If my shelf were a bookstore, you would only have so many choices right now.
You want to buy a book?
You can buy a very beat up, very thick, paperback copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest or Atonement. I don’t recommend the copy I have though. It’s the “Major Motion Picture” cover, which I will forever now refer to as MMP. Double ’em pea. The MMP, for those of you who are privileged enough to be naive to the concept, is the cover a book garners when it is being made into a movie. The most recent and public offender of this was The Great Gatsby starring the ever-lovely Leonardo DiCaprio.
No, this copy of Atonement I would not recommend. James McAvoy and Keira Knightley are on the cover along with the little girl whose name I know I will butcher if I don’t Google it. Saorise? Something like that? At any rate, the book is spoiled a little bit. Whatever artwork was originally the cover is spoiled. I wouldn’t know. I bought my copy from a Salvation Army for sixty-nine cents. As a broke college student, I can’t be very picky about the books I buy. But it feels a little silly to look down at the book with such a beautiful name with two beautiful people on the cover and have it not be beautiful.
People say not to judge a book by its cover. I know this is more applicable to people nowadays. It’s the lesson we’re all taught in first or second grade whilst reading a sweet picture book you probably will only remember for the cover. Yes, the cover. I judge books by their cover. Beautiful books are sometimes hidden by covers that aren’t as beautiful as them.
The original “Gatsby” artwork is beautiful. The midnight blue and the woman’s face hanging over the gorgeous West Egg. You don’t forget that cover. Behind that cover is a just as glorious story. The artwork for the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is beautiful, but inside, I do not find a beautiful book at all. I despise that book for what it did to me freshman year, questioning if I should be having a life altering experience immediately as a fourteen year-old with not much experience to go on.
Covers and stories don’t always match. That’s why I let Atonement hold my heart for a second and I glanced over the fact that there was an insanely cheesy movie poster on the cover. It has the classic chaos and peace split by the title, written in fading typewriter letters.
MMPs make covers look like cheap romance novels that I can buy at Walmart hidden behind the title of “Harlequin,” a word that loses it’s beauty in all that silliness. Trashy, erotic, characters that don’t even breathe because they’re so one-dimensional.
Now, I am not stupid. I understand the marketing idea. However, books are books and movies are movies. As an actor, I have come to understand that very easily–books do not always make wonderful movies. Do not judge the book by the movie or the MMP for that matter. Books deserve more respect than that.
The Typewriter Variations 