Five Challenge: Great Book Covers

Dear blog,
day two of the Persnickety Snark FIVE challenge, in which I blog about which five books of 2010 have (in my opinion) the most gorgeous book covers.
This was a hugely hard sort of post to write, because anyone who stalks my blog frequently knows how much I love book covers, however many times I buy books with nice covers and then they end up being totally awful.
Anyway.  So here are my five favourites, in no particular order.

THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE by Jandy Nelson
The UK cover is nice, but the US edition is even better.  (That is, the one I've pictured here).   I'm currently reading it-almost finished- and it seems so relevant to the book.
Anyway.  Much love for this cover.

HARMONIC FEEDBACK by Tara Kelly
So I haven't actually read this yet, but look at that cover.  That alone makes it worthy of my to-read shelf on goodreads.  However, I hear it's also about music, and that's a bonus.

 LOSING FAITH by Denise Jaden
Haven't read this either. Still,  I love simplistic book covers, and so the cover of Losing Faith is right up my street.  And it's pretty. 

FALLOUT by Ellen Hopkins
*drumroll* the grand conclusion to Ellen's gritty trilogy about Kristina Georgia Snow and her addiction to methamphetamine.  I love this cover because it's so relevant to the book; what you see is what you get.  A raw, disturbed and disturbing rollercoaster that follows the lives of three teenage siblings.

LIFE, AFTER by Sarah Darer Littman
Tree. Flowers.  Beautiful font.  Enough said.

Well, that's all.  It was irritatingly hard to pick my five favourites, so I'd better post this entry before I change my mind about some of them. 

Armchair BEA: Literary Blues

Dear Blog,

Armchair BEA continues.  I think I shall miss it when it dissapears on Saturday night. Anyway, my Thursday entry will be all about books that have blue covers.  Hence the title.

I don't know why this seems a good idea.  But no other blogger seems to be talking about book covers, especially not blue ones.   

Why blue?  Well, blue is a cool colour.  And there cool books with blue covers.  For example:

River Secrets by Shannon Hale-sorry the picture is so rubbish.  The Books of Bayern have some of the most beautiful UK covers ever, to my mind, and no picture does them justice.  As I've said before, they're so pretty you don't want to read them.  I'm not too keen on the US covers because, well, they're not as pretty.  And they have models on the front.  I don't know why, but I don't like it when books have models on the front.  Probably because they destroy how I imagine the character to look.  Anyway.  The prose in River Secrets is as beautiful as the cover, and all the Bayern novels are well worth a read. (I think River Secrets is my favourite). One thing: Bayern is actually the German name for Bavaria.  Perhaps Shannon Hale could have thought something up herself instead of stealing a region in another country with another language across the Atlantic.  This is meant to be a fantasy novel.

Life as we Knew It by Susan Pfeffer-is just made of pure awesome and is what got me into dystopic/(post)apocalyptic fiction.  The UK cover is purple, but the US one has blue elements.  Anyway, I'll review Life As We Knew It soon.

I was 11 or 12 when I first read it and since then I've read many, many such novels.  Some are better.  Some are worse  But, well, I'll always look at it and think, "how awesome!"  I shall forever be glad I read it, even though I'm always worried now about how much food we have, etc. We had a powercut yesterday afternoon and you really would think an asteroid had hit the moon.  It was only off for an hour, but when it came back on I yelled, "THE LIGHTS! THE INTERNEEEEET!"

Related to my shallowness surrounding book covers, I'm spending 8 or 9 quid on the US edition of This World We Live In because I think the UK one looks like a poster for a B-movie horror film.

Lirael by Garth Nix-If you haven't read the Old Kingdom Trilogy, then where've you been?  You cannot claim to be a YA fantasy fan without having read at least some Nix. 

I think Lirael is my favourite of all the Old Kingdom books.   Epic huge-ness?  Check.  Necromancers? Check.  Talking dog, aka most awesome sidekick ever?  check.  Fantasy kingdom?  check. Steampunk-type nation?  Check.  Big mysterious, magical wall dividing aforementioned fantasy kingdom and Steampunk-type nation?  check.  Evil crow spies?  check. Misfit, unlikely heroine?  check.  Fantastically evil villain, who you can practically hear yelling, "BWAHAHAHAHA!" off the page?  check.  Armies of corpses aforementioned evil villain is trying to raise from the dead?  check...

Fearless by Tim Lott- Best.  Book.  Ever.  Simple as.  End of.  Seriously. 
This is a kind of dystopic novel, even though I didn't realise it at the time.  But it's wonderfully thought up and everything seems to be perfect and harmonious-much like The Other Side of the Island, but perhaps not as post-apocalyptic.  Still, it's there: Corporations (as every good dystopia must have), who hide the truth from the public and spread fear and corruption.
It's truly a touching book.  The first time I read it, I wept buckets at the end, but once I dried my eyes and blew my nose I smiled in that tragic sort of smile you smile when you read tragic books and something uplifting happens at the end.

The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder-although it is very much a book about oranges, the cover is blue and it deserves a mention.  I'm a huuuuuuuge fan of Jostein Gaarder.  I love the way his books open your eyes to the world and you discover things you've never even thought about before.  While much of the world critically acclaims Sophie's World, The Orange Girl is my favourite of the Gaarder books I've read. I really should talk about him one Foreign Language Friday (which, by the way, I'm not expecting to do this week with all the Armchair BEA everythings). 

