These days, with no plans in the evenings and nowhere I can travel on the weekends, I have started looking inward for entertainment, mainly at the boxes of books in my closet. Last November, I discovered there was a not-actually-secret-but-nobody-else-cares-about-them stash of books in English at another English teacher’s house. Intent on restarting the  “Aomori ALT Library,” I filled up my car a couple times and brought some of them home. I still have less than half of the books from that storage shed, but the winter snow discouraged me from driving all the way out to his town for more. Six hundred are enough, right? It only took me a couple Saturdays to put all the titles into a spreadsheet, complete with authors and genres. Now anyone in my area can borrow books from my library, and I can spend these free evenings reading and experimenting with books.

My current experiment started as a way to motivate myself to read more. It has been a few years since I read many books for fun, so I needed a method to get myself back into reading like I did as a teenager. Since I came to Japan, I got busy with traveling and socializing. In college, I read tons of books for my literature major, but these left little time or motivation for pleasure reading. Now that I actually have plenty of books to read and time to do it, all I had to do was start. So I decided to start with one box and an experiment. My experiment? Test my accuracy in judging books by their covers. Taking the box of books sorted by authors starting with “A,” I started reading whatever books caught my attention first, and seeing how they matched up to my judgments solely based on the front cover. I’m now only halfway done with box “A,” but I think it is far enough that I can pass judgment on myself.

The verdict of this experiment? The old adage runs true. Here it is in my own words: I suck at judging a book by its cover. But there’s something more I gained from this experiment: I don’t always know what I will like until I try it. 

So let’s have some examples.

The first book to catch my attention was deceptive.

This cover would pass for a book in the children or young adult section of the library I grew up visiting. It looks like a magical story based in a historical time period. I started reading. Yes, more fantasy than historical. Nope, not for kids. Right in the first chapter, she gets a steamy vision with the chest of a man she will meet later that day and save from execution by…marrying him? Oh, boy. Some magic and mystery in this one, but my interest was ruined by the characters I could not enjoy reading about. I have not read many romances before apparently. Are they all about girls who try to act strong but then get wimpy when hot guys with ripped chests show up? I’ll have to try some other books. This one went back to the box without being finished. 

With the next one, I discovered there are exceptions to not being able to judge a book from the cover. For example, this one is exactly what it says and appears on the cover:

I started reading, knowing it would not be a keeper. Whew. Steamy. Literally. The steamy bath vision thing caused by some love talisman. Twice. This book did not last long in my hands. It went back to the box before I got through the second chapter, but not before I flipped through the rest of the book, quickly. I was just curious. It got worse the farther I went. Or it got better, I suppose, if you are into that kind of book. 

Moving on, this next one surprised me:

Exciting cover, eh? Looks like another hot romance. Holding back my misgivings from the previous two historical romances I could not get through, I started to read. This one was exciting. But not in the way I expected. The story was engaging, some of the main characters were complex enough to keep me reading, and it was certainly not very sexy as the cover made me presume. There was more action and actual plot-line holding this story together outside the romance, which was still there, of course. It made me want to study European history. I finished this book. 

A few books later, some of which were just boring and I did not finish, but others engaging enough to the end but left me wondering why I spent my time reading them, I got bored of the other book covers in box “A.” It was time to see if anything in box “B” could catch my attention. I found one right away:

Well, the title sounds good. I liked reading fantasy as a kid, but certainly not fantasy with this kind of cover. Nice outfit. Let’s see how it holds up to the promises on the cover. 

I started at 7 o’clock in the evening. Over five hours later, I was glad my work the next day was not demanding because it turned into a late night. Not only was the story a unique fantasy adventure in a fascinating magical world, it came complete with a unique history, magical beings, and engaging characters. The main character was a girl that I actually liked and could respect. Now that’s rare. Her love interest was respectful and kind, too. He was not a man who gets his way by being sexy and forceful like too many of the other books I recently flipped through. I am not a night owl, but it kept me up reading after midnight then left me wanting more of the story, more of this author’s world and characters. The only problem with the book besides finishing it: the cover is a lie. Yes, she wore a dress like the one on the cover once in the book, but it certainly wasn’t the evening when she was scaling walls to rescue a friend wrongly accused. 

So I proved to myself what everyone already knows: you cannot judge a book (for the most part) by its cover. Who is designing these things anyway? Some authors need to take more care with their covers. The takeaway from my experiment so far is that I don’t always know if something is worthwhile until I try it out.  I also need to catch myself when I am wasting my time. If something is not working, the book is not worth reading, it is time to move on and cut losses. There is much more out there to read, experience, and do in life. I still have many boxes of books left in the closet to examine more deeply. I won’t know if I like them until I try them. What have you tried that surprised you?