if you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, then why do they spend so much effort and money on it?
and if not by its cover how do you decide on whether to buy a book or not?Let’s say , for the sake of argument, that you’re at the airport and want to buy a book you can read on that long flight, how do you pick out a book at the airport mart?
I don’t judge a book by its cover but , for the most part,especially if I needed to decide quickly, I judge a book by its first sentence. Sometimes, I read the last sentence too, but that could be fatal if looking for a mystery book.
OK, let’s change the venue, Let’s say you’re at a used-book store ( because this is where I buy most of my books). Which of the following books would you spend $2.00 on, given their first sentences:
1.The insuperable gap between East and West that exists in some eyes is perhaps nothing more than an optical illusion.
2.Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.
3.”Who is John Galt?”
4. A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.
5.Across the northern reaches of this continent there lies a mighty wedge of treeless plain, scarred by the primordial ice, inundated beneath a myriad of lakes, cross-checked by innumerable rivers, and riven by the rock bones of an elder earth.
6.The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert,shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.
7.He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish.
the books:
1.The Bridge Over the River Kwai – Pierre Boulle
2.A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
3.Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
4.Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
5.The Desperate People – Farley Mowat
6.White Oleander – Janet Fitch
7.The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
daybreaker213 