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.
Tags: airport bookstores, book covers, books, lists, unnamed female protagonists
There will also be something with a knockoff cover of Malcom Gladwell’s “Blink,” and it may be another Malcom Gladwell book.
There are soooo many of these and it drives me crazy!
Shine: The secret history of the white parts of your eyes (image is half a hard-boiled egg with the white removed)
There will be a case of something with a prominently displayed “Oprah’s Book Club Pick” sign above them, as well as “Oprah’s Book Club Pick” stickers on the covers themselves. There may also be “Oprah’s Book Club Pick” bookmarks included within the books.
You mean the wonderful world of that genre of fiction known as ennobling white trash. And there were so many that Oprah led us to: Ellen Foster, The Book of Ruth, She’s Come Undone, The Rapture of Canaan. The mind reels at the waste of time they represent.
Oh GOD, I think I read all of those in high school. (Slinks away in shame)
Wow, I haven’t thought about She’s Come Undone since it was my favorite subversive book in middle school. It had masturbation in it!
oh god, did you read Wally Lamb’s follow up? about twin brothers, one of whom has schizophrenia? even as a tween (coming off a serious She’s Come Undone fixation) I was like “this book is in dire need of an editor.”
There will also be a historical thriller or four on a shelf alongside the most recent heavy-handed Robert Langdon piece by Dan Brown. All of them will have weathered, distressed sepia art that looks like a grainy closeup of some classical piece you can find in the Louvre. Maybe it will have an artistic torn edge effect and hints of either Nazis or the Illuminati.
Or the Illuminati Nazis, who everyone knows were actually behind the Nazis’ obsession with cultural artifacts.
The Illuminazis.
Cheetahs are cool. Way cooler than monkeys.
There will be a new novel that you think, from perusing the first few pages, is right up your alley, but it has Oprah’s Book Club EMBOSSED on the cover and not on one of those stickers, which means you’ll have to deal with people snickering at you behind their hands thinking you only read books because Oprah recommends them and not because of your own discerning literary tastes. You put the book back down and buy something less enticing, but more intellectually impressive.
I hate when it’s embossed on the cover! I will buy older editions used just to avoid it, if I have to.
This is how I feel about books with movie tie-in covers. I am such a snob.
The embossed ones! WORST.
My copy of Middlesex has a fuzzy circle on the top right corner of the cover because I peeled off the Oprah sticker but it left residue behind and all the lint in my purse stuck to it. These are our just rewards for snobbishness.
What about headless ladies in period dress?
You have specific dresses for that? <–stupid.
You forgot the novel about women with “girls” in the foot-long title, e.g., “The Amazing True Story of The Tehachapi Chowder and Marching Society’s Queen of the May and Her Girl’s Guide to Online Dating on Neptune for Girls.”
there will also be a dark cover with handcuffs/rhinestone cuff bracelet/stiletto/something else with innuendo, with a title about secrets or submission. the kindle versions of these sell better, since no one can see the cover, and you would buy it, but you get your erotica for free from the internet, thanks.
Well-written free internet erotica, no less.
Books with covers featuring middle-aged white men in blue dress shirts with their arms crossed. The cover background is usually white; red, blue, and black are the only acceptable accent colors. The title is either a randomly assorted jumble of corporate buzzwords (“Maximum Synergy: Leveraging Profits in The New Tech”) or a strained sports analogy (“Shoulders Straight: Golf and Corporate Leadership”).
The Daughter of Ice and Grief!
You mean Sansa Stark?
I can picture that first one in my mind so exactly! Also UGH to the last one.
Book that rip off either a) The Twilight Covers (usually YA, but not exculsively, it can pretty much be any book marketed to “women”) or b) 50 Shades of Grey (again, not always erotica, which is confusing). I think it’s supposed to be some sort of mind trick for making sleepy travelers THINK they’re buying one of those two books, but really it’s another book entirely.
“shit like that” is the worst on a book cover, but I am guilty of having tons of shit like that on my desk and my coffee tables and various surfaces.
Also, I don’t want any of those books, I want the Hot Pink Cover with Curly Writing, a Cartoonish Skinny Girl and a Stack of Books or a Bunch of Shopping Bags
May also have a cocktail involved
I miss living with my sister mostly because I no longer have a constant supply of Trashy Lit. Someone let us buy a stack of Jill Mansells, Sophie Kinsellas and Jilly Coopers at the village fair when we were 10 and 12 and we were HOOKED.
A grid of 54 photos of women laughing alone with salad. Edith would be given artistic credit.
I cannot deal with any more “The [Traditionally Male Man’s] [Relation]” books. There are a thousand of them, and they make me tired.
I refuse to read them out of priciple. I am probably missing some great books that way, but I just can’t with those names.
I had a similar rule, but then I read The Orphan Master’s Son, and found it worth reading. Like, the publishers have to title them, right? And pick the covers? Which doesn’t stop me from being like, “Ew, sick, gross,” and rarely buying the ones with the marks of the beast upon them, but sometimes I feel bad for the authors. Like. You work for however long, and then your book is called something so trite.
Or the related (perhaps sub-) genre of Historical Famous Person’s Wife/Mistress. I have NO IDEA what Loving Frank was intended to be about, but what it ended up being about was a boring selfish lady.
Why are there SO MANY? They may as well title them all “The Lesser-Than” or “Don’t Even Worry About It, She’s Not That Important.”
Good list, but it’s missing The Dad Book. The Dad Book is about one of three things: WW II, a famous horse, or a shipwreck. It has an un-centered, partial reproduction of a painting or engraving on it and is either black or orange. I enjoy purchasing The Dad Book in airports.
DAD CONTENT IS THE BEST CONTENT
I posted about this on Facebook and my dad INSTANTLY replied to update me on the dad books he’d recently bought. CIRCLE OF LIFE
I usually end up with the Wild Card because it usually involves serial killers. But once I was on a plane reading a book about Jack the Ripper and suddenly there were PICTURES and oh my GOD did that flight get ruined.
Also you forgot about Jane Austen Novel With Modern Cover.
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