Judging a book by its cover

Books have always been one of my favourite things. I love the way they smell, the way the paper feels when you open a brand new book and how the pages fade over time. I love libraries, and when I went to visit various universities I relished the thought of having a library like Hartley on my doorstep (I will miss this greatly!). Even when I was a child I would have my head stuck in a book, my parents sometimes calling me antisocial… but I just couldn’t read enough!

Now, after having studied English at undergraduate and postgraduate level, I face a very exciting prospect. You see, when I finish my dissertation in September, I will be faced with, for the first time in years, the possibility to read… for pleasure.

It’s true that if you choose to study English at university, you are unlikely to read a book for pleasure for years. Often in the summer holidays I was trawling through course texts to get ahead. Even books you get excited about studying can become laborious and you start to wonder… what if my degree has put me off reading for good!? The horror!

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve adored my course, and I would not have studied anything else. But I cannot wait to pick a book up and read it at my own pace, really relishing it.

Come September, then, one of the first things I will do is to go into Waterstones (probably with my mum, who is a fellow reader!) and just stand there, relishing the ability to pick anything and everything. I’ll go for romances, crime, maybe even the classics I never read for my studies which ALL English students should be familiar with (such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Dracula).

 My attempt to read this last summer fell flat due to other work!

But one recent event has made me ask myself this: how do I know which books to pick, out of the thousands available to me (subject to my bank balance)?

It has been in the news this week that J K Rowling has been revealed as the author of a book called ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, which was published under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. I couldn’t help but notice that it was all over Twitter, and took some time out of my (tedious) note-taking to read one or two news articles about it.

An article on the BBC states that the book has now ‘topped charts’, with sales rising from under 500 copies sold (before her real identity was revealed) to more than 5,000 on Amazon after the revelation.

Indeed, one spokesperson from Waterstones told the BBC, "This is the best act of literary deception since Stephen King was outed as Richard Bachman back in the 1980s" and Rowling herself described adopting a different authorial identity was a ‘liberating experience’.

(You can read the BBC article I read here)

There are two things that this has brought to my attention.

Firstly, Rowling’s decision to adopt a male name for her most recent book strikes me as almost eighteenth-century. I studied a module on texts of that era and, due to the gender differences at the time, it was not unusual for budding female writers to adopt male names or even anonymity in order to get published and to be taken seriously as an author. This causes me to wonder why Rowling chose a male name. It may not be about gender differences; indeed, I may be reading too much into it. But was it a bid to be taken seriously? To shake off the expectations created by Harry Potter and The Casual Vacancy? Most likely it was an attempt to get as far away from her real identity as possible.

Indeed, I typed Rowling’s name into Twitter to examine some responses, and found one article from the New Statesman asking if Rowling had betrayed female writers by using a male counterpart. In the article, Nichi Hodgson states that even though Agatha Christie is the top selling crime writer of all time, men have continued to dominate the genre since. In this respect, then, Rowling’s choice fits perfectly into the genre whilst allowing her writing to be judged away from her name. This is also interesting because Rowling's use of just her initials for the Harry Potter series was also due to her desire not to be judged as a female writer, but just for her work, and to encourage boys to read her books.

On the subject of gender in literature, I also saw a tweet about how one reviewer of the book chose it because it was, indeed, by a male writer, and how he would never read a book by a woman. This clearly backfired, causing much amusement online!

I met American author Jodi Picoult back in 2008, at a reading of her (then) latest book. 

It was a fantastic evening!

Secondly, it is interesting to observe the impact of a household name on book sales. Now that Rowling’s identity has been revealed, her book sales have increased tenfold. This is also explored in an article in the Guardian. It’s true:  people are now interested in reading this book because of the expectations surrounding her name and to compare it to her last endeavour out of the world of Harry Potter. Could this be a publicity stunt if not by Rowling then by her publishers? If she really wanted to break away, wouldn’t she have maintained her pseudonym? Why would you come clean if it wasn’t to boost sales?

One of my favourite authors is Victoria Hislop

This second point got me thinking. Going back to my more casual beginning to this blog entry, I have no idea how to pick my first few reads as a graduate. I am very likely, in fact, to go for books by authors I know very well (such as Jodi Picoult or Victoria Hislop) or names recognised from my course. This business with Rowling certainly emphasises the problems facing unknown authors who haven’t yet hit the literary headlines, as it were. There are thousands of books out there by small-time, unknown writers such as the phantom ‘Robert Galbraith’ whose books are just as good if not possibly better than famous authors; but they just don’t grab the attention of the keen reader.

If you’re interested in gender affecting the world of books a little more, here’s a fantastic project by Maureen Johnson. She asked readers to send in altered covers to well-known books and making ‘girly’ covers more masculine, and vice versa. This project really highlights how books can be designed to appeal to either gender and how this often puts readers off buying the book.
 

So, on that note, when I do finish in September, and I head out to buy my first book without the expectations of a seminar or essay, I’ll make sure I judge a book by what’s inside, not by the cover or even the name emblazoned on the front. It’s obvious that the literary world is still dominated by the big names and even gender politics. It’s important that my return to reading for pleasure, then, should be based on story and taste and not popular culture and books seemingly written ‘for men’ or ‘for women’.

Joanne