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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Favorite Books from Ten Series

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about our favorite books in series! I don’t think of myself as a reader particularly drawn to series, but according to my own tracking on LibraryThing, I’ve read books in over 150 series! I do tend to be most drawn to first books in series, so in order to make it more interesting, I’ve allowed myself to only pick five initial entries, five later entries. I have to have read at least two books in any given series for it to count.

Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging: I still remember picking this book up at a bookstore on vacation as a teenager and just laughing so hard I was crying. The first 5-6 books are really the best, it kind of runs out of steam in the later books, but this one is a delight.

New Moon: I will never pretend I don’t enjoy the Twilight series. They’re not good, but I like them all the same. The second book actually has what I think is the most complex material, really exploring the depth of Bella’s heartbreak when Edward leaves her in a way that feels emotionally true to the end of a first love. It also sets up the love triangle, which I don’t think is ever all that well-developed, and introduces the Volturi as very fun antagonists.

The Golden Compass: All three of the books in this trilogy are strong, but I’ll never forget the rush of reading the first one for the first time. What an incredible world Pullman builds!

Bring Up The Bodies: Wolf Hall, the first in this series, tends to be the most well-regarded but I honestly found it pretty boring and kind of a slog. But this, the second one, was much livelier to me, with Anne Boleyn a worthy opponent to Thomas Cromwell’s scheming. I still haven’t read the third but it’s on my list!

The Hunger Games: As much as Harry Potter really drove the YA boom, I think it was The Hunger Games that gave it continued life. Dystopia is a well-worn genre and many of the story elements have been done before throughout various forms of media but Collins built such compelling characters and told it so well that it launched a bazillion imitators.

A Wind in the Door: I’ve read the four core books in this series dozens of times each, and while all but A Swiftly Tilting Planet have been my favorite at some point or another, the one that sticks with me the most is the second with its core themes of love and connection.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I am not usually a crime thriller girly, but this series (particularly the first, but I also enjoyed the sequels) pulled me in and didn’t let go.

Dead to the World: Another vampire series about which I will make no claims to artistic merit, but they’re so fun and silly and charming. Like many readers my favorite is this one, where Viking vampire Erik Northman loses his memory and falls in love with Sookie Stackhouse.

Sabriel: One of my all-time favorites. The sequels are also really solid but the first one is so great I’ve read it over and over and over again.

The Year of the Flood: I loved both this and its predecessor Oryx & Crake, but this one pulls away for bringing in a female perspective to balance the very male energy of the first boo.

Top Ten Tuesday: Covers That Made Want to Read/Buy the Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a pretty covers week…we’re talking about books we decided to read because we liked the cover! I don’t know that the cover has ever actually been the deciding factor for me, but I won’t lie that the good ones catch my eye and make me curious about what they might be about…which sometimes results in a purchase/read!

A Tale For The Time Being 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Interestings

Sabriel

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging

The Fountainhead

Stardust

The Luminaries

Shantaram

 

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters Whose Jobs I’d Love To Have

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about characters with jobs we would want to have. I don’t read a lot of books that take place in the workplace, but here is what I came up with!

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): Who doesn’t want to be handsome, clever, and rich…and bored enough because you don’t need to do anything productive that you start playing matchmaker with your friends?

Margo Manning (Death Prefers Blondes): I mean, I don’t know that I would have ever come up with “ringleader of a group of drag queen catburglars” as a job description, but now that I know it’s out there I want it.

Daisy Jones (Daisy Jones and the Six): A beautiful, talented singer developing a slow burn attraction to a hot, talented musician? There are worse jobs to have!

Selin (The Idiot): I sometimes wish I had the chance to go back to college and do it over, I feel like I would pick more interesting classes! Being a college student again, especially at Harvard, would be so interesting.

Georgie McCool (Landline): I don’t know that I think I would be any good at it, but working as a TV comedy writer sounds like fun!

Maud Bailey (Possession): There’s a part of me that always wishes I’d gone into academia, which may be one of the reasons I think longingly about being a college student again. Honestly, the idea of getting to research my interests all day every day is the dream!

