Tag Archives: Random House

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 | The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

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To be honest, I don’t really know what to say about Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending, and I mean that in the best way possible. I was chatting about it with @bookgaga on Twitter, and the more we talked about the book, the deeper and more complex I felt the book was. I liked Ending. It’s one of those books I wish I owned rather than just borrowed, because there were just so many passages I wanted to highlight. Reading it at a coffee shop, I alternated between “Hmm…” and “Ooh, so true.”

I read Ending because my co-worker, whose book taste I trust, told me to. “You told me to read Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” she said. “I’m returning the favour and telling you to read this book.” We both adore Major Pettigrew (my review here), and Ending is such a wonderfully short book (only 150 pages!) that I figure I might as well. (For the record, I still like Major Pettigrew better, because I got more lost in that story than in this one.) Ending is about Tony Webster, an elderly man who receives a letter from a lawyer that causes him to think about his past. A huge part of that past are Tony’s school friend Adrian, and Tony’s first serious girlfriend Veronica. As the book’s jacket tells us, “[m]emory […] is imperfect,” and Tony is forced to rethink some of the ways he’s viewed the events in his life.

Barnes caught me with the first chapter, but that may be just because I’m a sucker for school stories. I love the schoolboy humour: for example, asked to elaborate on what he meant by there being “unrest” during Henry VIII’s reign, a student replies, “I’d say there was great unrest, sir.” Juvenile, but the narrator uses that same line (“There was unrest. Great unrest.”) to end the book, and that just blew me away. What had begun as a throwaway schoolboy comment had, by the end of the story, become utterly profound. What else, after all, is there to say about life?

I also love the self-conscious reflection of the adult narrator: “Yes, of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for?” I cringe now when I remember how self-righteous and self-important I was at various episodes in school — were we ever really so naive? Barnes’ school scenes remind me of Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (brilliant book!), but with too much adult self-reflection to enter the teenage psyche as completely as Murray did.

Ending isn’t about a schoolboy, but about a man having to give up the pretensions and illusions he’d had as a boy. From looking forward to having a girlfriend to falling in love with Veronica only to have her break his heart. From dreaming of changing the world only to end up with a rather unremarkable life.

I have to admit, it took me a while to warm up to the post-school part of the book, and that’s mostly because I found Veronica such an unlikable character. She’s cold and manipulative and I just got really annoyed at Tony for being so much in love with her. I kept wanting him to dump her, and, with such a short book, was afraid the book was going to be all about their romance. In my snap judgment of Veronica, I admit I fell into the same trap Tony falls into over and over again, and perhaps my reaction to Veronica is a testament to how skillfully Barnes has used Tony as a narrator. I went from accepting Tony’s view as gospel to realizing he jumps to conclusions so often that his opinions can’t really be trusted.

“History isn’t the lies of the victors,” Tony tells us. “It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” It’s a profound statement, and one that raises so many questions about the nature of history. What role then would these survivors have played in history, and what kind of agenda do they now have in telling us the story? If they were on the sidelines, how much did they actually know about what happened? In the case of Tony’s history, we learn that he constantly has to rewrite his view of the past, as he continues to find out new things. Barnes gets a bit too obvious with comments like “Annie was part of my story, but not of this story.” We get it! Tony  is a narrator controlling the information we get, and I’m sure university English classes will have lots to discuss about lines like that and the role of the narrator. Luckily, however, Barnes also reveals it well through the plot.

We learn, along with Tony, that history, even personal history, isn’t absolute. Just because we learn another facet of someone’s story doesn’t mean we know his or her whole story. So, in the end, when certain discoveries lead Tony to revise his thinking on a couple of major characters, I found his new views yet another absolute and therefore not to be trusted. Yes, certain discoveries cast a more damning or more sympathetic light towards some characters. However, by the end of Ending, I’ve read enough to say, not “Now I understand him/her better,” but “what else have we not been told about him/her?”

Review: Blood Red Road, Moira Young

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I’d heard that Moira Young’s Blood Red Road was very similar to The Hunger Games, so as a Hunger Games fan, I was eager to check it out. There are certainly similarities: Blood Red Road also takes place in a dystopian future, the heroine Saba is an archer like Katniss, and Saba has to compete in a gladiator style Cage Match to the death like Katniss has to survive in the Hunger Games. Overall, however, I don’t think Blood Red Road quite matches up, at the very least in terms of the breadth of social commentary in Hunger Games. While Hunger Games delivers a scathing portrayal of contemporary society’s obsession with consumerism and voyeurism, Blood Red Road reads more like a straightforward action-adventure story, with its social commentary focused on the dangers of drug addiction.

That being said, Blood Red Road is still a very good book. It has a heroine much fiercer than Katniss, UFC-style fight scenes, language that reminded me of the dialogue in The Grapes of Wrath and a landscape and drug culture that reminded me of Dune. Saba’s twin brother Lugh (the “light” to Saba’s “shadow”) is kidnapped and Saba sets off to rescue him. Along the way, she is captured and forced to compete in no-holds-barred cage fighting, where she earns the nickname Angel of Death: when she fights, the “red hot” takes over and she can’t lose. People are addicted to chaal, a drug controlled by a King, and this addiction makes them either suppliant or, after a certain point, filled with bloodlust (hence the need for deathly cage fights). Saba also encounters a group of young female warrior rebels and a handsome young thief called Jack.

Young writes well. This type of writing (filled with intentional misspellings and grammatical errors) usually grates on me, but, as with Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy, I thought it worked here. Blood Red Road is a fast-paced, action-packed, exciting read. It’s already been optioned for a motion picture by Ridley Scott, and I can certainly imagine some of the scenes playing out on screen. The secondary characters are well developed and likable. I especially liked Jack, who is charming, funny and sweet. Saba’s younger sister Emmi is usually the kind of character I’d hate in books and movies, the kid who always gets involved in things and so has to be rescued several times. But I really felt for Emmi in this book, and I think it has a lot to do with my major problem with the book: Saba.

I liked Saba as a narrator, but I don’t really like her as a person. I do like that her survival instinct is so strong that she dominates the cage fights. I also like that she is so devoted to her brother, even though it’s clear (Jack even tells her so) that she puts him on too high a pedestal. We do see her vulnerability at times, and also her protective instinct toward Emmi.

Thing is, as one character says, Saba is “prickly.” Beyond that, she can be downright mean, especially to Emmi. A lot of the time, other characters were offering Saba help and friendship and she kept turning them away, preferring to be a lone wolf even when it wasn’t practical. She has to be forced to accept help, and for me, at least, she hadn’t shown enough of her vulnerability to make this anything but annoying.

I was most annoyed by Saba’s relationship with Jack. It followed a standard “I hate you (but secretly I love you)” type love story. But after a while, Saba’s insistence that she really, really hates Jack just felt forced, like the author just wanted to stretch it out just a bit longer. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t really see why Saba was so defensive, unlike in Hunger Games, for example, where I could really understand how Katniss’ society had made her so defensive and afraid to trust anyone.

Overall, however, Blood Red Road is a really good book. Definitely worth checking out for fans of The Hunger Games or Divergent or kick-ass heroines and dystopian fiction in general.