Anyway.  It's wonderfully simplistic, romantic and dreamy.  It makes for a great summer read without being trashy, and will make you wish that there were trams still running in (insert tram-lacking country here), except by the seaside towns for tourists.  It is truly, quote the quote on the back from a magazine which escapes my mind, "a modern fairy tale."

Voices by Ursula Le Guin (sorry about the rubbish picture quality again)-is the second book in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, and my favourite of all Le Guin's books.  Why?  Well, Orrec and Gry  (from Gifts) make an appearance, it has some cool new characters, a war-torn city, and books.  Lots of books.  Hidden books. People giving their lives to protect the books. And so on. The city is fantastically imagined: one of those books that really opens your eyes and makes you go "wow!" as every good fantasy novel should. 

Well, there you go. Sorry I only mentioned  a few  books, but I've not been sleeping very well and I need to catch some zzzzzs before I faint with tiredness. I forgot to do a whole piece of Russian homework, and only remembered it existed when my tutor asked why I hadn't done it.  And my music theory...don't ask.  I know I've only been going for five weeks but I've been singing for six years and playing the classical guitar for a year and a half.  I should know the difference between tied notes and slurs.  Anyway, I believe it's overtiredness, which explains me not wanting to do anything vaguely extra-curricular that takes up my valuable reading/thinking about sleeping time (I don't sleep very well at all at night.  I'm just not tired at 12:45 am.  Perhaps I should become nocturnal instead).

Hooray!

Dear Blog,
Yay!  Today I got If I Stay by Gayle Forman!  Hoozah.  Review coming soon.  Also coming soon, a regular feature every Friday. 
I got the UK edition, but I keep comparing them in  my head:

Hmm.  I love them both!  I love them both so very much.  In terms of which is more relevant to the book, it's sort of hard to tell, but I think the UK cover is...well...is it more relevant?  Probably more so than a tree.  But a stark little tree all by itself with one single bud just looks so...beautiful.  And I am a sucker for pretty covers.  *sigh*  But we need nice covers, don't we? *another sigh*.  So I'll say it's a draw.  US-1, UK-1.

I just felt like sharing my joy with the world, is all.  Hooray!  I also bought Stolen by Lucy Christopher (review coming soon).  But, well, this isn't In My Mailbox so I better go.  I got Laputa: Castle in the Sky off Lovefilm.com and I better go and watch it.  

*publishes*

*goes to watch film*

Covers=Beautiful

Dear Blog,
I don't know if anybody else does a post where they post their favourite book covers on a regular basis.  If they do, I'M SORRY and I do not mean to steal your idea.  But I am a relative newbie to the book blogosphere and I have yet to explore it all.
Either way. I thought once a month or so I'd post my favourite book covers, why I like them, reccomend the book, share them with the world or some such things.  And of course categorize them.  Cheesy covers, blue covers, spotty covers, covers with models, minimalist covers, etc. etc.  I thought I'd start with some truly beautiful/pretty/gorgeous covers. 
So.  Let it begin.  But first: Presume that all these mentioned are given their UK covers.  Because I live there, they're generally (and slightly obviously) the covers I get.

Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen-and anything else by Sarah Dessen.  I love her covers just because of, well, their sort of simplicity at a first look, but when you look closer, you see they're bursting with stuff that relates to the book.  And more often than not the books are just as wonderful.  Though the formula is sort of similar in all her books (girl+boy+life changing summer=pretty much anything by Miss Dessen (except Dreamland, in which case it's girl+boy+abusive relationship), it's good fun.  It's nice to read a romance novel without vampires and creepy things lurking round every corner (I'll rant about urban fantasy later).  This is the first of her books I read and I loved it.  I read it in about two days.

River Secrets by Shannon Hale- again I mean pretty much anything in the Books of Bayern series (anyone know how many books are going to come out?).   This is the one I'm reading right now (and I'll do a review of later), but also the only one I could get a good picture of.  But no image on a blog does this justice.  The Books of Bayern covers are undoubtedly my favourite covers of any book.  They're so wonderful you want to put off reading them and just keep them in pristine condition.  It's been over 2 years since I read Enna Burning. but for one of those aforementioned 2 years I was travelling Europe so I guess it didn't count.  Anyway. 

The Ghost's Child by Sonya Hartnett-They say you should never judge a book by it's cover.  Alas, despite my best intentions more often than not that's what I do.  But what are covers there for?  To pull us in and make us interested.  Exactly.  The publishers are just begging you to judge their book covers.  Well, this is the one book in today's list that you should not judge by its cover.  Despite the beautiful covers and illustrations inside, the story itself isn't good.  At all.  I suppose my main problem with it is the main character, Maddy.  She travels the world for the first five pages and then pines after Feather for the next 200 odd.

Cyrano by Geraline McCaughrean- is based on the famous French play.  I prefer to say "based on" than "adaptation" because more often than not adaptations are lame versions for kids, like a yummy freshly squeezed orange juice diluted with too much water.   I'm familiar with two covers for this, and both are equally wonderful.  This is one of them *points to shown cover*.  And the book is truly worthy of it.  Despite the short-ness, Cyrano  will make you laugh, cry, and reccomend it to everyone you know.  In that order. I've been meaning to read the play for a while, but in truth, it's one thing to read the script and another to see actors performing it in front of you.

   

The Declaration by Gemma Malley=a truly amazing dystopic novel.  The cover does it justice.  It has a certain stark beauty about it.  I would ramble for ages about it, but my little sister wants to use the computer now.  Alas.  I better go then.  All for now.