Tess Durbeyfield (Tess of the D’Urbervilles): It’s not so much that I think I have any natural gift or even longing for outdoor work, but the book makes Tess’s experience as a shepherdess feel so idyllic that I want to give it a try.

Vianne Rocher (Chocolat): I don’t actually have any particular fondness for eating chocolate, though I do love the smell, so I think I might make a good chocolatier. At least I wouldn’t be tempted to eat my wares!

Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo): Being a genius hacker helping solve mysteries and take down hateful people wouldn’t suck.

Clarice Starling (The Silence of the Lambs): Doing criminal profiling for the FBI was at one point very much my dream job!

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Antiheroes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is actually a villain freebie, so I decided to make a list of the best heroes-of-the-book that are actually the villains (which to be honest, usually means they’re more interesting).

Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair): Becky is an unapologetic relentless social climber who thinks nothing of manipulating wealthy men to get their affection and is about a billion times more compelling than her sweet-natured friend Amelia.

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): She and her husband Nick are both awful people, but honestly I’m always glad that Amy gets away with it.

Jaime Lannister (A Storm of Swords): Jaime was a fairly straightforward villain in the first two books, but when we start getting his perspective in the third one…he’s still terrible but he’s much more sympathetic.

Nick Naylor (Thank You For Smoking): The gleeful amorality with which this tobacco lobbyist/spokeman plies his trade is delightful.

Humbert Humbert (Lolita): He preys on a child and actively seeks to isolate her so he can continue to take advantage of her. But there’s something captivating about him, a testament to Nabokov’s skill as a writer.

Hannibal Lector (The Silence of the Lambs): He’s suave and sophisticated and totally brilliant and eats people. Shame about the last.

Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo): Lisbeth is violent and doesn’t care about most people. She’s amazing and terrifying and enthralling.

Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall): He’s basically the male version of Becky Sharp in his eagerness to throw morality aside to climb the ladder and then stay at the top, except he’s real and since he’s a dude he doesn’t have to play the marriage game to get power.

Henry Winter (The Secret History): He’s rich, obscenely smart, and dynamic, and it’s easy to see him through Richard’s enchanted eyes and forget that he killed a person accidentally and then killed his own friend when he thought he might have to face consequences for the first death.

Alex DeLarge (A Clockwork Orange): Alex so enjoys his life of rampaging around fulfilling every cruel urge he has that you almost feel a little sad when he’s brainwashed into being unable to do it anymore. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Books to Pull You Out of a Reading Slump

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking at reading slumps, and the books that will pull you out of one! This is honestly kind of tricky for me, because I don’t really get into reading slumps, so I don’t really know what I would look for to pull me out of one. But these are books that I think are enjoyable in a way that could work for someone who just can’t get hyped to read anything else.

The Hunger Games: These books are compelling without being especially challenging…there’s enough narrative tension here that you get sucked in, without having too many characters or excessive world-building to slog through.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: If you’re still looking for something tense but are actually in search of something a little more complex that demands more of your focus, you can’t go wrong with this trilogy.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: But what if you’re thinking you want something breezy? This book is very light and very funny. Since it’s literally structured like a diary, there’s not a sense of interrupting the plot if you want to put it down for any reason, which makes it an easy read.

Me Talk Pretty One Day: Another funny one (the kind that makes you laugh out loud in public), structured as vignettes so easy to pick up and put down as necessary, and it’s nonfiction if that appeals!

Stardust: If you do want to find yourself drawn into another world, this book feels like a fairy tale for adults…there’s darkness here, but fundamentally it’s sweet and often gently humorous.

Station Eleven: Post-apocalyptic stories are done to death, but this take, which flashes back and forth between our present and 15 years after a global pandemic, is slower and more meditative than most. It gives you characters to get invested in and big questions to ponder.

The Girl With All The Gifts: Still in the general fantasy realm but much grittier and with more momentum, this take on a zombie story is hard to put down even if you don’t think you’re that into zombie stories. There’s a good balance of characterization and plot.

