Rain, covers for girls and books for boys

Sorry, I've been monumentally lazy and haven't posted for ages. So much has been raging on the net too - debate about whether thrillers should be included on the Booker list, people up in arms about book covers - whether "chicklit" style covers are being used to misrepresent more "serious" texts...etc.

I was thinking about writing about a couple of those issues but realised, in the fuggy humid heat of the tropical torrential weather we have (most unusually) been experiencing here in Edinburgh, that I have not the energy for all of that. (Apparently there was a partial eclipse this morning but I would never have been able to tell - I was too busy constructing my arc and gathering up my neighbours pets - two-by-two.)

I might as well direct you to Musings from a Muddy Island, which has rather more to say about the covers question than I do. The guardian blogs piece she talks about - and moreover the comments on the Guardian blog - really make for quite interesting and revealing reading. I suppose I do start wondering, with this whole debate, whether it's really a case of misrepresenting "serious" books by "chicklit" covers or whether - for me - it is just a general despair that everything for women has to be blooming pink these days. I mean, when did that start? I'm sure it's a recent phenomenon. Comedy for women, books for women -  that is all excellent in my view. But why must absolutely everything - clothes, books, handbags, folders, stickers - you name it - be so very pink?

(And yes, before anyone points it out, I am aware that my own cover appears to have a strip of pink across the bottom. But it does also have a gimp mask and a penguin so I think that makes up for it. ;)

But the chicklit cover issue aside, there are other cover trends I keep noticing - like the tendency of most photos of the people on covers to look like models. When I looked in a bookshop recently there were a host of covers of bare women's legs on all manner of books.  It's not that any of them aren't good covers in terms of composition or image or anything. It's just that the modelliness of them makes them not look like real people/characters somehow.

Maybe it says more about society's relationship with a nice pair of pins than anything else.

I also saw a book called "What Rhymes with Bastard?" with a picture of a woman with mad green hair on the front. That appealed.

It seems to me that in the cover debate bloggers concentrate more on the covers they don't like rather than the ones they do. Musings seems to be suggesting plain - but I like images. So I shall list a few covers I have liked recently - just the first that come to mind for me. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a lovely looking book with a nice cover. Although the animal-lover in me would have loved a reference to a hedgehog on it somewhere...although that could have had the danger of turning twee I suppose.  But a nice-looking book. The Needle in the Blood is a fine-looking thing too, in my opinion and Space Captain Smith certainly grabbed my attention with the kind of ultra-detailed illustrated cover that you so rarely see nowadays. Feather Man is also a fine-looking book. Gods Behaving Badly is attractive too. In a more generalised way, I think I quite like retro. Except that probably sounds too much like I know what I'm talking about. So I better shut up quickly. I also liked the old-fashioned thing of finding an old painting to put on the front of classics. Of course I like paintings a lot so maybe that is why, but portraits, for example, can also fit so well with the time and period of the book and makes you better able to imagine the look and dress of the characters...but this is probably very old-fashioned now.

Are there any covers you are particularly drawn to? Is there a common look/theme? Can you tell what it is you like about them/what you associate with them?

Anyway, vague ramblings aside, and on a more serious note, I did want to flag up a really excellent interview with Keith Gray who wrote a book called "The Ostrich Boys". It seems to manage to cover most of the issues of the moment related to boys and young men and it is a very interesting piece. Here's a couple of quotes that particularly struck me:

I believe these are precarious years of adjustment for young men, because plenty seem to be struggling to figure out exactly what being a “man” entails these days.  The iconic male is so different to what he used to be.  No more Jimmy Stewarts, John Waynes or Clint Eastwoods.  But where was the fun in acting so repressed?  Then again, do we really all want to be metro-sexual Beckhams?  Do we really want to be grubby, druggy Pete Dohertys?  Maybe we’ll retreat into ourselves and live vicarious lives inside our computers.

And

...suicide is such an important issue, and an issue that touches so many people.  Just looking at the stats from up here in Scotland is shocking:  Two suicides a day; two out of three of those are male; it’s the leading killer of young men between the ages of 16 and 35.  I’m amazed more people aren’t writing about it.

Eve, who has been consistently covering more boy-related young adult/teen (sorry if I've got that wrong but I've never been quite sure of the difference) has run many interesting reviews lately on everything from knife crime ("The Knife That Killed Me" by Anthony McGowan) to suicide and lack of expression ("The Ostrich Boys") and I realise this is a whole area of books I know little about and I have become quite curious about them. I might have to investigate further.

*Note, I actually wrote this on Friday in case anyone is wondering about my mistimed eclipse.

Comments

[clom]

Nice piece Rosy, do you and/or eve fancy going to that Teen Novel debate with Kevin Brooks, Anthony McGowan & BR Collins on Friday in the Book Fest?

I'm pretty sure I'll have at least one spare ticket.