The Five Book Covers You’ll See In Airport Bookstores This Summer -The Toast

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It’s The Pilot’s Wife or The Daughter of Ice and Grief or something like that. You can’t remember. The front’s just crammed with a random assortment of objects against a dark grey background. Maybe dark blue. There’s a girl’s shoe, a faded postcard, an old-timey hand mirror, jacks, shit like that. The Scrivener’s Woman. The main female character goes unnamed for the first fifty pages.

Someone Who Briefly Held A Minorly Important Job In Another Field Is Going To Fix American Education. Odds are 50-50 that the cover is either of a sad-looking kid surveying a dilapidated classroom looking disappointed in the system, or the author him- or herself wearing a suit and looking attractively serious. Their six-point plan, while horrific (Step 4: iPads), is also unremarkable enough that it generally blows over after a few weeks on the talking-head circuit and a meaningless grant. Often followed up a few years later with a run for public office in one of the more corrupt states.

Wild Card. Could be a thriller about an F.B.I agent, could be “How Children Succeed: Why Some People Are Happy and How To Make Choices In Fourteen Seconds.”

How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Dinner Parties and The Feeling of Shame. The cover will have cheetahs on it. It can’t be helped and it can’t be explained. Cheetahs. “Wouldn’t primates make more sense? Or humans?” Yes, but they’re not cheetahs. It’s got to be cheetahs. The people clamor for pictures of damn cheetahs racing in front of a baobab tree. Also, you are programmed to laugh in uncomfortable situations because of your caveman ancestors.

Memoir From Someone Who Was Dead For Several Hours. Everyone in your extended family has read this book. You alternate between sneering, dread, and fascination. You do not buy it.

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