City of Thieves: How about some historical fiction? This book, set during the siege of Leningrad, is short but still full, with a strong coming-of-age story that develops a friendship you find yourself caring about. There’s nothing “new” here but it’s very well-executed.

Moonglow: World War II plays into the story here, but there’s also a family saga told with warmth and humor likely to please readers who enjoy character-based stories.

Spook: Just to close out with something completely different, this book about ghosts/the soul/what happens to the not-body parts of “us” after we die takes on various beliefs about the afterlife with charming, infectious curiosity.

Top Ten Tuesday: Popular Books that Lived Up to the Hype

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! If you’ve ever read a book everyone told you was really good, and thought “really?” when you finally finished it, you’ve been bitten by the hype bug. I think a lot of us have gotten a little gun-shy over the years about the next hyped release! So here are ten books that (at least for me, everyone has different tastes) actually lived up to high expectations!

Jane Eyre: Classics, especially “beloved” classics, have literally hundreds of years of hype. I thought this book was going to be a straightforward romance and was delighted to find a story about a young woman coming into her own that happened to end with marriage. It’s really good, y’all!

War and Peace: I tell everyone I’ve read War and Peace both because it’s a gigantic classic and half the point of reading it is to brag about it but ALSO because it’s honestly an incredible book that people think is intimidating and likely serious and boring and it is long but it is wonderful.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I resisted this one for a long time because mystery/thriller is not a genre I’ve had particular luck with and I figured that its bestseller status confirmed that it was dumb. Joke’s on me for being snobby, once I read it I raced to get the sequels because I looooved it.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember a list I read several years back that said this was the best book since the turn of the century, which made me raise my eyebrows because it’s a book about dudes writing comic books. How good could it be? The answer is: phenomenal.

The Hunger Games: I don’t read a ton of YA. I’m not trying to sound like I’m hating on it, but I usually find that I’m looking for books with more complex characters/plots and more elegant prose styling for my personally most enjoyable reading experiences. So when this series got a ton of buzz, I kind of wrote it off as not for me and then I raced through all three of them because they’re so good.

Gone Girl: A missing wife. A husband with a secret. Sounds like something you pick up at the airport to read on the plane and immediately forget. But I found myself staying up late and reading while I ate because I didn’t want to put it down and that Cool Girl breakdown is a masterpiece.

Americanah: I read this just recently and there have been years of continually low-level hype about it that made me almost sure it would inevitably disappoint. Nope, turns out it really is that good.

A Game of Thrones: I actually watched the first season of the show before I picked up the books. Though I love The Lord of the Rings, I’d tried reading some other fantasy epics before and they’d just never clicked, but these books are so damn good and I re-read one over the holidays every year and I just want the sixth one nowwwwwwww.

Me Talk Pretty One Day: People love David Sedaris, which had always made me a little wary. Humor can be tricky on the page, and I’ve often found myself reading things that are supposed to be funny and being completely flummoxed. But happily, this book kept me laughing and I’ve picked up several of his other works to read.

Big Little Lies: I literally just posted my review of this last week, so I won’t belabor the point. I read it as the miniseries (which I STILL haven’t watched) was airing and getting raves so I read it at Peak Hype and still really liked it.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Vivid Reading Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books for which we have particularly vivid and detailed reading memories. I don’t often have super strong recollections of where I was and who I was with when I read (even if I really like the book!), but for some books, I do, and here are ten of them.

Fifty Shades of Grey: I KNOW, okay? I have very vivid memories of reading these blissfully brain-engagement free books on the boat at my mom’s house when I was studying for the bar exam. I raced through them, because goodness knows I needed something easy on the gray matter that summer.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Another memory very tied to the boat…years after their big popularity boom, I read them over the summer after my first year of law school. That year in particular was not great for me in a lot of ways, so I relished getting lost in these twisty, propulsive books.

Never Let Me Go: I can still picture the little purple bookcase in my room my senior year of college that this book sat on after I read it for the first time…and the couch in our living room that I read it on.

