Obviously, I’m stealing my book and album cover art from Amazon.com. I could scan them myself, but let’s face it, no one has that much time. So, I’m sorry for the Search Inside logo, which I suppose I could crop, but I’m simply not going to. Not if I’m going to have time to write anything, anyway. Just the fact that it bothers me should display enough anal-retentivity for anyone. But the point I was getting at is just how weird it is for me to be posting covers that are not the cover of the book that I read. In fact, I would say that over half of the covers no longer reflect the jacket in my house or from my library. How weird is that. It makes me feel like I didn’t even read it. Frankly, the cover of the Duchess of Nothing (below) is appalling, and nowhere near as interesting as the cover of the book I read. Weird.
In the same breath, however, album covers never change. And despite the ineluctable (thanks James Joyce) connection between the music and the unchanging album cover, it is the music that you can now download with no art at all. Although now, you can go to http://www.dailylit.com/ and have a chapter (or at least a chunk of pages) of any number of classic works (including Mr. Joyce) sent to your Inbox daily. Fascinating. It would be like getting THE BEST WRITTEN EMAIL EVER! Maybe they can modernize it for us and have War and Peace start: “It wuz the best uv times and de worst of em.”
The site is also neat because is shows you how many installments of the book you will get in total, which is basically worse than having a teacher assign you a certain number of pages a day. You just know if you don’t read those 27 pages by the end of the day there will be 27 more in your Inbox tomorrow. And, jeez, what if you don’t read your email for a couple of days, Tolstoy will just be sitting there getting more and more pissed. And who needs that?
I Just Read About That... 
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