hosted by Booking Through Thursday
This week’s question, the flip side of last week’s …
Are there any good books that you read IN SPITE OF the cover and ended up wondering what on earth the artist and publisher were thinking to pair up a cover that so badly represented a perfectly good book?
And … if you didn’t like the cover, what made you pick up the book? The author? Assigned reading from school? A recommendation from a friend?
I typically don’t judge a book too much based on the cover and after I read a book, I usually give the cover some credit, even if I didn’t care for it. However, there are still books I like with covers that I don’t like.
The Golden by Lucius Shepard is a good example. The cover doesn’t badly represent the book, as the book is about vampires and there are vampires on the cover. It just looks cheesy to me and doesn’t really make me want to read it. It looks like a bad vampire book. I read it because it was recommended to me by a friend as a wonderful horror novel and it was pretty good.
The entire Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris is another good example. No, the covers aren’t terrible, but I don’t like them. I would have never picked up the series had I not seen the first season of True Blood, realized it was based off a book, and headed to the store in search of the books. When I saw the cover for the first time, I knew that even if I had seen the books somewhere before, I would have overlooked them completely. I feel like the covers make the series look like something it’s not. The covers actually represent each book quite perfectly, though, in terms of what scenes are on the covers. They are just too cute or something.
I’ve learned not to judge books by their covers because I read a lot of classics. Most of the time, the covers aren’t the original covers when I see the books in the store. All of the classics are the same design for the most part, so I can’t tell anything about the book by the cover and I have to look closely for anything to stand out at me. I have to look at the title and synopsis to make a real decision. That being said, the books are always classics, meaning 99% of the time I’ve heard of the book, are familiar with the title, and possibly know some more information about the book, so I’m also going off of that, too.
When I read a book, I pick it up based on various factors. Titles entice me more than covers. A good synopsis usually reels me in. Recommendations from people I trust, bloggers, goodreads friends, and the various goodreads recommendation algorithms are all things I look at. Also, anything my husband recommends is always awesome, even though he’s not a big reader. Reviews are always helpful and I look at reviews quite often, which is why I’m not a big fan of spoilers in reviews. I just sort of skim through a few in each star rating to figure out if there is anything that sticks out at me as being desirable or undesirable when reading.