The Virgin Suicides: I remember picking this up at the bookstore and starting to read it while sitting in the backseat on the way home with my mom and sister and getting really excited about seeing Bon Secours Hospital, where I was born, turn up in the text.

A Wrinkle In Time: This is very unglamorous, but in the interests of honesty, this book was always sitting in a basket in the bathroom with reading material growing up and so I read and re-read it over and over again in there in little bits at a time.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: I remember getting this book in high school and staying up late to read it (my light dim so I could turn it off quickly if my mom came to tell me to go to sleep), trying desperately to stifle the sound of my laughter.

Zodiac: This isn’t really honeymoon reading, but that’s when I read it. There was one night we were in Chicago that we had a just crazy thunderstorm (the night we were going to go down to the fireworks at the Navy Pier, in fact) and I remember sitting on the little loveseat by the window and just hearing the thunder crash while I read.

A Suitable Boy: This isn’t just one memory, because this book is crazy long, but I remember very much living at home after my sophomore year of college and reading this book when I wasn’t working my very short-lived stint as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store. I would stay up in my room for hours because it was so absorbing.

The Awakening: We read this book late my senior year of high school in AP English and got these really cheap paperbacks, and I remember very much freaking out because I’d managed to rip off a big chunk of the cover accidentally. Thankfully it was only like $5 to replace it.

Gone With The Wind: My mom once dated a guy who had a cottage in northern Michigan on Torch Lake and I remember that we went up there for a long weekend one summer to open it and this is what I was reading…it’s forever linked in my mind with the slightly musty smell of a house that’s been shut up all winter.

Top Ten Tuesday: Series I Have Given Up On

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re looking to series we’ve tasted and decided not to go back for a second helping of. I don’t do a ton of series reading, to be honest, but here are ten books that didn’t do it well enough for me to pick up sequels.

Crazy Rich Asians: This series is usually pitched as a frothy delight, and for me, it was a little too frothy. I didn’t care enough about any of the characters to feel compelled to continue to follow them.

The Hangman’s Daughter: I’m convinced it must have been poor translation that made this book such a dud, because it’s got a bunch of sequels and there was nothing I read that made me feel like even one was necessary.

The Paper Magician: This book was fine and made good airplane reading (engaging enough to keep you reading along, but not threatening to make you actually think) but it didn’t have the spark that made me want to re-immerse myself in its world.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: I read and loved the original trilogy, but I’m generally not into the idea of a new writer picking up where another left off…and nothing I’ve read about the quality of the continuation makes me feel any particular regret about this.

Divergent: I thought the first one was alright, but the second one was definitely not good. The final entry was widely panned, so I will be a-okay if I never read it.

The Giver: One of my favorite books as a teenager, I think it told such a good story that the idea of continuing on doesn’t feel remotely necessary.

Eragon: I read and really liked the first one when it came out, and then when the second one came out I read like 100 pages and never picked it back up again and can’t muster up an interest in getting back into it.

Dune: I know there are people who just can’t get enough of this world since there are approximately a billion sequels, but the first one was more than enough for me.

Wicked: I’ve re-read this book probably a dozen times, I like it that much, and I’ve liked other work by Maguire, but the idea of reading the sequels has like zero appeal.

Uglies: I read the first and second one and enjoyed them both and then just lost interest entirely.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Take Place In Other Countries

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! While I read mostly books set in the country in which I was born and live (which I imagine many of us do), my reading goes all over the world! And that’s something I love about reading, how I can travel anywhere I want from my chair/bed/reading locale of the moment. Here are ten mostly recent-ish reads that take place outside of the US that I really enjoyed!

The Bear and the Nightingale (Russia): I’ve written about this Slavic folklored-based young adult book before to tell you how much I loved it but I LOVED it! The first two books in this series are both great, honestly, and I can’t wait for the third to come this summer!

Stay With Me (Nigeria): You think you know where this book might be headed when a couple’s interfering, traditional in-laws get the husband a second wife because his first one hasn’t gotten pregnant yet…but you have no idea. And the plot continues to twist on and on in ways that are completely unexpected.

