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Honestly, in the governmental bureaucracy of Winter Park High School, Jasper Hanson was like Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Athletics and Malfeasance. When a guy like that gets promoted to Executive Vice President of Urine Gunning, immediate action must be taken.

– John Green, PAPER TOWNS

I apologize for the post title, y’all. I have a math midterm tomorrow, is my excuse. Actually, I’m finding that math is a handy excuse for many things. When I’m caught behaving abnormally, I just wave my hand vaguely and say, “Math.” Most people are so horrified by the thought that I might elaborate that they leave it at that.

Like the blogger Drek at the sociology blog Scatterplot, from which I am stealing this video, I take things much too literally. I, too, blame this trait for my inability to “get” poetry (a fact which causes no end of frustration to my boyfriend, who writes it; he thinks I’m just not trying).

There’s a particular irony in my case, though, because I am a highly sarcastic individual. And yet also highly gullible, as I am, inexplicably, prone to interpreting others credibly. Said boyfriend and I used to live in Brooklyn, where we had a really busybody landlord living on the ground floor of the same building — a fact I was not too happy about. I was kind of ill when we moved in, so I went to sleep in the middle of the floor, surrounded by boxes, while he went out with his friend. The next morning I was expressing my fears about living with a landlord who always seemed to be hanging around watching, when this exchange occurred:

BOYFRIEND: Yeah, she was still sitting outside watching when I got in last night.
ELIZABETH: What? What time was that?
BOYFRIEND: Maybe 2, 3 AM.
ELIZABETH: Oh my god. We’ll never be able to get away from her! We’ll have to run in and out of the house!
BOYFRIEND: Actually, she said she was going to stop by for brunch this morning.
ELIZABETH: [horror]
BOYFRIEND: I think she’ll be here any minu– [pauses, listening] — Is that her?
ELIZABETH: [grim, efficient determination] Okay, let’s think. Maybe we can sneak out the window!

I was totally serious, y’all. (We lived on the third floor of a building with very high ceilings, by the way.) The boyfriend, fortunately, was not.

Anyway, after that excessively long and irrelevant set-up, here is the literally-minded Total Eclipse of the Heart:

And now, to finally make this nominally relevant to our blog: I have noticed that my reading habits have changed with the blog, and I’m not sure if it’s blogging itself (which has made me think more about what I’m reading and take note of cool lines for the Wednesday Words) or things I started doing at around the same time, which partially inspired me to start the blog (reading other blogs, reading books about how fiction is constructed, reading more new children’s lit instead of my same old favorites). But one thing I’ve observed is how much more I appreciate metaphors than I did when I was little.

Like, I had this bizarre experience reading PAPER TOWNS:

Internal Monologue Dialogue

• I love this passage about the strings and the ships and the grass!
• Um, it’s a two-page passage about metaphors for death.
• But it’s beautiful!
• The characters are talking to each other about what’s the best metaphor for death!!!
• But they’re picking such good ones!

(I have very explicit arguments with myself in my head.)

So, is this just a sign of getting older — I was never one of those super-literary kids; I loved to read, but it was always trash — or is book blogging going to make me a more high-minded reader? Might I somehow become a poetry fan after all??

(…Doubtful.)

Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:

These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?

I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.

Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.

My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:

… But they also kind of creep me out.

Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:

For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:

* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.