa’s collection of novellas, The Diving Pool, slightly better than this book. There was a quirkiness to those stories that was absent here. But I suspect many readers will have the opposite response.

View all my reviews on goodreads.