Rebecca (England): This Gothic suspense novel has lots of repression, largely takes place on a countryside estate, and features a head housekeeper as the main antagonist, so it’s very English indeed.

The Blind Assassin (Canada): Margaret Atwood is Canadian after all, so it’s only reasonable that she sets this incredible, rich story in her homeland.

The Book Thief (Germany): Bring all the tissues for this World War 2 story about a young orphaned girl who loves to read.

Big Little Lies (Australia): I still haven’t managed to sit down and watch the TV show (which was set in California), but the book was super entertaining and it just goes to show that rich lady competitive mommy-ing is not a uniquely American phenomenon.

The Queen of the Night (France): There’s a little bit at the beginning that’s in America, and another bit in Germany, but this is mostly in Napoleonic France and it has the best kind of truly insane plot and I love it so much.

The God of Small Things (India): This is one of my two “cheats”, because I first read this book quite some time ago, but it’s so good and basically anything I know about Kerala at all comes from this book.

In The Woods (Ireland): I don’t read a lot of mystery, because I find it gets formulaic and often is plot-over-character when I prefer the other way around. But this book has inspired me to collect the rest of the Dublin Murder Squad series because it was so well-told and I want to read mooooore.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Sweden): My second cheat, because I read these books during the summer of my first year in law school, but I did really love this trilogy, the first book especially. I’ve got no interest in the continuing series with a new author, though.

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Original Books I’ve Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is original books. When I think of books that are original, I think of books that are kind of the first of their kind or kicked off a trend. I don’t tend to read a lot of books that fall into any sort of avant-garde category, so there are the books I’ve read that I think changed up the landscape for what came after them (and some that are just kind of offbeat).

Lord of the Rings: Forget just books, I think most high fantasy movies and video games owe a significant debt to J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork. My husband loves playing the Elder Scrolls video games, and I couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen the LOTR movies beforehand because they have so much in common.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: While the book itself is certainly an enjoyable twisty mystery, it’s really here for the amazing character of Lisbeth Salander. Usually a slight female is the victim, but she turns all that on its head and is a brutal force to be reckoned with in her own right.

Gone Girl: Besides some genuinely shocking twists and a depiction of a compelling female sociopath (a rare creature indeed), this book propelled a boom in domestic thrillers. How many times have you seen something labeled “the next Gone Girl”? Exactly.

Life of Pi: I can’t think of another book that tells a story quite like this one: a teenage boy trapped on a lifeboat with a variety of zoo animals, including a Bengal tiger, floating in the Pacific Ocean. Or was he trapped with any animals at all?

In Cold Blood: Truman Capote’s incredible work basically created new genre: the non-fiction novel. Pretty darn original.

Bridget Jones’ Diary: This hysterically funny book kicked off a boom in “chick lit” with flawed, quirky heroines. None of them were quite as much fun to spend time with as Bridget.

Moby-Dick: When I read this a few years ago on a classics binge, I was expecting something boring. But it’s actually very modern, interspersing its revenge saga with details about whales and whaling that made it surprisingly enjoyable.

American Gods: Gaiman’s incredible book manages to juggle multiple threads and characters along with an incredible main story about a clash between the gods people brought to the US from “the Old World” and the ones they’ve raised in the New. There’s nothing quite like it that I’ve read.

A Wrinkle In Time: Maybe it’s not nearly as special as I remember it, but to this day I don’t know that I’ve ever come across as defiantly prickly a character as Meg Murray in a YA book…when I was a prickly girl myself, discovering Meg felt like a revelation.

Flowers for Algernon: I don’t think I’ve ever read another book quite like this one, with its trajectory of genius found and lost. It’s a heart-ripper.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Kept Me Up Late To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s theme is “one sitting books”. Now I read a lot (obviously), but I almost never read a book in one sitting. That’s just not the way I do things. So rather, in the spirit of the theme, I’ve made my list out of books that kept me up late to read. I’m usually pretty good about putting my book down at bedtime, because I’m one of those people who doesn’t function well after a bad night of sleep. But sometimes, I’m just too into it and I can’t make myself do the smart thing and get back to it tomorrow. So here are ten books that kept me up late at night to read them!

