Lessons from All the Ms: Good versus Bad Dust Jackets

For this list (the opening of every book by an M author in adult fiction), since I'm going to read the beginning of a book no matter what, I don't always read the dust jacket. Occasionally, after reading the first chapter or first 10 pages, I turn back to the dust jacket to confirm what the book is about.

And I've noted a distinct difference between dust jacket blurbs that prepare me, however persuasively and enthusiastically, for the plot--"an adventurous tale in which Peter the Rabbit takes out zombies alongside Jane Austen!"--versus the dust jacket that informs me HOW I'm supposed to react to the book.

The second type is not all that different from the way Hollywood declares a movie a "cultural phenomenon" before the movie has even come out. That is, the description is more about forcing a label--and a reaction--onto the viewer/reader rather than persuading the viewer/reader to try something out.

So a dust jacket that informs me that the book is "a story for the ages that addresses life-changing and important themes, moving readers to great heights of enlightenment" is...

A BIG RED FLAG.

It is the same reason trigger warnings are part and parcel of the worst aspects of social media--the tendency to keep life carefully under control and non-threatening by labeling anything possibly ambiguous or personal or individual: responses to the work are already determined. 

If you wonder why people who watch movies warning us against AI would embrace it anyway...the above is one possible answer. Apparently, we are supposed to hate AI in one context but be grateful to it in another (I think it's tacky, across the board).

Real life isn't always safe. And fiction is inherently threatening. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author Azar Nafisi remarks that simply encountering Pride & Prejudice--with its multiple voices and perspectives and existences--is deemed a threat to a dictatorship.

The answer to art is not trigger warnings. The answer is harder and braver:

Read the stuff. Form an opinion. Who cares what the dust jacket says?