Links galore: Romance book covers and titles

I have sometimes mentioned book covers how important they are. I may also have mentioned the standardised covers found in genre literature, and especially romance novels. As individual artwork, some romance covers are beautiful and evocative, but taken as a whole, the genre suffers from some terribly cheesy artwork that occasionally makes one wonder if the artists are all copying each other's work. I have especially noticed this in traditional Regency romances, serial romance and historical bodice-rippers. Sometimes the covers really invite you to have fun with them, and that is just what these people have done:

These cover artists were really just asking for it: Longmire does romance novels.
Some of the comments are funny, some not so funny, but this blog showcases a lot of bad romance covers: Uncle Walter's Bad Romance Novel Covers.
There are some wonderful comments here, and the repetitive element is really brought to the fore:The Smart Bitches snark romance covers.
Here the Smart Bitches and friends play around with both ridiculous artwork and ridiculous titles: The Smart Bitches' romance cover caption contests.
This one is about book covers and titles in general, but features enough romance covers to warrant inclusion here: Judge a Book by its Cover.
Finally here is a bonus random romance title generator. There are actually several in existence and they cover all kinds of titles, not just romances.

I am thinking about bringing back to life an old feature of this blog: the cover snark/analysis/discussion. Actually, I would like to do more than just criticise bad covers. I want to discuss covers in general and showcase some examples I have come across. I have started updating three posts I made on the subject on my ancient book blog and I have a number of covers lined up for discussion. We shall have to see what happens after that and whether I have the stamina to keep it going.

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Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme

Reading in Reykjavík

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