By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book based solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews! Just look at that cover. It cracks me up every time I see it. If those boys aren’t English then I’m the Queen of Sheba! I found this book in a used bookstore drawn instantly by those rascally faces and the title that seemed so appropriate. This just had to be a novel set in England. And indeed it is — Birmingham of the 1970’s. It is framed by opening and closing pages…

Read More By its Cover: The Rotters’ Club

BY ITS COVER READING

~Beasts Of Extraordinary Circumstance Ruth Emmie Lang If a little bit of happy is what you’re in need of then you’ll enjoy reading this enchanting book. It’s warm and inviting and light and charming, without ever being silly. On the day Weylyn Grey was born, the doctor knew there was something special about him when it started to snow…in the middle of June. Years later when Weylyn’s parents die in a car crash during a snowstorm, he grabs the emergency money from underneath the mattress and runs away to the woods where he is taken in and raised by a pack…

Read More Bits and Bobs from the Bookshelf

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~The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo Taylor Jenkins Reid  At 79, Evelyn Hugo has spent her adult life as a Hollywood darling. Now that everyone important to her is dead, she has decided to put a tell-all memoir of her life out into the world… to be published posthumously. Evelyn knows her story will be a hot commodity: after years of her life playing out in the media she then chose to hide herself away in relative anonymity. It is something of a surprise then that she hires an unknown journalist to write the book. Evelyn grew up poor and trades her…

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~Killers Of The Flower Moon David Gann A true crime story that makes your blood boil and stuns you into stony silence at the potential for human depravity. In the 1800’s the Osage Indians were run off their reservations several times by the US government, in the end being forced to hand over nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land. In the 1870’s they found land in Kansas that was so hilly and rocky they deemed it of no interest to the white man and decided to purchase it. Then, in an amazing twist of fate, it turned out that…

Read More Bits and Bobs from the Bookshelf

READING

By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book based solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews! Ben Ziskind, former child prodigy, recently divorced and feeling very sorry for himself is at a cocktail party in a museum that his twin sister has all but dragged him to.  When he spies a painting of an old man hovering above a city which he recognizes from the wall of his childhood home, he steals it. Just takes it off the wall and waltzes out the door with a million dollar Chagall.…

Read More By Its Cover: The World To Come

BY ITS COVER READING

By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews! I grabbed this book on the way out of the library, drawn by its whimsical rendering of double decker buses. To be honest, I have a rather bad habit of leaving the library with a stack of books that I can barely carry let alone find time to read. But after perusing the first few pages of this short book, I was pulled in by its clever writing and charmingly daft premise: that the perfect timing…

Read More By Its Cover: The Maintenance of Headway

BY ITS COVER READING