How E-readers Can Ruin Your Day

Okay, so they can also save the day. But the point I'm trying to make is that sometimes you should judge a book by its cover.

I've always judged books by their covers. I don't always let that affect my decision to read a book--in fact, I'll acknowledge that a frivolous cover is going to enclose a frivolous story, and read it anyway. Sometimes it does affect it--I didn't read the Chronicles of Narnia for years because the editions they had back then were very science-fiction in design.

The hilarious website foreveryoungadult.com addresses the embarrassment of reading good books with awful covers (or awful books with awful covers) in their Cover Story features. One of their recently reviewed covers was this latest retelling of Pride and Prejudice: 

Pride and Prejudice sequels are a genre that I haven't tried, but let's say most of them--even the vampire ones--have fairly respectable covers. Women in dresses with empire waists and cameo pins automatically equal classiness. This, however, reflects the horrors within. However, if by some chance you'd always imagined Darcy as a brooding guitarist, you could read this with no public shame.

Alice's governess never knew she was reading Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Sadly, e-readers can't protect you from everything. Many people, myself included, will hear a title that sounds good, and get it on their Nook or Kindle. With this kind of instant gratification, you don't even have to read the blurb. Recently, I was browsing the ebook section of the my library's website for some light reading...

"This...is light?"

and decided to look up this book I had enjoyed as a kid, called The Forestwife. Well, they didn't have it, but instead showed me The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Intrigued by the title, and thinking it was probably some scary forest like in a fairy tale...

I went ahead and started reading it. After some initial confusion, I realized that this was another take on the love triangles of Twilight and The Hunger Games with one significant deviation: Zombies.

Fortunately, the zombies were not the love interests, so I wasn't subjected to any necrophilia. Anyway, this tired out plot in another incarnation could have been avoided if I had taken a look at the hardcover edition of the book and its sequels:

All the dead girls might have  clued me in.
















Oh, by the way? They're making movies of these, so if these become the next Hunger Games, you heard it from me first! Although the main characters are not the brightest, the suspense necessary for a blockbuster was there.

So it's a risk you take when you pick up your nook--you could be deceived into wasting your time on a shoddily crafted word-mess, or you could be reading whatever you want without people judging you in the waiting room at the dentist.

Do you judge covers? Leave a comment and tell me about your experiences with horrible books and what you read in the doctor's office. My next post will be a little longer, discussing internet memes and how books and movies are all the same...and yet different!