The Queen of the Night: Even though I’m usually a character-over-plot reader, I could not get enough of this plot-heavy historical fiction mystery. I kept promising myself just one more chapter until I went to sleep, and then one more, and one more…

The Last One: This book’s story, about a woman on a reality TV survival show when a deadly pandemic strikes, deconstructs the way we respond to these kinds of shows and the action is hard to tear yourself away from. I loved this book.

Green Girl: This was a very recent read, and even though I didn’t actually like it that much, I found it very difficult to turn away from the tale of a lost young American woman in London trying to figure out the world.

Dead Until Dark: All of the books in the Southern Vampire Mysteries did this for me, honestly. They’re breezy and light and so easy to get sucked into and hard to put down.

Gone Girl: Didn’t we all get totally drawn into this book when we read it? The mystery of the first half, and the twist, and then wondering how it’ll all end up…how could you sleep before you find out how it resolves?

Anna Karenina: I found this gigantic Russian tome to be incredibly compelling. I finished it in about 5 days, which meant a few days of less-than-ideal resting but I couldn’t tear myself away from Anna’s tragic story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Before I finally picked the first of these Swedish mystery/thrillers, I thought they couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. But then I opened the first one, and found it really hard to close it again until it was over.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Ok, fellow nerds who were growing up in the Harry Potter midnight-release-party era, you gonna pretend like you didn’t get the book and then immediately stay up all night until you knew how the saga ended? Didn’t think so.

Child 44: I grab a lot of books that look mildly interesting off of Kindle sale pages, because for 2 or 3 dollars, why not? This was a bit hard to get into at the beginning, but once it took off, it really took off and I had a really hard time turning off the light to take a break and rest

We Need To Talk About Kevin: Even though you know from the beginning how it ends, the way it unfolds is what keeps your attention. I kept turning the pages to dive deeper long past I should have been getting some shut-eye

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is All About Visuals. I had a hard time with this initially, since I’m not a graphic novel person, but I decided for this week I’d highlight some of my favorite book covers! A great cover can really make a book stand out…even when I’m browsing through NetGalley and Edelweiss, I find myself drawn to covers when I’m thinking about what I might want to read next, sometimes even more than the authors! And I’m just going through trade editions for this purpose…the fancy special edition hardcovers are just not fair to compete with.

The Great Gatsby: This cover is just iconic. The woman’s face superimposed over the city sky, the single tear, the naked ladies inside the eyes…instantly recognizable.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: That statute, which actually existed in the Savannah cemetery, was apparently removed because people were tromping through so much to see it (at least, that’s what my husband told me based on a childhood visit to Savannah).

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: So bright, so bold, so eye-catching.

To Kill A Mockingbird: That tree, so symbolic in the story, is a perfect cover. Striking in its simplicity.

Twilight: Two pale hands, offering an apple. The apple and its connotation of falling innocence, gives you a subconscious clue to what you’ll find inside. I know there is a lot of disdain for the content of the book, but the cover design is amazing.

Life of Pi: It’s so straightforward- a dark skinned boy, curled in the fetal position, in a small boat with a tiger, surrounded by fish. But doesn’t it promise one heck of a story within the pages?

The Hunger Games: Considering how deeply the role and power of symbols is explored over the course of this series, that the first cover is essentially just the mockingjay pin, arrow in its beak is perfect.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: A dorky looking boy on a broomstick, with a visible scar on his forehead, trying to catch…something. A unicorn racing by. Three dog faces in the corner. All of this sets you up for a magic story unlike any you’ve ever read before.

The Handmaid’s Tale: Those two figures on the cover are so ambiguous. You can’t tell who they’re supposed to be, not even if they’re boys or girls. It’s the kind of thing that makes you look again.

A Million Little Pieces: This was actually the inspiration for the direction I chose this week. Even though it turned out the book was a bunch of crap, that image of teeny sprinkles clinging to fingers is so evocative and intriguing.

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