I want to know. There must be some book that is sitting on your nightstand, that for whatever reasons, you just cannot bring yourself to begin, or finish. For me, that book is All the Sad Young Literary Men, by Keith Gessen. Why? Because you can judge a book by its cover, silly. The cover is the most boring, pretentious, monochrome excuse for a piece of graphic design that I have ever seen. Mr. Gessen must have wanted to kill himself when his publishers showed him the mock-up. Or kill the artist.
Yes, I know it’s supposed to be a good book. Yes, many people have recommended it to me. But I just can’t get beyond that cover, so I move on to something else each week.
What book can’t you read? Why?
[...] I have resisted this book for quite a while, because frankly, I (Brown, ’87) didn’t like the cover, even though I bought it in hardcover when it first came out, thinking my husband (Harvard, ’86) might enjoy it. The problem is that now having finished the novel, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anything absolutely definitive about it. My husband has the same issue, but he read it a long time ago. I don’t have any such excuses, apart from thinking this should be a collection of interconnected short stories, and not a novel. Funny, huh, given last week’s kvetch? The main characters share a few girlfriends, and have a similarly dark take on the world, but they don’t interact at college. They also have a decidedly politically liberal bent, and two are interested in Russian history and one is not. Other than that, I’m not sure why they are thrown together in novel format, as the book jumps around from character to character, and from first person to third person. Actually, I’m not even sure the first person is the same first person who pops up later in the narrative. (Harvard readers: insert snide comment here about Brown graduates.) [...]