I own thousands of books…literally thousands. This means that, at any one time, choosing a book to actually read can be difficult. Like Barry Schwartz claimed in his book Paradox of Choice, more options can make decisions harder. So I spend a lot of time scrolling through my To Be Read list.
I do this on Goodreads, where I can see all the covers together. (I’m a visual creature after all.) I could just as easily do it in Calibre, but I like GR’s format. Some covers are more attractive than others. As it happens, I find the picture in the above covers particularly unappealing. I don’t know why, but I do. And, as all four of those books came from my TBR list, I own four books with essentially this same yucky cover. I see it all the freakin’ time, because it has four times the likelihood of popping up, even in a randomised order, than any other book I own. So, the repetition is unavoidable and unignorable.
[You see authors/publishers, this is why you shouldn’t use easily accessible stock photos on your covers. It annoys readers, because we notice and it just looks like you didn’t put much effort into it. This certainly isn’t the only cover photo I have several books using.]
In this case, I’ve decided to do something about the situation. And the obvious answer (besides just deleting them, which isn’t my style) is to read the suckers so they never show up in my TBR list again. I’m going to spend the coming week doing what I’ve deemed an ‘annoying closeup guy’ reading challenge. I’ll read all four books back-to-back.
And I know that from an author’s perspective, it may seem a good thing that the cover got their book read, but surely having a reader start out irked isn’t an ideal situation. Of course, I’m not going to allow this irritation to colour my reviews. They will be as honest about the good and the bad as any other.
Here are the books deets:
- The Mark of Saturn, by Joseph Eastwood (This also qualifies for my TBR challenge.)
- Prophecy Foretold, by Ron Hartman (This is a review request and also qualifies for my TBR challenge.)
- Shadewright, by Dean McMillin
- Stalking Dead, by S.C. Reynolds (This is book 2 in The Vampire Hunter Series, so I’ll have to read book 1, Living Dead Girl, first. There are five books in the series. So if I like these first 2, I’ll finish it out.)
