I remember picking up Middlesex in a used book store and thinking, this looks like a good book, even though the cover doesn't grab me at all. I know that I have a tendency to be drawn toward books with glitzy or appealing covers, so sometimes I try to force myself to look at once that don't look interesting at all. Occasionally, I'm glad that I did. That was definitely one of those cases! I'm glad that I picked up and read Middlesex because it turned out to be a book I really enjoyed reading. It was a story I am normally not drawn to but raised a lot of questions and interest about sexual and cultural identity.
Another instance where the book cover completely threw me off was reading Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. This is a graphic novel that took me by suprise. I loved the cover because it wasn't anything like I had seen before. When they described it as a graphic novel, I didn't think that it meant the story would actually capture me the way it did in traditional novels. Just because it was written in a comic book fashion didn't mean that the story was a joke. I LOVED this book. Completely untraditional and held my attention the entire way through.
