 “Review a Book by its Cover: Part I”
Welcome once again to Fear and Loathing on a College Campus brought to you by Mikey Vu. This week, I have decided to debut a brand spanking new feature to my column that I will be using from time to time, and that is “Review a book by it’s cover.” For the first installment of this feature I will be reviewing the New York Times Best Selling Book, Running With Scissors based solely on its cover. Ahem.
Running With Scissors, from what I can best guess, is a coming of age story about a child named Little Billy that was born with a crippling genetic defect. Little Billy struggled through his childhood with a rare condition known in the medical community as Boxitus, a birth defect in which a child is born with a cardboard box for a head.
 The story takes place in a little Midwest town where apparently the grass is red and everything else is a varying shade of orange, a dramatic literary choice by Augusten Burroughs used to depict Little Billy Boxhead’s struggle to see the outside world through his box with no eyeholes. The initial part of the book largely spends time dealing with Little Billy’s struggle to fit into his school, and how he overcomes the teasing from his peers like being called “Boxy McBoxface from Cardboardville” or having them put postage stamps on his face telling him to “return to sender.”
The title, Running with Scissors, comes from the climax of the novel where Little Billy’s is in an art’s and craft’s store with his mother looking for decorative stickers for his head when she says, “Billy! Be careful! You can’t go skipping around the store with sharp objects!” To which he responds defiantly, “No mom, I’m not skipping. I’m running. Running with scissors.” Dramatic, yes I know.
The story also follows Little Billy through his tumultuous teenage life, in which he attempts to commit suicide by overdosing on packaging peanuts and bubble wrap, which in combination may seem harmless, but with Billy’s condition prove near fatal.
The huge twist in the novel comes when Billy is approached by the CIA, and offered a job as a spy because he is said to be the man with “a thousand faces” due to his uncanny ability to look like anyone with only the help of a printer, scotch tape, and a black felt sharpie.
Running With Scissors gets an enthusiastic 8 out of 10 from me, and although I have no idea what the actual book is about, I’m sure that my version would have made the New York Best Seller’s list as well.
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