“Top 5 Wednesday” is a weekly meme currently hosted on Goodreads by Sam of Thoughts on Tomes in which you list your top 5 for the week’s chosen topic. This week’s topic is “favourite covers” but it felt a little too general, and then I saw that Acqua from Acquadimore Books did a post on the types of covers she doesn’t like. So I thought I’d talk about the five kinds of things I love seeing on covers.
Airships
My obsession with airships started when I was in my early teens with the Final Fantasy games, which then branched off into my obsession with steampunk in general. So nothing gets me going like seeing one (or multiple ones *swoon*) plastered over the cover of a book. If I could be reborn in a steampunk world, I’d want to pursue a career as an airship engineer (no, not the captain; I wouldn’t trust myself to lead us anywhere other than the fiery arms of death).
Corvids Birds in Flight
Fantasy is as obsessed with crows and ravens as it is with using “Blood” and “Assassin” in its titles, so it’s only natural that we’d see them in so many covers. I see that as a good thing because I love those beady little critters. They’re ridiculously clever and they teach you to treat all living things with respect because, otherwise, they’ll dive-bomb you (and your dog) to hell and back.
You may notice that The Ninth Rain bucks the trend by showing not a corvid, but–*gasp*–an eagle on the cover. The nerve! Clearly the black sheep of the family.
Black, Red, and White
Say what you will about Twilight series, but the covers are a brilliant display of simplicity and colour contrast and I used to salivate over that apple. There’s no sexier colour combination to me than these three.
White Space
Who says white is boring? Sometimes a white background is louder and more impactful than a busy, colourful one, as it allows allows the objects on the cover to “pop”. It’s again, super sexy–but in the opposite spectrum.
Celestial
There’s a reason why humans have stared up at the night sky for so many millennia dreaming of things greater than ourselves. I love star-gazing–it fills me with calm and wonder and just a bit of loneliness (but the good kind)–so it’s no surprise that I’m drawn to covers with celestial themes.
These types of covers never fail to be awe-inspiring, whether you imagine yourself as a spaceship captain chasing starlight or just a person on Earth gazing up into the possibilities of what might be, could be, will be. The three above covers are my favourite examples this year.
