TWIR: Judging books by their covers

Some weeks I get to Friday and realize I’ve not actually read that much. I’ve done a good amount of cooking, gone to the gym, edited a satisfying amount, and, of course, watched a few episodes of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, but not so much with the curling up with a good book. The sensible thing to do would be to read the Kerry Greenwood books that the series is based on, but I haven’t gotten my hands on those yet.

There are a bunch of things that I’m in the middle of, but as a small follow-up to this post I’ll mention that I finished Ombria in Shadow and put a review up on Goodreads. While there were great aspects to it, the cover was in fact a good indication that it wouldn’t be quite my thing. Still good! Not my bag.

Judging books by covers: Completely valid.

Cover of Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders

To judge Civilwarland in Bad Decline by its cover, it seems a lot more sedate and serious than the contents of the book are turning out to be. I’m only a few stories in. I was going to work my way up to Tenth of December (also a sedate cover!), but I might have to skip to that next. It received such praise on release that I wonder if it’s much different from what I’ve read so far. I’ve read a few other things by Saunders, the odd short story in an anthology. I thought The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was awful, too much a product of a brief period in time, and trying so hard to be satirical that it lost sight of anything else. These short stories aren’t like that, but… I still don’t quite know what I think of Saunders yet.