True Bood series by Chalaine Harris

The original True Blood book covers always had the same kind of folksy, colorful, almost hand-drawn feel to it. It looks like something you'd find on a calendar in a preschoo. Like this one:

Or this one:

The woman always looks like she's flying, floating, or about to start flying. It's morbid with the dark colors and little flaming houses on the ground, but there's also a sense of whimsy. It's the kind of thing your grandmother wouldn't be afraid to take on a plane lest a fellow passenger takes a quick glance at the paperback she's holding in her Jergens-scented hands as he enjoys his alcoholic beverage complimentary Southwest airlines (you get coupons depending on how many miles are in your frequent flyer account), arches his or her eyebrow and gives a salacious smile or wink.

A plane. I just realized how symbolic that is because pretty much all of the book covers make some reference to floating or levitation. Look up all of them yourself, I'm pretty sure nobody's feet ever touches the ground in any of the illustrations.

Then they made a TV show and put in on HBO. Now it looks like this:

And this:

Sex sells, baby. Sex sells.

First Blog (Intro doesn't count) about the Twilight series

In order to generate the most possible hits for our virgin blog, we did a very sneaky thing and decided to use the cover of a book that is already insanely popular and with highly used tagwords. Plus, the book series covers pretty much follow the same layout. Firstly, they follow the same illustration style and color scheme. They also always have that the thing with the red and white as shown here:

The first one is pretty easy though. The whole apple, downfall of Adam and Eve thing. The apple is meant to be a symbol of innocence, but rather than having something sexy and dangerous next to it, there’s a pair of hands cradling the apple and protecting it because after all this is book geared for tweens who should not be having sex until they are married (in fact, I think that even happens in the book’s series. They’re, like, afraid to even kiss each other unless their combined raging hormones will interact together like bad chemistry experiment and implode the entire northwestern town they reside in).

The cover of the second book in the series has a sort of white flower thingy that looks like it’s been dipped in blood. The flower or losing one’s flower is another reference for losing your virginity and burgeoning sexuality. The new green color, however, on the flower’s stem seems to imply an intruder into our pair of lovers. Who could it be? A werewolf? Don’t be asinine.

Now the third is particularly unique out of all the book covers in that there is a single color in the scheme—unless you count the black background which used for all of the Twilight books, which I don’t.

A sole red ribbon, hanging on by a thread in the middle, floats in space. Something has been broken, or is at risk of being broken. There is vulnerability and isolation. There is the fluid sensuality of an antique version of a hair-tie. There is no white at all in this picture, so innocence must be completely lost by now, right? Wait until you see this:

OMG it’s a chess set with a red and white chess piece. Someone has not been totally ravaged yet. Note that the white chess piece, the queen, is largest and in the foreground while the red one, a mere pawn, lies in wait in the background. Is it sneaking up on her? Surely something that small couldn’t do that much damage, could it?

The feminized chess piece is so much larger than the pawn it brings to mind the animal kingdom, specifically those insects and fishes where the female is larger than the male and usually eats him after mating with him.

The fact that the largest chess piece is a queen doesn’t distract from the fact that the whole thing is incredibly phallic. So is the pawn, despite, its size. When I was a kid I had this cheap-ass chess set where the pieces were plastic and hollow, so they were incredibly flimsy. Sometimes I would stick the smaller pieces inside the larger ones and they would get wedged in there. I don’t think this book has anything to do with two guys trying to fit inside of each other, I don’t think that at all. No, definitely not. No.

So remember kids, it’s ok to have sex with your vampire boyfriend ONLY IF YOU’RE MARRIED AND STRAIGHT.

A Brief Introduction

Welcome to the first writing ever done on ww.thehellyoureading.blogspot.com.

Before we get to the fun stuff, let’s shout out a disclaimer:

1. I don’t own the images of the cover art printed on the book. I don’t even own the book.

2. What is written here isn’t a critique of the book covers; I haven’t written any of the books you see here and chances are I haven’t even read them.

3. I have no formal art history or appreciation education, so if you’re offended that I’m not impressed with a fantasy novel that has a chick with a metal bikini holding sword with a dragon in the foreground, console yourself with the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Without further ado, we present to you thehellyoureading.blogspot.com.

We don’t just judge a book by its cover. We only judge the cover