Attachment and detachment

I'll admit it, as much as it may destroy my credibility.

I judge books by their covers. Not only by their covers, but by their titles. Even by the author bios (too detailed is usually a bad sign.) Especially by the typeface the author used. (I have a visceral, physical reaction to Times New Roman, that personality-devoid gray suit of fonts--and don't even get me started on the hideous cutesy crayon purée that is Comic Sans.)

Which is why I picked up Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera: I've always loved the title. And the book did not disappoint: it's the kind of lush, epic story which you fall into, which wraps you up in meandering plot and gorgeous imagery. The book traces the lives of three people in a Colombian town in the Caribbean (the location is never really clear): a hopeless romantic, a levelheaded scientific, and the beautiful woman whom both pursue. It's absolutely lovely, although in a sense, it's almost too easy to become absorbed in the story and forget that none of the three self-absorbed characters is really very likeable. All are, however, very real, incredibly funny, and at times appallingly unromantic: their worst flaws coexist with the beautiful, decades-long love story like, well, cholera and love.

On the other hand, Herman Hesse's spare, short Siddhartha was a chore to get through. The novella is the iconic story of a man named Siddhartha, who encounters the Buddha and eventually attains nirvana after a winding journey through the stages of life. (I was so clueless when I started reading it that I initially thought the Siddhartha of the title was the Buddha. Confusing.) I had heard corroborated, rave reviews of this book as a life-changing masterpiece of literature.

Maybe it's my unenlightened frame of mind (I do yoga, but generally, and unfortunately, with thoughts and to-do lists swirling in my head) or my general lack of patience for allegorical tales with meanings buried beneath layers of stories about forests and animals and boat-men and rivers. Perhaps I'll pick it up again ten years from now and glean all the meaning that was supposed to burst forth like wisdom from the realized soul. But Wednesday's mindset just couldn't handle hokey phrases like "Her mouth fell open like a freshly cut fig" or the protagonist's need to refer to himself in the third person ('"Siddhartha is going to eat now,' said Siddhartha.")

Argh.

The cover, though, was beautiful.