Top Ten Tuesday: Books with [xxx] On the Cover

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

• March 1: Books I Enjoyed, but Have Never Mentioned On My Blog
• March 8: Books With Your Favourite Trope/Theme
• March 15: Books On My Spring 2022 TBR
• March 22: Books With an Adjective in the Title
• March 29: 21st Century Books I Think Will Become Classics Someday
• April 5: YA Books I Think Will Become Classics Someday
• April 12: Authors I’ve Not Read Yet, But Who I Want To Read
• April 19: Bookish Merchandise I’d Love to Own

---

How did we reach summertime already? April draws to a close and the clocks have leapt forwards, my 0530 runs have become light enough not to need a head torch, daffodils and bluebells line the road, blossom decks my apple trees. And there is a definite warmth in the air.

This week’s topic is to select something that it on the cover of books, whether it be sexy people, hot men, nature, dragons, flowers, colours, geometric designs…. there are almost too many things to choose from. And covers is a topic that I sometimes have difficulty with: I rarely buy physical copies of books, so the covers that appear on my kindle are not always drawn from the official UK covers. But, nevermind that! Let us try to pull together some covers drawn from my more recent purchases.

Love Marriage, Monica Ali

What draws these book covers together is two-fold: the geometry of the design and the boldness of the vibrant colours. I do adore the 1960s vibe on Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue and am reading Careless – as a longlisted Women’s Prize book – at the moment. Careless is a great read, creatinga wonderfully vulnerable voice in its narrator, Bess, even if some of the commentary about the care system is a little overt for my liking.

My favourite book here? The Death of Vivek Oji, without a doubt: powerful, heart wrenching, haunting… just like everything else written by Akwaeke Emezi and their new novel You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty is released next month and has a cover as gorgeous as its title!

• The Sentence, Louise Erdich
• Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell
• The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
• The Mothers, Brit Bennett
• Detranstition Baby, Torrey Peters
• The Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi
• The Candy House, Jennifer Egan
• Careless, Kirsty Capes
• Home Going, Yaa Gyasi

Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith

I am so close to finishing this one and am loving it, after a somewhat slow start! The supernatural running through it is so unlike anything I’ve read for a while, and the interplay of the various strands and they way they are wrapping up around one another like a snake coiling itself around its prey is remarkable. As one of the core images in this book is serpentine, let’s consider books with snakes and serpents on the cover. Do I include dragons?

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed The Essex Serpent! It really was one of those books that you could immerse yourself in and disappear into another world, another time! And both Ninth House and A Natural History of Dragons were great, fun reads!

• The Leviathan, Rosie Andrews
• Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
• Serpent and Dove, Shelby Mahurin
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson
• A Natural History of Dragons, Marie Brennan
• The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
• A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
• The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
• Highfire, Eoin Colfer

October, October, Katya Balen

This book was wonderful and I adored the depiction of October, as this child raised by her father in the wild woods, finding wildness in the world around her even when forced to move to London with her mother and attend that least wild of all institutions, a school.

The cover for To Kill A Mockingbird is stunning in its simplicity and beauty – I’m not sure where it came from, some limited edition, but it is gorgeous! And both Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and H Is For Hawk deal with grief and bereavement in astonishingly powerful ways.

• See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt
• Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Max Porter
• The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
• The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah
• H Is For Hawk, Helen MacDonald
• The World That We Knew, Alice Hoffman
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• This is How You Lose The Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

---

Once again, far too many books for a Top Ten, but hopefully something in these three lists that spark a conversation or pique someone’s interest in these books. Let me know what has attracted your eye in the comments!

Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes

May 3: One-Word Reviews for the Last Ten Books I Read (submitted by Susan @ Bloggin’ ’bout Books)
May 10: Bookish Characters (these could be readers, writers, authors, librarians, professors, etc.)
May 17: Books I Was SO EXCITED to Get, but Still Haven’t Read (bonus points if you tell us how long it’s been since you got them!)
May 24: Book Quote Freebie (Share your favorite book quotes that fit a theme of your choosing! These could be quotes about books/reading, or quotes from books. Some examples are: quotes for book lovers, quotes that prove reading is the best thing ever, funny things characters have said, romantic declarations, pretty scenery descriptions, witty snippets of dialogue, etc.)
May 31: Comfort Reads (Share which books or kinds of books you turn to when you need to escape. You can either share specific titles if you love to re-read, or you could share qualities of books you look for in a comfort read.)