Posts tagged link

Judging a book by the cover | Manila Bulletin

This article (written by Blooey) is very relevant to my interests. Paint me red and call me shallow, but I do judge a book by its cover. It’s this habit of mine that introduced me to some of the best book cover designers that I wouldn’t have bothered knowing about were I not so keen on paying attention (undue, some people might argue) to book covers. My favorite, as I’ve said a million times, is Jonathan Gray aka gray318. His designs are invariably original and refreshing. His style is utterly distinctive that it’s difficult for me not to recognize a gray318-designed book even from yards away. I had even bought books I’d never heard about solely because the covers were designed by him. Did the pages between those covers turn out to be any good? Luckily, yes. The guy is yet to design a good cover for a bad book, I believe.

I also collect multiple copies with different covers of books that I really like, including White Noise, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Then We Came to the End. My ultimate goal, though, is to collect all extant editions of my favorite Bible book, The Catcher in the Rye — a task which entails scouring eBay and Amazon for hours on end every week for reasonably priced old ones. Here’s my latest catch, won after a nasty bidding war with Shinji, a fellow Holden Caulfield worshiper:

Going back to the article — I’d have liked to read what the author and her respondents thought of generally not being able to judge an e-book by its cover. I’m not a fan of e-books, but recently I’ve been enjoying iBooks, an iPhone e-reading app which displays the books installed on the application on a virtual shelf showing their covers. Most of the books I’ve downloaded so far are from Project Gutenberg, and they simply come with plain text covers showing the title and the author. The only one with an artistically rendered cover is the complimentary, pre-installed Winnie-the-Pooh book. And surprise, surprise, that’s the only one I’ve read in my iBooks collection so far, which goes to show that my inclination towards good book cover design transcends media. Heh.

An Abundance of Hyperlinks

“Book blogs are all the rage these days,” a friend tweeted several days ago. I can’t say I don’t agree with him. While I lack the statistics to support our shared observation, I can truthfully say that book bloggers for some reason have steadily been increasing in number for the past few weeks. 

Read Hard!, a Tumblr book club managed by Zet and Carina, who naturally are book bloggers themselves, was launched just last May, yet member count as of yesterday is already at almost 800. A quick visit to the Books category, under which Read Hard! is of course listed, in the Tumblr directory (which may or may not count as scientific data) will also show you a mix, somewhat confusing in the number and arrangement of its contents, of international book blog titles and avatars, most notable of which are those of Casey and Laura. 

Honey, a fellow Filipino blogger, also reinforced our point when she recently posted a list, by no means definitive, of both old and new book blogs created and run by Filipinos. The list, aside from putting me on the same page as Rise and speed reader and marginalia writer extraordinaire Sasha, lets others, Filipino or otherwise, know of more book blogs that are hopefully worth following. A similar directory is also being developed by Chachic. Worth mentioning as well is the incredible community of Filipinos on Goodreads, a social networking site for book lovers.

Arguably the cherry on top of this series of fortunate book blogging events, however, is the ongoing Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Jennifer of Crazy-for-Books. The Hop runs on a string of directories updated weekly with over 200 links to book blogs from all over the worldwide Web. The idea is to explore the blogs on the lists and submit your own if you’re so inclined. 

In the spirit of the Twitter Friday Follow, the Book Blogger Hop is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and find new book-related blogs that we may be missing out on! This weekly BOOK PARTY is an awesome opportunity for book bloggers to connect with other book lovers, make new friends, support each other, and generally just share our love of books! It will also give blog readers a chance to find other book blogs that they may not know existed! So, grab the logo, post about the Hop on your blog, and start HOPPING…

A couple of readers and fellow book bloggers have already chimed in, saying in the comments section that they discovered my blog through the Hop. If you did, too, the Hop guidelines suggest that you let me know by leaving a comment below. That way I could visit your blog and leave a comment on it as well. Sort of like the principle behind the famed emoticon in that Miranda July film.

Know any more book blogs I should be hopping to and “pooping back and forth” with?