Author Archives: Jaclyn

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About Jaclyn

Reader, writer, bookaholic for life!

On book covers

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My sister sometimes makes fun of me and how much stock I put in book covers. Browsing through a bookshop or flipping through the IFOA booklet, she’d ask me what I thought of one book or the other, and my response usually is, “Ooh, I love that cover!” or “Meh, the cover doesn’t grab me.” My sister would then ask, “No, what do you think of the story?” and I’d go, “Story?”

Now, I don’t usually buy a book simply because of the cover art. Usually, it takes at least an eye-catching cover and a gripping first page to make me buy a book. That being said, in this age of e-books, it’s even more important for print books to be works of art in their printed form, and I appreciate it when publishers make the extra effort to provide that. One book I boughtprimarily for the book design is Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys. The story, about an art student and his class, is pretty good, but what really makes this book pop is the book design. Beyond the eye catching cover art, the text on the title page, copyright page and table of contents scroll right off the edges of the pages. Harper Collins offers a view of the first few pages here, but it’s an effect you can appreciate only from the physical book. I love it, and I think it’s a great example of the extra wow factor book design can give a print book.

Cheese Monkeys actually made me a Chip Kidd fan, and I am absolutely in love with his latest work — the cover of the single volume edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. Now this image is beautiful enough, but what the picture doesn’t show is that the book jacket is actually in two layers. An onion skin layer covers the image of the woman, and, my personal favourite part, the portions of the woman’s face within the book title are printed on the onion skin layer and left white on the layer beneath. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone wrote about how the onion skin layer on this cover is defiantly fragile. This seems antithetical to the sturdiness people look for in hardcovers, but it’s also a beautiful testament to the ephemerality of Aomame and Tengo’s love story. I also love that, even with colour e-readers now out, the physical 1Q84 will still have the advantage of design; the e-book version will necessarily merge both cover layers into one image, and it will still be beautiful, just not as beautiful.

I also love the cover of Jose Saramago’s Cain. Featuring a detail from thepainting Cain and Abel by Titian (oil on canvas, 298 x 282 cm, 1542-44), this cover is both beautiful and powerful. It takes the horror and violence of the Titian painting and makes it personal, by focusing on the brothers. You can almost feel Cain’s rage emanating from the cover. Abel’s death is almost secondary; this is an image of action and movement. You can almost feel that weapon being smashed down. Cain just blew me away, overall. A powerful story, in just as powerful a package.


I am a huge fan of the Penguin Essentials series. I love the cover art so much that I bought that edition of The Great Gatsby, even though I already own another edition of that book. I love the playful cover art, and I love that these books are small enough to tuck into your jacket pocket.

One of my recent favourites from Penguin however is the hardcover edition of Madame Bovary, translated by Lydia Davis. I loved the beautiful, subdued cover so much that I chose to buy the hardcover rather than buy the e-book or wait for the paperback. Then I saw the paperback edition recently, and just love it as well. I especially like how both covers are so different, how they set such a different tone for the same novel, and yet, to me at least, are both equally beautiful.

Paperback

Hardcover

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When it comes to Agatha Christie books, I usually love buying super old, ratty, used versions. Call me romantic; I love the idea of a fellow Christie fan having enjoyed that book before me. But the Harper Collins re-releases of Christie’s works have such beautiful covers that I admit I’m tempted to start buying brand-new Christies. You can find a comprehensive list with images on this Agatha Christie website, but here are a few of my personal favourites.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two of my favourite covers from the past year, both from Anansi:

The cover for The Sisters Brothers is just absolutely iconic. Simple, stylized, yet very striking. I love how the Sisters brothers’ heads feature as the skull’s eyeholes. I especially love how the red eyes act as both the eyes of the cowboys (giving them both sinister, one-eyed glares) and the eyes of the skull. You can remove the top and bottom thirds of the cover, and the image is instantly recognizable as The Sisters Brothers, at least for bibliophiles who’ve read so much buzz for this book over the past year. At the very least, I’d say it’s the most striking, most memorable cover among the 2011 Man Booker Prize finalists.

