Judging a book by its cover

This is odd. I’ve been known to buy a novel purely because of its strik­ing cover or due to an intriguing title. How­ever, I have never had an exper­i­ence whereby I bought a book by a favour­ite author, and then felt unable to pro­ceed with it because I was cap­tiv­ated by the cover image. Yet this seems to have happened with Atone­ment by Ian McE­wan. I love McEwan’s writ­ing, but some­how didn’t get around to pick­ing up a copy of his latest title until a few days ago, when I ordered it from my book club. The prob­lem is that every time I try to start read­ing, I get no fur­ther than star­ing at the pho­to­graph on the front.

It’s one of those curi­ous images that pro­vokes so many ques­tions. What is the girl think­ing about? Why is she frown­ing? Is she look­ing at some­thing in the dis­tance? Why is she sit­ting on some stone steps in the middle of an orna­mental garden? I guess that my ques­tions would be answered if I actu­ally opened the book and began read­ing, but … oh, it’s prob­ably just tired­ness mak­ing me this way.

Along with Atone­ment, I also bought a copy of the Col­lec­ted Poems of Philip Lar­kin. I was a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Hull, and spent many (well, a few) late nights in the cam­pus lib­rary where Lar­kin worked for thirty years, so it’s per­haps not sur­pris­ing that I dis­covered his poetry dur­ing my time there. While I didn’t find his name exactly ubi­quit­ous in the city — per­haps the loc­als didn’t go much on his most fam­ous open­ing line — his ghost was dif­fi­cult to avoid around the uni­ver­sity. A couple of my tutors claimed to have been per­sonal friends of Lar­kin, and would begin relat­ing an old anec­dote or two at the drop of a hat — or the first sip of a pint. I remem­ber buy­ing the Whit­sun Wed­dings col­lec­tion at a cheap book sale in the Stu­dent Union build­ing, but it’s taken me until now to get hold of the com­plete col­lec­tion of his poems:

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solv­ing that ques­tion
Brings the priest and the doc­tor
In their long coats
Run­ning over the fields.

It seemed appro­pri­ate, at the end of one of those days.