Yes, I Will Judge Them By Their Covers

The other day, the last day of summer I’d spend at home before really moving into my college apartment, I was incredibly bored. Most of the day was spent worthlessly lazing around the house, and even though I think I’m rather mellow, spending a whole day in pajamas is no bueno.

So I up and went to a few bookstores once night started to settle in. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, there’s 10+ things on my shelf I’d like to read but I know I won’t have time to when classes start up again (tomorrow). They include Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein books, 1984, Ender’s Game, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Harry Potter 7 (which really is just there so I can reread it again before the movie comes out), City of Ashes, The Hunter’s Moon, and Wicked Lovely.

Whoo. What a list. I’ve got a stack of Marvel comics I’ve got to read as well.

But let me get back to the point. Though we are told to not judge a book by a cover, I can’t help it when I walk into a bookstore with nothing on my list of books to buy. I went into Half Price Books at dusk the other day and barely remembered while I was in there that I read a positive summary on a book called Wicked Lovely—it’s about faeries and such, which I can’t really say I’ve read anything focused solely on faeries. Let me just say, if I hadn’t read the summary, based on the cover alone, I would not have even touched this book.

It looks like one of the million of teen/supposedly YA books on the shelves of any given store. I used to be in love with YA books, but now that I’m fast approaching 20 I’m teetering between the more mature YA and “adult” books now. I like fantasy and science fiction and all of that, but when every book focuses on some girl finding this fantastic boy she thinks she’ll spend forever with…and they’re both 16, I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes with every page turn. For all of these stories to end like this…there’s a huge imbalance between reality and fiction. It’s not that I’m against what the stories are saying, it must just be that I’m growing cynical in my old age. Haha.

Although, you can tell from my list that I’ve not outgrown the YA books. Some people never do.

But moving away from YA, I wanted to share a couple covers I saw on new releases that I found intriguing. I didn’t even pick up these books and read their summaries (because we were at Barnes and Noble at this point, and I really dislike buying books at full price), but the covers spoke a thousand words on their own. Often times I feel like covers do that, and that the whole cover game is really hit or miss. I don’t know if the authors get a say on what their covers look like, especially if they’re new authors. If they do, then they know what to put on the book to symbolize the story within in. If not, then the artists chosen to do so have a heckuvalot riding on their shoulders. Because whether or not we want to admit it, we do judge books by their covers.

This one, I will say I gravitated to because of the cat. I love cats. Then I like the look of it—the text more compact and not spread across the cover in boring, proper fashion. Looking at the cover, it makes me wonder if this is a novel about some old lady’s disappearance and whether or not she’s left her twelve cats all alone at her little cottage at the end of the block… Those poor kitties… Never mind what it’s about, this book will stand out against another with a simple background picture and words in a straight line across the center.

Here’s what The Vanishing of Katharina Linden is about:

“Ten-year-old Pia, who lives in the quaint German village of Bad Münstereifel, is having an especially difficult year in school. Ever since the gruesomely freakish accident that claimed her grandmother's life, she has been unmercifully teased by her classmates. Forced to socialize with the other school outcast, StinkStefan, Pia is only able to forget her troubles when their kindly neighbor, Herr Schiller, invites them over for hot chocolate and beguiles them with ghost stories. When young girls start disappearing from their small town, many parents become hysterical, but Pia and Stefan decide to find out who has taken them.”

With this one, the letters being dark and light, all on needle-thin stands, it made me feel like something eery was waiting to creep out of its pages. The letters remind me of Coraline and how I just thought the tale was particularly creepy. Then of course the word “dead” on the cover just solidifies the uneasy feeling. From first glance I would think it was a horror or suspense story, and a lot of people actually enjoy things like that. I love films but very rarely will I agree to a horror flick. So the cover isn’t there to scare people off, but to rather tickle their senses and draw them in with assurance that something will go wrong.

Here’s the summary for Procession of the Dead:

“Moving into the city to work with his small-time gangster uncle, Capac soon finds himself at the service of the Cardinal, the leader of all the criminal gangs and the ruler of the city. Capac enjoys his new life except for a few small details, including the enigmatic blind and mute monks who have a way of appearing at significant moments in Capac's life, and the fact that he can't really remember any of his life before he came to the City. Then he meets and immediately falls in love with a young woman who is determined to dig out the Cardinal's secrets.”

What I mean to say in and among all of this mess about covers is this. A picture is worth so many unspoken words and can inspire the imagination more than mere words can. I’d like to think that the words I read are things to be taken as fact (even in a work of fiction, you have to believe what the author’s telling you), where as a picture allows you to think whatever you’d like about the work. In the case of book covers, this of course may lead you to make very wrong assumptions about a book, but that’s a chance you’ll have to take. If you judge a book by the cover and read it to find that you were wrong, perhaps that’s a sign you should write your own take on it.