I also love this cover for Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English. My boss and I were discussing this cover recently, and she told me she just kept discovering more birds than she expected: “I thought that was just a collar!” At first glance, it’s a simple silhouette with striking colours. But a closer inspection reveals a jigsaw-like fit of birds and boy, and I love that this cover forces you to look closely to see all that.

 

 

Finally, a couple of gift editions that I just find so beautiful I think they’re well worth the additional cost:

The Giver by Lois Lowry changed my life when I first read it, with its story about thinking for yourself and questioning even things you grew up believing were true. I love my copy for sentimental reasons, yellowed pages and all. But this one, with beautiful illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline, is just absolutely beautiful. I was literally moved when I first saw it. I love that such a wonderful book has been given such a beautiful edition. And I love turning the pages, reading Lowry’s words, seeing Ibatoulline’s art, and just being drawn back in to the magic of Jonas’ world.

Christopher Moore’s Lamb is a classic, a re-telling of the Gospels by Christ’s childhood friend Biff. It’s hilarious, entertaining and just a great book overall, and this is a case, I think, where the design is just perfect for the text. This gift edition of Lamb looks just like an old, fancy Bible, complete with ornate gold lettering and a ribbon bookmark. The utter seriousness of this design is wonderfully cheeky considering the subject matter, and I love it.

 

How about you? What’s your favourite book cover art? Have you ever bought a book just because, or at least mostly because, it was so beautiful?

 

Review | In Session, M.J. Rose

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It all began when thriller writers Lee Child and Barry Eisler were chatting online about their characters, Jack Reacher and John Rain, taking each other on. Fellow thriller writer M.J. Rose suggested that her character, sex therapist Dr. Morgan Snow, psychoanalyze these tough men. Rose also got Steve Berry and his Cotton Malone on board, and the result is In Session. It’s a novelty e-book and audiobook rather than a full-fledged novel, and it is priced as such ($1.99 international price for the Kindle edition). The book is also for a good cause — all the proceeds of the audiobook and part of the proceeds of the e-book will be donated to David Baldacci’s Wish You Well Foundation, which supports family literacy. The stories aren’t thrillers, but fans of these characters may be interested in seeing their hidden, vulnerable side.

Full disclosure: I’ve never read any of these authors, though Lee Child and Steve Berry at least have been on my list of thriller authors to try. So for me, Rose’s stories provided a bit of an introduction to these characters. I love finding out in the Acknowledgements how involved these authors were in writing these stories; even if Rose wrote the stories, I’m at least assured that the characters are somehow still true to the originals.

I enjoyed the Cotton Malone story mostly because his partner, Cassiopeia Vitt, seems like such an intriguing character. What Malone reveals about his childhood also makes me want to find out more about him. Big bonus: Malone owns a rare book shop. That’s my kind of hero! Berry edited Malone’s dialogue and provided details of the rare book shop. I liked both, so I’m definitely checking out this series.

The John Rain story is my favourite. The introduction that brings Snow and Rain together is all right, but their conversation in the park is stellar — nuanced and realistic. Turns out Eisler co-wrote that scene with Rose on Google Docs in real-time, which helps explain why the dialogue flowed so naturally.

The Jack Reacher scene was my least favourite, and probably the most disappointing because Reacher was the one I most wanted to find out about. It was mostly a story within a story, which made Snow’s presence seem superfluous. Perhaps it’s because I also don’t know what Reacher does exactly that I spent the first few pages wondering why he was coming to Snow’s rescue. Did he just happen to be passing by, does he work in the area, or is he an Emergency Response specialist? Clearly, anyone familiar with Reacher wouldn’t have these questions, but it just felt more forced than the other two.

Snow herself was just okay, though in fairness she wasn’t the focus of any of the vignettes. Still, even though we see glimpses of her personal life, she just didn’t strike me enough to make me want to rush out and read more about her. Personal preference, and perhaps I just need to see her in a thriller setting to really get a feel for her character.

Overall, In Session is an inexpensive e-book and audiobook for a good cause, worth reading to get a peek into some of the contemporary thriller genre’s most well-known characters.

