Michael Orthofer: commitment

Transcript context

…I once did an experiment. I went into a bookstore, and I said, “I’m just going to pick out the book whose cover I like the best and put aside whatever other impressions I might have of that book and really see this through,” just to see how good of a predictor that would be. I ended up liking the cover of a Kate Christensen novel. I then liked the novel, and I’ve liked some of her subsequent writing. When it comes to covers, covers are there, in a way, to trick us, but there’s also a kind of matching going on. It signals, maybe, how intellectual the book is or what kind of person should buy or read that book. You see a cover. How do you decipher or decode the information there? If you like the cover, does it sway you? It can sway me, but it rarely does. I’m not a big cover person. I’m really a text person, not an image person. And so I try to see beyond the cover, but the aesthetics obviously do play somewhat of a role. But it’s a very — I think a cover can attract my attention but won’t be decisive. I don’t think anything about a cover could convince me that this is a book I must have. I think I will leaf beyond that, but it can get me to pick up the book. Say a parent comes to you. The parent says, “I have a 12‑year‑old, smart child, shows some interest in now wanting to read,” what advice do you give that parent for hooking the child on reading? Since you yourself — your whole life, you’ve had this extreme, intense love of reading — maybe you were born with it — but how do people get hooked on reading? What do you tell that parent?…

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