The OF Blog: October 7 Book Porn

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

October 7 Book Porn



All of these books are Amazon purchases. The first three are gorgeous tradeback reprints of Jeffrey Ford's The Well-Built City trilogy, with the other two being respectively one for my background reading for my World War I unit that I'm writing, as well as a Spanish-language book that I learned about after Dark Wolf mentioned him in passing the other day.

Left: Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy; Memoranda; The Beyond.

I loved these books when I read them in 2003-2004 (and again a couple of years ago), so I'm certain I'll be re-reading them in the near future. What do people think of the covers and how they are interconnected?


Left: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (This is the World War I history in the minds of many and I couldn't imagine doing background reading without having this, Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring, and J.M. Winter's The Experience of World War I forming the secondary source backdrop - with any luck, this will engage the vast majority of my students); Félix de Azúa, Historia de un idiota contada por él mismo (as I said above, I haven't heard of this author until Dark Wolf mentioned him, so this title intrigued me. Might read it during my Fall Break next week).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just spent half an hour looking for the covers I wanted to illustrate my point with... no look, it looks like the book is a figment of my imagination. Although it's sitting right there on the shelf.

Anyway, I love interconnected covers. My boxset of Hitchhiker's Guide is very nice in this regard, even though google doesn't know it.

I love the Romanian edition of Pandora's Star (published in two volumes) - not least because I suggested it :) http://bp1.blogger.com/_uPJdKHe-oC8/RoTv-THeBXI/AAAAAAAAAD0/Ecbpr1srlwA/s1600-h/Pandora.jpg

No others come to mind at the moment, but for someone like me, who likes to match* her books, it's awesome.

* i.e. have all the series in a certain edition.

Camilla said...

Larry, you need a better camera. Or a brighter room.

Larry Nolen said...

Camilla,

I have only a cell phone camera to use and the lens was knocked askew sometime ago, I think. I'm getting a new one in December, so hopefully that'll help, although the room I had those books in doesn't have adequate lighting for reading.

Jen,

I'm going to look at those pics in a bit, but yes, interconnected thematic covers are kickass and these Ford ones even more so because of how well they correlate with the story. John Picacio is a very talented illustrator and it is a pleasure to look at these covers, beckoning to me only a foot away...

 
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