Review | The Very Picture of You, Isabel Wolff

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Isabel Wolff’s The Very Picture of You is a light, feel-good read with likable characters. The novel has some beautiful, deeply emotional moments, and also has some scenes where the narrator tries a bit too hard to tell us about the emotion, and thus lessens the scene’s impact. Ella is a portrait painter who is hired by her half-sister Chloe to paint her fiance Nate. Ella had taken an instant dislike to Nate, but as she paints him, grows to fall in love with him.

I personally found the subplots more interesting. Behind Ella’s dislike of Nate is her hurt at her father’s abandoning the family when she was a child. In an especially poignant scene, Ella confesses that when her mother said she’d lost all photos of her father, Ella as a child

drew and painted him, obsessively […] And I believed that if I did a really good picture of him — so that it was the very picture of him — then that would somehow make him come back.

It’s a beautiful, child-like, innocent wish, one that stands in marked contrast against the adult Ella’s immediate distaste when her father emails her asking to meet up. The adult Ella is scarred, and her desire to refuse all contact with her father, warring with her lifelong desire to connect with him is a very emotional struggle, with which I can completely sympathize.

In some ways however, Wolff ends up overemphasizing the emotions. For example, when Ella reads her father’s first email, Wolff intersperses the letter with Ella’s reactions to each line. I felt like I was watching a TV sitcom with the laugh track telling me when something was funny.

There’s a passage I love where Ella describes the portraits she paints:

…a competent portrait just catches a likeness, and a good portrait reveals aspects of the sitter’s character. But a great portrait will show something about the sitter that they didn’t even know themselves.

It’s a beautiful description of Ella’s artistic process and gives added significance to the scenes with Ella’s subjects. With each one, she ends up discovering something the subject originally tried to keep secret. I found these side stories interesting and the characters sympathetic, though sometimes the parallels with Ella’s own life felt forced.

The main plot, Ella’s struggle not to fall in love with her sister’s fiance, felt a bit more cookie cutter and therefore less compelling. Ella forms a snap judgment against Nate, based on something she overhears. I found that conflict shallow and contrived, especially since it could easily have been resolved by a simple conversation. Later on, when she realizes she’s misjudged him and is actually attracted to him, it felt too sudden for me, and I think that’s partly because I found her gripe against him too easily resolved.

At times, Wolff injects so much symbolism that some scenes felt like a Katherine Heigl romantic comedy or a Nicholas Sparks melodrama that took itself far too seriously. For example, Chloe is most drawn to the “Giselle” wedding dress, inspired by the ballet of the same name. As the novel takes pains to explain to us, Giselle kills herself after being two-timed by her lover Albrecht. (I think she actually dies of a broken heart, but the general theme remains.) I love the reference to a ballet; I hate the ham-fisted symbolism.

The novel’s ending also felt too convenient, and the pun in the last couple of paragraphs just made me wince. It reminded me of puns or one-liners that sometimes end Harlequin novels, but the romance in this book just took itself too seriously to make that fit.

Still, like I said, the parts about Ella’s art and her relationship with her parents were interesting. I really like the loving stepfather, and I absolutely love the complexity of Ella’s mother. Ella’s portrait of her reveals pain:

On the surface it was the pose of a ballerina taking a curtain call, her left hand spread elegantly across her chest. But it was also a defensive gesture […] shielding her heart.

This image of vulnerability is coupled with a contrasting image of the woman’s being

every inch the prima ballerina. She didn’t just ‘sit’ in a chair — she folded herself into it, ensuring that there was a graceful ‘line’ to her body, that her limbs were positioned harmoniously and that her head was at an elegant angle to her neck.

With these images, we see what Ella meant about her portrait revealing the subject. Here is a proud woman, who always wants to maintain the illusion of control by disguising her pain. She is a controlling, manipulative figure who drives Chloe crazy with her iron control over the wedding plans, yet she is also scarred and sympathetic. She is probably my favourite character in the novel, and Ella’s relationship with her one of the plot points I found most interesting.

Picture falters in the romance department and could have used more subtlety in its presentation, but it also depicts an interesting family dynamic and I love the idea of art revealing things even the subject may not realize about himself.