Christmas present/s for myself
Yes, I’ve bought me some Christmas presents, all of them books, and, now that I think of it, all by women writers.
There were the two books I’d promised myself – Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace and Toni Morrison’s Love.
And then, because I was in a bookstore, I ended up buying two other books I’d not planned to get at all – Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Sue Townsend’s Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman.
It’s dangerous to be in a bookstore. I want to buy everything I see in it!
Well, not really. I wouldn’t buy any of the romance stuff. And some of the non-fiction stuff are too deep for me. So what made me choose those two extra books out of everything I saw in the bookstore yesterday?
In Lahiri’s case, she’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, and I’d been completely blown away when I read Interpreter of Maladies, the book that’d won her the Pulitzer. So The Namesake comes with good credentials. BTW, I’d thought it was something she’d published before her Pulitzer winner and brought out again to capitalise on her win, but I just found out I was wrong. According to amazon.com, it’s the follow-up. Anyway, I digress …
As for Sue Townsend, she’d written the wildly funny and hugely successful Adrian Mole series almost 20 years ago, so Public Confessions of a Middle-aged Woman comes with good credentials, too.
Of course, whether or not the two books live up to their writers’ reputation, that’s another story. For that matter, Maxine’s and Toni’s new books may fall short of expectations, too.
Now, next question.
How do people choose what they want to buy when they walk into a bookstore? Hopefully, like me, they go in knowing what they want to buy. And probably, like me, they choose books by their favourite writers.
But books these days are packaged really attractively. I have bought books by writers I’ve never read before (e.g., Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies), but now that I think of it, I am attracted more by whether they are book prize winners than by their covers.
How about you? How do you choose what books to buy?
