Hello everyone, and welcome to another Top 5 Wednesday.
Today I'm going to be talking about my favorite book covers.
Now there are a ton of book covers out there that I think are gorgeous, but to limit the
scope so I that can actually get through a small list of them, I'm limiting it to books that I have
enjoyed and that I own, because there are a lot of books out there that have beautiful covers,
but I ended up not liking the book itself.
I had trouble getting down to just five, so I'm cheating a little bit with my list here,
but it's okay because the more celebration of beautiful book covers, the better the world
is.
One of the categories of book art that I really love are old '80s sci-fi/fantasy book covers.
And a lot of them are terrible, but some of them are just really, really good, and you
don't usually see artwork like this on book covers anymore.
For this I'm going to talk about The Rowan series by Anne McCaffrey.
The art on these five books is just gorgeous.
It says sci-fi loud and clear, and they all feature powerful women.
The colors are great, I just...[happy sigh].
I love looking at them, I love talking about them, they're gorgeous.
So The Rowan is book one; Damia is book two; Damia's Children is book three; book four
is Lyon's Pride; and book five is The Tower and the Hive.
Book five must have been done by a different publisher or artist for some reason.
The cover art is still great, but as you can see, the spines don't match, and I don't think
that a matching set exists, which is really, really painful for me.
But overall I love the cover art on this series.
For number two on my list, I'm going to cheat a little bit and put up three books that have
very similar styled covers that I love equally.
Sunshine by Robin McKinley, Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, and The Last Unicorn
by Peter S. Beagle.
Browns, golds, bronzes are some of my favorite colors.
They are gorgeous.
They have lots of decorative elements to it.
When I first found this edition of Sunshine, I did not initially notice this, but when
I did I just fell in love with it all over again.
But if you look real closely to under the N here, the red in the N bleeds into the little
curliques around it.
Oh, it's so pretty.
I love these books, I love these covers.
I had already owned an edition of Sunshine and The Last Unicorn, but I bought both of
these editions recently just because they were so pretty.
Another book that I have additional copies of is Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.
It is a signed edition.
It was a gift to me for my birthday from some very good friends of mine.
I had not known that this cover edition existed.
When I saw it I just thought it was so funny and perfect.
If you know anything about this book, having oysters on the cover is just both brilliant
and subversive at the same time.
I adore owning this signed copy.
Fourth on my list is Heartless by Marissa Meyer.
Now this book was good.
I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed The Lunar Chronicles, but the cover is stark and
stunning and gorgeous.
I love how the red vines just shine and they're slightly raised from that black background,
with the silver wording.
I think the paperback edition is just as gorgeous, but instead of a black background it's white
and the vines are either red or black, so you're still getting a lot of that gorgeous
contrast.
This general type of design is just really up my alley.
Fifth on my list is Night of Cake and Puppets by Laini Taylor.
I have read the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.
Unpopular opinion, I know: I did not care for it as much as many other people do, but
this little short story companion to that trilogy is one of the best things I have ever
read.
It's funny, it's sweet, it's magical, it's romantic, and it took two of the characters
that I really enjoyed from the main trilogy, made them the forefront in just the absolute,
most entertaining, best way possible.
The cover art on this book really reflects that magical quirkiness of those characters.
I had borrowed it from the library and I read it that way, and I happened to stumble upon
a print version of it in a bookstore.
Didn't even know it existed, and I immediately bought it.
Because I've been so terrible in keeping this down to strictly five books anyway, we have
a bonus number six, which is basically all of the artwork of the graphic novel Saga.
Fiona Staples is magic.
If I showed you everything from the eight existing graphic novels that I really loved,
I would just be reading you the entire series.
It is that good.
Fiona Staples has a way of grabbing your attention with her art.
I was not big on graphic novels, but I happened to go into a comic book store around the time that
the first volume was published, and they had a display with this cover facing out.
It just had everything on it that I was immediately drawn to.
It has the fantasy elements, it has the sci-fi elements.
Looking at this cover for volume one, you've got a horned guy, you've got a winged woman,
she's got this great hair, they're holding various weapons from guns to swords, she's
got a baby that's got little horn nubs, and she's breastfeeding.
Just out in the open, I am here, I am feeding my child, and I am badass enough to make sure
you know and respect me.
I don't think that there is cover artwork out there that better represents what you're
going to get in a story than this.
Highly recommend, one of my favorite series of all time.
Those are all of the covers that I'm going to gush over today.
I know I didn't really limit it to top five, but all of these are worth talking about.
It was really nice to take them off of my shelf and share them with everyone.
Let me know down in the comments if you've read any of these books and what you think
of their covers.
Thanks for joining me.
No comments:
Post a Comment