Cover Thoughts and New Book

This week the only reading I did was for my other English class. We read the book Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (be ready for a lot of Irish lit this semester), and I can't say that I was a particularly big fan of the book. For some brief context, the book follows the story of a ten-year-old boy—Paddy Clarke—growing up in Ireland in the late 1960s. It is told from Paddy's point of view as he tries to navigate and make sense of his everyday life, social norms with the boys at school, and his parents' increasingly tumultuous (and eventually violent) relationship.

I have to say that I had a hard time connecting with this story and its characters at first. Paddy and the other boys had a penchant for violence and overall were not particularly likeable, and I was left feeling a little cold just because of the seeming randomness and pointlessness of Paddy's rambly mundane stories about fights at school and picking on his little brother. It wasn't until the last third or so of the book that I began to appreciate what was happening narratively. The instances of violence served a function within the story, providing context for a key trend: as the tension and violence became more pronounced in Paddy’s home, there was a noticeable shift in Paddy’s behavior toward others. The inverse relationship between the increasing violence between Paddy’s parents and Paddy’s decreasing violence toward his peers called attention to the book’s themes of childhood trauma and domestic violence in a way that helped the reader parse out the true depth of the effects of these forces. Perhaps what is most poignant about the book is that, since everything is told from Paddy’s point of view, we are grappling with these difficult ideas and situations via a ten-year-old’s understanding of them: his thoughts and feelings as he tries to make sense of why and how these things are happening between people he loves, between people who are supposed to love each other, and how he fits into that picture. While it’s still not one of my favorite books I’ve ever read, it’s certainly a powerful one.

On another topic, after our discussion in class last week about book covers, I’ve been thinking about book presentation specifically as it relates to the last book I read, Educated by Tara Westover (which I wrote about in my blog last week). This book cover interests me in particular simply because of the sheer number of awards and accolades that are lauded on the cover of the book:

Both the front and back covers list the book’s various achievements—the back cover even lists an entire paragraph of sources that named the book one of the best books of the year. While it’s certainly not uncommon for book covers to display promotional blurbs and relevant awards, this is one of the more prevalent examples of this that I’ve seen. Personally, I know that I don’t pay a lot of attention to blurbs and awards, especially considering how many books feature these types of displays on their covers. But that made me curious about whether others will become pick a book off the shelf or buy a book simply based on (or at least partially based on) the person who has praised the book or the types of awards it has won. Does anyone notice or put stock in these things, or do people tend to overlook them as much as I do?