Friday Face Off: Coming of age

Posted on September 23, 2022 by WordsAndPeace

The Friday Face-Off was originally created by Books by Proxy:
each Friday, bloggers showcase book covers on a weekly theme.
Visit Lynn’s Books (@LynnsBooks) for a list of upcoming themes.
Please visit also Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy (@tammy_sparks)
thanks to whom I discovered this meme.

This week, the theme is
“Coming of Age“

The last book I read that deals with coming of age characters is The Sword in the Stone, the first book in the series The Once and Future King, written in 1938 by T.H. White.
I enjoyed a lot this first volume, especially as an audiobook.
Please come this way to see why.

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Click on the picture below if you want to identify the various editions
You can also right click and ‘open image in new tab’ to zoom in

My favorite cover is the first one, the Collins Abridged Junior Classic – I didn’t read the abridged version, I actually listened to it, so my edition was the very last one featured here.
But I like this cover for its colors, its detailed naïf art, that for me fits really well with the genre of the book. And we see several animals, which are very important in the story. Looks like no other designer has bothered to insert animals!

Have you read this book?
WHICH COVER IS YOUR FAVORITE? WHY?
My next participation may be on Friday, October 28,
with black covers

Friday Face Off: clocks

Posted on September 16, 2022 by WordsAndPeace

This week, the theme is
“Rage against the machine – anything, cogs, clockwork, AI“

I’ve gone simple with Clocks, and featuring here one of Agatha Christie’s novels:

The Clocks was published in 1963. I listened to it when I did my project of listening to all of Hercule Poirot. This is #30 in the series.

It’s great at the beginning, then I found it a bit slow. The plot was much more complex than it looked, despise what Hercule Poirot said.
The neat thing is the reference Agatha Christie makes to many authors of crime fiction – in Chapter 14.
There’s also a cool description of how books can take over your place or your world!

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“Sheila Webb, typist-for-hire, has arrived at 19 Wilbraham Crescent in the seaside town of Crowdean to accept a new job. What she finds is a well-dressed corpse surrounded by five clocks. Mrs. Pebmarsh, the blind owner of No. 19, denies all knowledge of ringing Sheila’s secretarial agency and asking for her by name — yet someone did. Nor does she own that many clocks. And neither woman seems to know the victim.
Colin Lamb, a young intelligence specialist working a case of his own at the nearby naval yard, happens to be on the scene at the time of Sheila Webb’s ghastly discovery. Lamb knows of only one man who can properly investigate a crime as bizarre and baffling as what happened inside No. 19 — his friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot. “

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Click on the picture below if you want to identify the various editions
You can also right click and ‘open image in new tab’ to zoom in

My favorite cover is the Dutch edition, for its cleverness. Funny that no other illustrator thought of that! Too bad it’s not more artistically done.

Have you read this book?
WHICH COVER IS YOUR FAVORITE? WHY?
My next participation may be on Friday, September 23:
“Tough Travel Tropes – Coming of Age”

Friday Face Off: a blue cover

Posted on August 12, 2022 by WordsAndPeace

This week, the theme is
“Dark/sky/navy – a cover that is blue“

I’m featuring a book with a blue cover in the edition I read it in, though interestingly enough, I don’t see any other blue cover in the other editions!

This novella (194 pages) was published in 1931.

The student of French with whom I read Barjavel’s classic scifi, La Nuit des temps (translated as The Ice People), told me it reminded her of At the Mountain of Madness. So I had to read it to see why she was saying this!
Indeed, it’s also about a scientific mission in Antarctica, and something unexpected they found there.
The discovery in At the Mountain of Madness is definitely more in the horror genre than in The Ice People, though there are commonalities about some very advanced society way way back, when there were not even supposed to be people on Earth.
Lovecraft’s style is much more scientific, with tons of very detailed descriptions related to geology for instance.
There were some super scary passages – that reminded me of a classic movie that really scared me a lot. I won’t say which one to avoid spoilers.
That could be the closest to the horror genre I will read for a while, as I usually stay away from that genre.
But definitely worth your time.

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Click on the picture below if you want to identify the various editions
You can also right click and ‘open image in new tab’ to zoom in

My favorite cover is actually the Valdemar edition in Spanish, so grey, not blue for me!

Have you read this book?
WHICH COVER IS YOUR FAVORITE? WHY?
My next participation may be on Friday, September 16:
“Rage against the machine – anything, cogs, clockwork, AI”

I can’t do it every week:
sometimes I can’t find a cover that fits in the books I have read,
and sometimes I can’t even understand the theme!