This doesn't really relate to anything...

Rise of the book snob

There are times when you want to read a book simply because it makes you look good. Like John Cusack says in the (insanely wonderful) film High Fidelity, you end up judging people based not on what they're like, but on what they like..

WITH THE rise in social networking websites, what becomes important is not who you are, but what you want to be perceived as. It’s like that terribly confusing thing they teach you in Psychology class - you are not what you think you are, or what other people think you are. You are what you think other people think you are. A regular tongue-twister, yes, but it does make a fair amount of sense when you apply the concept to books.

Rather than talk about what you’re really reading (Grisham, JK Rowling…or God forbid, Sidney Sheldon), you plough your way through conversations about the one they advertised on Intellectual’s Top 20 or the like. If you’re lucky, now a perfect stranger thinks you’re smart and you’ve racked up invisible points somewhere. If you’re not (and this is generally what happens), people think you’re boring because you read. Still, you end up feeling self-satisfied because you pulled off a conversation about something vaguely cerebral with panache, and you can smile a smug little smile on your way back home to The Sky Is Falling.

Or, if you’re like me, you buy it because it looks nice. I must confess I am somewhat of a snob when it comes to book covers. Yes, I’ve read the little note that comes out of those slightly stale fortune cookies, but I still judge (and very often condemn) a book by its cover. I refuse to read anything that uses more than three primary colours on its dust jacket. I will not be seen with anything that has a title in a silly font. And I make it a point not to venture near anything with lurid faces (which resulted in my missing out on Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted until a longsuffering friend brown-papered it for me).

And I’m not the only one. In an informal survey (alright, so I asked all my friends and classmates), I discovered that when it came to buying books off the rack (so to speak), name of the author, the colour of the cover (hah!) and the size of the book influenced them more than anything else. So much for not judging anything.

It makes you wonder how Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi had even a sporting chance at being noticed. The book was fantastic, I don’t deny that. But the cover had what looked like a surfboarding tiger on it, and you have to admit that the font was very ’self-help book’. To make matters worse, it had ’A Notable Book’ printed at the back. Sigh. Martel hadn’t really written anything exceptional before that, and a pre-Pi Google search gave rise to a Hungarian king. And would you look at him now, making a book list for the Canadian Prime Minister.

Ah well, I suppose it was the Booker.

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