Cover Issues: P.G Wodehouse

Browsing in Waterstone’s the other day I was both delighted and a little upset when I found these beautiful Jeeves and Wooster covers lurking on the classics shelves:

Gorgeous aren’t they? But why had they been brought out after I had already committed myself to the cartoony covers? My bookshelf is one of the few things I keep in any state or organisation and mismatched series are one of the most irritating things in the world (I’m still smarting that Harper Voyager changed the size of A song of Ice and Fire paperbacks after book four). But these were so stylish I almost considered ditching the Jeeves I had already and starting from scratch.

Thankfully, I didn’t, because it turns out that these are from a set of special edition Wodehouse’s – four Jeeves, four non-Jeeves – aimed at attracting new readers. Here are the others:

Top 5: Jane Austen adaptations

TV and film companies love Austen. Maybe it’s the enduring appeal of the novels, maybe it’s the huge in-built audience of Austen fans that’ll guarantee success, maybe they just like the clothing, or maybe they’re just too damn lazy to find and utilise less known novels. Who knows? Either way, it means that the market place is flooded with films, tv series, plays, webisodes – period versions, modern-day versions, Bollywood versions, time travelling versions, versions with zombies… (and that’s just for one book!) basically pretty much any ‘twist’ you can think of.

Well before I read any Austen for myself I had seen TV and film adaptations of most of her books, some good some…not so good. Here are just 5 of my favourites – and yes, they are mostly (but not all) period versions, maybe later I’ll put together a list of my favourite modern-day versions but for today it’ my all time favourites and these are simply the ones I love the most.

Cover Issues: Hesperus Books

So I as up in London today, checking out a museum exhibition on Death at the Welcome Collection (I wasn’t allowed to take photos but a few pics here for anyone interested) and I thought I might pop into the Piccadilly branch of Waterstone’s while I was there. It’s the largest bookshop in Europe. Instead of a coffee shop it has a cocktail bar and restaurant. To be honest, I’m not sure I like it – too much open space and order and display tables it doesn’t feel…booky enough and the bar was way too dimly lit for my rubbish eyes to even attempt to sit down with a drink and read my book. But it did have an independent publishers section and a few display tables focusing almost solely on foreign and translated fiction – so it was a good way to browse for books I probably wouldn’t see at all in other shops.

Anyways, as I was browsing the rather large classics section a few rather striking book covers caught my eye – and obviously the eye of the employee responsible for the classics section because they had put several of them on prominent front-facing display. I’ve got such a big to-read pile and so little money that I didn’t buy any, but when I get round to it I am definitely getting myself this edition of Heart of Darkness:

Product Spotlight: Novel Posters

New feature! Sorta.

For highlighting all those wonderful book related products I spot that aren’t books: posters, bags, jewelery, games, shelves… anything with a literary theme to it that I desperately desperately want to own but normally can’t afford/don’t have space for. Hopefully in time I’ll even feature  things I can afford, have bought, and just desperately need to show off.

First up though – price be damned, I would buy them if I had any wall space at all left! Novel Posters

The Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling
by Spineless Classics

Ok, so it looks pretty cool, a poster with images made up of text. Look a little closer though and you can tell it’s the whole book up there. A single book, from start to finish, all on one page, and turned into a beautiful work of art (personally I have to admit to not particularly liking the title font, but the book-to-image design is gorgeous). Better still the text, if you peer closely enough or have good enough eyesight, is completely legible! And it’s not just short books like this you can get – though the shorter the book, the more white space to play with. They have A Tale of Two Cities, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Pride and Prejudice, even gargantuan books like War and Peace.

And they’re not the only ones doing this sort of thing. Check out these, three different versions of Peter Pan from three different companies:

       
Peter Pan by Spineless Classics                      Peter Pan, by Litographs

Peter Pan by The Literary Gift Company

Cover Issues: The many covers of The Hobbit

As promised in my New Years post, Cover Issues is back! And to start off just a slightly silly look at how many different covers of The Hobbit I managed to discover while working in my local branch of Waterstone’s over Christmas.

Worst 5 reads of 2012

While I liked most of what I read last year there were a few duds, as there always are, that sipped through the cracks. So as a companion piece to my top 5 reads of 2012 here are 5 of the worst books I had the misfortune to encounter. This was actually a much harder list to put together than my favourites list. Three books immediately jumped out at me as some of the worst books I could recall reading ever, but it took a very long time and lots of scrolling through the blog to even remember reading the last two on my list.

Top 5 reads of 2012

So I haven’t quite finished catching up with the last of my 2012 books that need reviewing, but since none of them are going to make an appearance on either my 5 Best or 5 Worst lists this year I thought I’d just plow on and get these up.

2012 was a pretty good year for books for me, I managed to fit more books in than I have for a very long time, and I enjoyed almost all  of them – which is always good! That should probably make any ‘top 5’ of 2012 a quite difficult task, but when I actually got down to looking over the books I’d read this year the standouts were obvious. These were the books that I really loved, not just enjoyed, but ones that found a special place in my heart and that I will happily try to force on any and all acquaintances. So, in no particular order:

New Year, New Ratings System!

