BTT: Judging By a Cover

A week late ~ Last week’s Booking Through Thursday question asked…

CAN you judge a book by its cover?

Sometimes, I think you can. I’m a total cover-junkie, so I very, very often pick out books based on their cover art. And, sometimes, yes, I’m disappointed, as the cover turned out to be better than what was inside. But, a lot of the time, the covers actually are fantastic, and the story inside turns out to be really good, too!

In fact, I’ve had it happen where I’ll have gone into a local Chapters bookstore and browsed for book titles — writing down the titles & authors in my notebook, based on which covers jumped out at me from the shelves (aka. which cover art I loved!). Then I’ll go home and look those books up in the library’s catalogue. If the library has them, I’ll put a hold on them, so I can give the books a try. And, some of those ‘finds’ have ended up being Top 10′s for me!

Below are some covers of books that I chose — based on the cover art, originally — that I ended up loving the stories of, too:

       

((“A Hopeless Romantic” by Harriet Evans | “Evermore” by Alyson Noel | “Perfect Timing” by Jill Mansell | “Shadow Hills” by Anastasia Hopcus | “Switch” by Chip & Dan Heath))

Of course, there have been some books whose covers were great, and whose back-blurbs/descriptions made them sound like they’d be good reads, that only turned out to be really not my cup of tea… for example:

         

((“Love Came Unexpectedly” by Ruth Scofield | “Bitten” by Kelley Armstrong | “Sloth” by Wendy Wasserstein | “Hurricanes in Paradise” by Denise Hildreth | “Solitary” by Travis Thrasher))

So, I think it’s true that you can sometimes judge a book by its cover… but not always. I think I do okay, though, choosing books by the covers — because I always read the description, too, and the book has to pass the test of both before it’ll go on my TBR list.

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