Simply Alone
My assignment this week is to design a book cover for Jonathan Franzen’s book “How to be Alone.” The first step was to res
earch the book and become familiar enough with it to create the design.
The book is a collection of seemingly random essays, but based on the excerpts and reviews I was able to read, there is an underlying theme. One which fascinated me. The title implies alone-ness, and you might ask the question, why would anyone want to be alone.
“How to be Alone” is actually about escaping the busyness of life. Its goal is to express the need to step back from the crowd of busy, frenzied people in order to actually see what’s going on around you.
It was published in 2002, and now in 2011 people are even busier and pay less attention to each other. We keep up with “what’s going on” through Facebook and other social mediums.
Keeping our lives as simple as possible is the only way to “be alone” and “see” the people in our lives.
from my notebook 