Ellie Wells 4/29

Out of the three works we read for this week, I think that I liked the TED talk the most. It was entertaining and interesting, and I think that his argument was very good. After watching that, I agreed with him that the art of a book cover was extremely important to the book as a whole. However, I do think that he over-exaggerates the effect that a book cover can have on a person. Speaking from personal experience, while book covers do make me pick up or put down a book, based on if I like it or not, I do not think that it often indicates the whole concept of the book just from an image. Maybe this is just my personal opinion, but I don't think I would do that much analyzing of a book cover before opening it. I care more about the content on the inside. I understand that this is his life's work, and so he thinks it is monumentally important, but I just do not get the same effect from book covers. 

However, I also don't one hundred percent agree with the other work about book covers either. I do think that they are important to the extent that you can get a general sense of what it is about, and pictures lure people in no matter what. Though, I do think the author's point is interesting. Thinking about it, I do think that it may make all literature more equal if one were to remove book covers across the board. Then people would have to focus on the story itself and not how fancy or nice their cover looks. And I agree, that you cannot encapsulate a whole work with simply one image. 

I just don't think that the book cover makes or breaks a work for me, and therefore they still should be a part of our reading experience. 

I also think that the work "Fictions of the Foreign" is getting too into the weeds about translation. I think at some point we have to accept that a perfect translation does not exist, and so these theories are all just personal preference. While I agree that some amount of foreignization is good, I also believe that keeping the readability of the work in tact is also important.