Double Feature: Death of a Salesman and No-one Makes You Shop at Walmart

I just realized that it's almost April, and I haven't written a single post this month.  Even though I'm ridiculously busy right now, I think I'll just get busier as the month goes on.  So, even though I have had absolutely no mind-blowing, incredible, amazing, earth-shattering ideas for posts, I think I'll just write a quick piece on the two books I've read this month so far.

The first one is Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  I absolutely loved this play. The writing was really incredible; it was much shorter than a novel, but every sentence had so much weight. I can't decide whether I prefer this to The Crucible, but I don't think that matters.  When I start comparing work by the same author side by side I always end up not liking one of the texts as much as I had before, because I realize that even though one might be great, it's not quite as good as the other.

Book review: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Recently, I was quite worried that I was writing too many book reviews, and that I should spend more time on other topics.  However, I have come to the startling realization that I haven't written a review since September.

So, I've decided to review Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, partially because I saw it on display in the bookshop, and partially because it was released fairly recently, so reviewing it seems slightly less passé.

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
(my own photo)

Kahneman's book is based on the idea that while humans are traditionally seen as rational creatures, we do a lot of irrational things.  So far so obvious, but Kahneman does more than just give a list of all the most illogical things we do. His book focuses on psychological research into heuristics, or mental shortcuts, and how they sometimes cause us to make poor decisions.  Much of the research is his own, but it's not the sole focus of the book.

It's really interesting to have someone writing about their own research.  Books that are this accessible to the lay reader are generally written by science writers.  While there is nothing wrong with that, I enjoyed the fact that we got it "straight from the horses mouth".

As I mentioned, the book is aimed at the lay reader, and the language is straightforward.  At the same time, I never got the sense that it was oversimplified or dumbed-down.  Kahneman seems very conscious that his work does have practical implications, and he is very keen to highlight them.

Overall, I thought it was a brilliant book.

That being said, I think that Part IV: Choices dragged a little bit.  It was probably due to the fact that the examples used were so similar, which meant I had several bouts of déjà vu.

Chances of finding it in my imaginary bookstore? 65%

Thoughts on: The New Bell Jar Cover

This year Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar celebrates its 50th anniversary.  The book itself is incredibly haunting and poetic, and I would highly recommend it.  But I don't want to talk about the book.  I want to talk about the new cover that has just been released.*  It's incredibly controversial, and to be perfectly blunt, I hate it.

Firstly, it's not an accurate representation of the novel.  Yes, Ester Greenwood is an intern at a fashion magazine.  Yes, there are sections that discuss clothes and make-up and image. Nevertheless, completely ignores the book's darker side, and focuses completely on one small portion it.

This cover is clearly an attempt to re-market the book as chick lit.  There are two major problems with this.  Firstly, it's not actually chick lit.  Secondly, the fact that they are choosing to re-brand this book in this way clearly demonstrates another major issue for female writers and creators.  Their work is consistently branded as being "for women".  The fact that almost anything written by a woman is separated from other books and put into another, significantly pinker category creates this idea that women's writing is only relevant to women, which is ridiculous.


I understand that publishing companies exist to make money, but when you have the rights to an author's work, then you also have a certain level of responsibility to protect their legacy.  This warped representation of the novel completely ignores that responsibility.  With this cover, Faber have given up even pretending to care about anything other than profit margins.


Another problem I have with this image is that it glamorises the 50's inspired woman on the front. This  is not only historical revisionism, but again undermines one of the key ideas of the book.  The ideal of the 1950's housewife is not a sweet, simple notion. At that time it represented the only acceptable option for a woman.  Both Ester Greenwood and Plath struggled with the very limiting views on femininity, and the fact that this cover completely ignores that is insulting.

There are some people who have suggested that this new cover is good, because more people will buy it and be introduced to Plath's work.  While the sales of the book have gone up since the release of the new cover, but it's questionable as to whether this is due to the cover itself, or all of the hype surrounding the cover and the book's 50 anniversary.  Even if this new cover did increase book sales,  we seriously have to question the cost of these additional sales.  The new cover is a yet another example of "if we make it pink, women will buy it" syndrome.  These insidious stereotypes are harmful, because they normalise dichotomous notions of gender.   The marketing of this book might encourage some people to read it, but it is also clearly an attempt to appeal only to a very specific market, and this will alienate a lot of other readers.

This cover is horrible on so many different levels.

What are your thoughts?

*I haven't posted a picture to avoid any copyright issues.  If you google search something along the lines of "Bell Jar 50th Anniversary cover" it should come up.

Bargain basement-ing

I decided to explore the bargain basement of a bookshop.

New Year’s Resolution: 50 books

 It’s New Year, and that means resolutions.

I know that the whole concept of New Year's Resolutions has become increasingly unpopular.  They don't work, they just make everyone put everything off until January 1st, etc.  However, I remain surprisingly optimistic about them.  January 1st always seems so shiny and new and full of promise, and I really like the idea of having a fresh start. This year I’ve decided to do the fifty books challenge. 

Just like any challenge, it has to have rules.

Rules

1. Read 50 books (insert sarcastic remark here)

1.  Plays, collections of poetry and books of short stories all count, so long as they are at least 90 pages long, not counting any introductions or footnotes.

2. Re-reads don’t count

3. Both fiction and non-fiction works count

I think that it would be ridiculously optimistic of me to suggest that I was also going to write a post on each of these books, but I’m going to start a new page with a list of all of the books I’ve read and a rating.

Happy New Year!

Top 4 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Little Women

I have a confession to make; I read Little Women, and I really didn't like it.  Here are some reasons why.

spoiler alert

How to Find Good Books

While it's fantastic that we have so many books so readily available to us from so many different sources, sometimes this can lead to a problem of just too much choice.  So today I'm going to try to give some advice on how to (hopefully) pick out the best books.  I'll try to avoid the really obvious suggestions of recommendations from friends, family, etc.

Read the middle pages

If a book doesn't seem like it's going anywhere or doing anything by the middle, then what are the chances that it will suddenly decide to pick up in the home stretch?  And, are you really going to want to read through to the end to find out whether it does?

Judge a book by it's cover

It's a really bad idea for life in general, but it can be applied really well to books.  A lot of time and energy goes into designing every cover, because publishers recognize that often people will be skimming though dozens of books, and they want theirs to stand out. 

One thing that I think should set off some pretty massive warning bells is when the name of the writer is written in bigger font then the title (I am looking at you, Nicholas Sparks).  What are they selling, the book or the writer?