Top Ten Tuesdays - Cover Art

This week's Top Ten Tuesday topic, hosted over at the Broke and the Bookish, asks do you judge a book by it's cover? Or title? Most of the time, a bad cover won't stop me from reading a book, but a good cover might drag me into something I would not have otherwise read.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman - I know I'm in the minority not liking this book, and I'm planning to read the sequel to give it another try, but part of my disgruntlement was that the cover was SO AMAZING and the book wasn't.

Something about the fog and the tree points to mystery and intrigue, and maybe silence.  Instead you get dumped into a boarding school with annoying teenagers, and very little discussion of the landscape.  Perhaps a picture of teen wizards would have been more appropriate?

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt -  I love this cover. It is bold and eye catching just in the color choices, but then it starts to look like an illusion.

Do you see the men first, or the moon?  It always takes me a while to notice the guns pointed directly at me because I see the face first.  Still thinking this might win the Booker today, so this book is on my mind anyway.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor -  I read this because it was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award, and the cover is stunning.

Look closer.  The desert... are those wings?Hmm, guess I'd want to read it to understand what the wings are for.  And seriously, you have no idea what you are in for in this book.  It was fantastic, unique, and kept my attention.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi -  Futuristic and elephants? Okay...

The Windup girl?  Is the elephant the windup girl?

I love this cover, and the book is great once you get to page 100.  I hope he writes a followup because the book does end somewhat unresolved.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner - This book had an intriguing title - the Geography of Bliss.  I have always enjoyed travel writing, and the concept of this book, to try to "figure out" why certain cultures are considered happy, was interesting enough to make me buy it for full price (I rarely do this!).

I wasn't disappointed.  Although now I want to go to Iceland more than ever.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - I resisted this book.  I love Jane Austen and hate zombies.  Right?  .... Right?  And then I was trapped on a ship in the fog for three days and this was one of three readable books in the ship library, clearly readable was a broad definition.  But then... I laughed my entire way through.  It is supposed to be campy.  It succeeds.  And in the end, I liked the alternate reason for Elizabeth Bennett not wanting to marry - because she is a master zombie hunter, of course.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub by Stanislaw Lem - This book was chosen for me by one of the hosts of the Sword and Laser podcast; we read it as one of the book club books.  The title is ultimately memorable, and also the key to the entire plot, if we can call it a plot.  This book is bizarre with an unreliable narrator, and also translated from the original Polish, about a world where history has gone missing.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace - The boy on the cover is rather... charming, don't you think?  This is a book of essays and the title essay is something I think about every time I go on a cruise.

Also memorable by DFW is his book of essays called Consider the Lobster... I try very hard not to think about it when I eat lobster, but it is enough to stop me from ordering it most of the time.

My Life in Orange by Tim Guest - I read a handful of books one year about people who had been involved in utopian society attempts or cults, and a lot of it started when I saw this book on the shelf.

The bright color, the subtitle "Growing up with the Guru," it just made me very interested.  The book itself - fascinating and disturbing.

Mozart in the Jungle by Blair Tindall - I admit it.  I was pulled in by the clever title and naughty cover image.

This book was terrible.  A grad student telling the tale of sleeping her way up in the world of classical music in NYC, lots of drugs in there too, not very believable or interesting.