Yesterday I went to a Gymboree. For those who don't have a small child, Gymboree is a children's clothing store (sort of) and an indoor playground (in a way). It's the type of place where hyperactive children of inattentive parents run around while inattentive parents of hyperactive children watch the mayhem and congratulate each other on the accomplishments of their respective offspring.

"Oh! Ashley is so big! Is she rolling over yet?" Apparently rolling over is a barometer of a child's development.

"Yes! She rolls all on her own! I can't leave her on the counter anymore!" This while the other child, a boy of about one and a half with a sagging diaper and a fascination for all things pony, runs hither and yon searching for the...?

As I said, yesterday I went to a Gymboree. The event that occasioned my presence at such an unholy establishment was a birthday. The young boy who spends most of the week in my girlfriend's charge, while his mother tends to his younger (and much bigger) sister, was turing two and his parents had decided on Gymboree as the most appropriate locale. I was in attendance as my girlfriend's date and as a ready-made excuse so we could leave at the first available opportunity.

With the setting chosen and squared away, the boy's parents had set about inviting 15 or so other children (and their parental accessories) to delight in all that is Gymboree.

And so, at about three in the afternoon, a flock of children one, two, and all ages in between, descended upon the padded, multi-colored indoor playground tucked between a Noah's Bagels and an auto parts store.

For the first fifteen or twenty minutes (after repeated admonishments to remove our shoes, but to leave our socks on [adults], or remove socks as well ["little ones"]) it seemed that the celebration was going to consist of little ones scrambling up and down decoratively cushioned variations of jungle-gyms. It soon became clear, however, that all this unscripted behavior was causing some anxiety among the adult population of the room.

In short order, a child-adult liaison was dispatched to round up the little ones. Tambourine in hand, she shook and shook mesmerizing every child until all the little ones where seated in a circle, attentively awaiting instructions.

The first task was rattles. Shake the rattles in time with the music. *SHAKE* *SHAKE* No, Peter, in time with the music. *SHAKE* *SHAKE* Megan. Megan! No, we're not playing on the horsy right now. We're shaking. *SHAKE* *SHAKE*

We sounded like a mariachi band on crack.

That task done, it was time to let the little ones loose. Once again they were sent our on their own. They ran. They jumped. They slid. They fell.

Time for another activity! Rocket-ship! To my eye, the improvised rocket-ship looked nothing like it's namesake. It was more like a 16 foot-long green and purple clown penis. The little ones were made to climb the circus cock and 1, 2, 3, jump! to the floor (with the help of their grown-ups, of course).

Another job finished, another round of, well, playing. Run. Jump. Slide. Fall. The rest of the party (I assume; we left after cake was served) carried on in this familiar pattern. Play. Work. Play. Work.

Even though my time at Gymboree was, thankfully, brief, I came away from it with the impression that some parents, specifically the breed that forces a game of scamper-up-the-clown-shaft on their little ones, view parenting as raising little adults. These parents were only comfortable with playing for short bursts. After that, as the average blood pressure of the room began to rise, a well-defined goal was needed to calm the children, and thus the parents, down.

The conclusion I draw from this is that places like Gymboree are designed for the parents' benefit more than the little ones'. Indeed, from observing the children, there was no difference between the play time and work time -- they were equally captivated by both. The parents, however, all breathed a collective sigh every time a new, and controlled, activity was introduced.

So, what are the little ones learning from these scripted activities? I suggest they're learning to play by the book. But, is that really playing?

Had you picked up a copy of John LeCarré's thriller, The Constant Gardener, six months ago, you would have found a sedate, humble-looking book: subdued aqua tones, brown lettering, and the silhouettes of flying insects.

Pick up a copy today -- if you can find one -- and you find quite a different picture: the face of the actor Ralph Fiennes, dirty, bruised, struggling across an African savannah. In a transparent, almost profile above him, like a cathedral mosaic, you see Fiennes and the actress Rachel Weisz in an embrace. Both co-star in the movie adaptation of LeCarré's novel. And, as modern publishing custom appears to dictate, both now appear on the cover of the book itself.

This phenomenon has been going on for some time. In 1990, LeCarré's The Russia House was adapted for the screen, and today one can still find dog-eared copies of the novel with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover, cheek to cheek. It has become an expected, and not altogether pleasant, reality in modern literature: if a book becomes a movie, the cover becomes a movie poster. And underneath the image on the cover, you will read those familiar, tantalizing words: "Now a Major Motion Picture."

There are more examples than we can discuss: thrillers (Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and Hannibal now sport Anthony Hopkins' sinister sneer on the cover), modern novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours features Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman in sad assembly), and even works by novelists now considered canonical (Graham Greene's The Quiet American shows Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser under a fiery brushstroke image of a geisha). The trend is everywhere.

And it is extremely irritating.

To see a book cover updated with images of movie actors, in various states of distress, anguish, ecstasy, or earnest contemplation, is like a seed in the teeth. Why? One reason is that the movie followed the book, and not the other way around. Although the movie has been adapted from the book, a sort of devolution has taken place; the work of fiction that inspired the film has now become a billboard that serves it. Original literature is reduced to a new kind of movie tie-in.

It is helpful here to distinguish between the movie tie-in and the movie adaptation. A movie tie-in is marketed with the release of a movie. The novelization of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Woodring Stover, accompanied the movie's release (and in this rare case, preceded it). By contrast, the photograph of Hopkins and Emma Thompson on the cover of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day followed the movie's success. The book was branded with the movie image.

This cheats us as readers. It assumes we are only consumers of products, rather than digesters of art. It assumes we don't mind having our art packaged in recognizable wrappers, a family of products easy to spot. Like many covert messages in our capitalist marketplace, the unspoken message runs something like this: Buy the book and be a part of something. A fad, a movement, everyone is doing it. Ride the wave, don't be left out. Even if we don't want to participate in this commoditization, we may not have a choice. Unless you are buying used or at a bookstore with slow turnover, you will not find a copy of The Constant Gardener with the original cover today.

What may be worse is that this phenomenon cheats our actual reading experience. One of the joys of reading is the priming of the imagination. Words, tone, characters shape the flow of pictures and thought in our mind so that we are see the events of the book our way. Each of us experiences a novel's events singularly and uniquely.

But once a film image has been attached, it is not so easy to separate our mental pictures from the ones supplied for us. The images are delivered ready-made. In a way, this is a kind of relief; we don't have to work so hard to conjure up our own experience. We get lazy. We let the book cover fill in the blanks. And we lose out on one of the great exercises of living: the use of our imagination. Think of Harry Potter. The lankier, shy Harry I pictured when I read the books has now been morphed in my mind into a sort of stretched-out Daniel Radcliffe from the movie adaptations. It's nearly impossible for my mind to stick to its original image.

I don't mind walking great distances. But give me a moving sidewalk in an airport, and I absolutely need to be on it. If it's shut down for repairs, I feel irritated, and the walk is twice as tiring. My reader's imagination is a similar beast: a joyful exercise until another source of movement is introduced. Equipped with the book cover, who can resist it? Who can now flex those imagination muscles?

My copy of The English Patient bears the kissing faces of Ralph Fiennes (there he is, again) and Kristin Scott Thomas. I saw the movie before I read the book. Thus it was a surprise to me that most of the story revolves not around Fiennes' and Thomas' characters, but around the military nurse, Hana, and the Sikh soldier, Kip. What the cover (and the movie) led me to expect did not map to what I eventually read.

But the cover reminded me of the movie, which I had loved. The photograph stirred up the emotions I felt while watching the film. I wanted to feel them again. I bought the book.

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