Happy New Year, everyone! And may your 2013 be better than my 2012 was!

It’s been almost a year now since I first started this blog as part of my new years resolution to read all the books on my shelves before I bought anymore. Looking at my ‘to-read’ list and counting up my book purchases this year (61) we can see how well that one managed! Broken new years goals aside though, it’s been fun. I haven’t kept up as well as I would like (I have a bit of a backlog of 2012 reads at the moment so expect fairly frequent posting until I get through them)  and had to drop some of my non-review features completely due to some pretty crappy stuff going on, but I plan to reinstate them for 2013.

Cover Issues – where I bitch/gush over book covers – will be back soon with a look at how many totally unnecessary covers of The Hobbit there were in the bookshop I worked in over christmas. And Top 5 will be back even sooner with a look at my top 5 (and worst 5) reads of 2012. The main change for this year though is that I’m overhauling my ratings system.

I’ve been planning and hinting at doing this for quite a while, but new years seemed the best and most logical time to actually make the change. When I started this blog I went with the standard Amazon-style 1-5 rating system, where 3 = ok, but as I actually started reviewing, and especially after I joined goodreads I found this system increasingly unsatisfactory. I rarely pick up books I actively dislike, so almost all my reads were falling into the 4 star (I liked it) zone by default, even though there could be huge gulfs between them in both the quality and my enjoyment. Meanwhile books that I really enjoyed but didn’t necessarily ‘love’ got inflated into 5 stars to compensate. So give a more accurate representation of how much I actually enjoyed a book I’m now shifting over to the goodreads rating system:

= I loved it
= I really liked it
= I liked it
= It was ok
= I didn’t like it
(With half-stars falling somewhere between these categories)

I won’t be going back to change all my previously rated books (at least I have no immediate plans to), but anything I review from now on will be rated in this way and I’ve shoved a copy of the key into the sidebar as well to try to avoid confusion.

And I think that’s about all I have to say about changes to the blog so I’ll just say thanks to everyone that follows the blog and wish you all a happy new year again while I get back to reviewing my backlog of finished books!

Cover Issues: A couple of UK/US comparissons

So I was going to do another Penguin line this month and explain why – despite being the same price as regular Penguins, and despite half that money going to AIDS charities – I simply can’t bring myself to buy any of the Penguin Red line because of the covers. I’m a horrible person, but at least I’m honest with myself…I guess.

Anyway, I decided to scrap that idea when June turned out to be the release date for two books I’ve been looking forward to ever since I heard about them. Not only did the plots look fun, but the covers were gorgeous… at least, the UK covers were gorgeous. Tracking down both books on Goodreads brought up images for the US covers first and, well… I’ll let people make their own minds up:

UK Covers:
* 

*In the interest of full disclosure this cover does have an ugly ‘SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER’ quote splashed across the bottom, I just couldn’t find pictures

US Covers:
* 

*Pre-release cover – has since been changed to the UK version

Top 5 – Female characters in children’s fiction

This month’s top 5, an issue  I think is very important – children’s books that get it right when it comes to female characters. As I’m sure a lot of girls will attest to it is disheartening as fuck when the characters who are meant to represent you are always portrayed as wimpy and annoying, relegated to a side character to fawn over the male hero or, even when given the title role, have a character arc that consists of silently putting up with all sorts of crap so that they can win the heart of a rich and handsome man they’ve barely even had a conversation with before. Not that there’s not a place for those stories – there is strength in traditional femininity and for some women finding a husband and starting a family is the most important thing,  and there’s nothing wrong with that – but it’s not true of all women and it shouldn’t be the sole characterisation of all women in literature either, especially that aimed at children in their formative years. So this month I’m going to celebrate a few authors who do something more with their female characters.

Actually, I think these days children’s books get it right more often than adult books when it comes to portraying women as something other than an object to be either won, overcome, or jerked off to. In fact, I ended up temembering so many awesome female characters that I decided to split this into two parts and do a top 5 female characters in illustrated books for smaller children next month.

Most of these books are pretty modern for the simple reason that I avoided the children’s classics that were marketed towards girls like the plague when I was a child precisely because I wasn’t a girly child, and the ‘boys own’ classics I did read didn’t have many female characters at all. This sort of marketing is actually something I would love to see change –  girls should enjoy Robin Hood and Treasure Island and boys fairy tales or Black Beauty without being made to feel abnormal for it. I’m sure there are strong female characters in older books though and I don’t mean any slight by not including the girl from ‘The Secret Garden’ or ‘Little Women’ or whatever – I simply haven’t read those books. I’ve also tried to keep it ‘children’s’ and not cross too far into  ‘teenage/young adult’ – so no Tamorra Pierce here (who does do a good job of portraying women of all personalities as strong, even if I think her plotting and worldbuilding are pretty shit) or Katnis from The Hunger Games (which I haven’t read and don’t really have any intention to). Also not included are any ‘girl disguises as boy’ plots where the reveal is meant to be a big surprise, that’s just spoilery. I’ll have to sneak that awesome heroine in through in another top five instead.