High Five: Leni Zumas

Five Books I Judged By Their Covers

I've been thinking about why I read. Not the act itself, but how I choose books. Why do certain ones end up in my hands and others don't? A friend lends me her latest favorite. I make a late-night impulse buy online. A novel's been recommended, an author raved about, or my ignorance of some pocket of literary history bothers me enough that I reach for one of its representative texts.

Almost always, I have some prior knowledge.

Once in a while, however, I read in near-total innocence. A peculiar title or striking image prompts me to look at a book by a writer I've never heard of. The innocence is not total because the thing has, after all, been published—there is some measure of vetting—yet I'm not armed with the usual prejudices.

Here are five I opened without knowing anything about them (or their authors) and why I was happy I did:

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

During a bout of depressed Christmas shopping, I noticed this spine on a shelf. I was in a bad enough mood that the title appealed to me. The story of a city street and its residents on a single calamitous day, this novel is enthralling, patient, and unrepentantly tender.

The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman

A series of meditations by a musician who is mourning her dead father and struggling to get pregnant. Because it was published by McSweeney's and had a ghost on the cover, I was ready to like it, but I wasn't prepared for how great it was-how smart, honest, and sad. I read it in one sitting and, when it was over, wished that I could be friends with the person who wrote it.

The Cutmouth Lady by Romy Ashby

Dark, dreamy, sexy stories about an American teenager in Japan. Lots of gothic urban pastoral and girls wanting girls. This is a hot book.

Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey

A weird, beautiful novel about a boy-man who curates his own museum in the basement of an English council estate. I started it in a store because of the cover, a scratchy white drawing on black ground, and immediately loved the sentences. Structurally inventive, psychologically shrewd, all around fantastic.

Weather Reports You by Roni Horn

I was browsing in Brooklyn's fine Spoonbill & Sugartown when out jumped a plain orange cover with a syntactically odd title. The book is comprised of transcripts of people in Iceland talking about their relationship to weather—a "collective self-portrait," Horn calls it. You will be this book's fan if you relish subzero climates, the perils of Arctic seafaring, and lines like "I remember when the fox farm blew away."