Cover Madness Giveaway Hop! (INT)

Hey guys and welcome to the first big Cover Madness Giveaway Hop hosted by Giselle from Xpresso Reads and Jenni from Alluring Reads! I've loved their Cover Madness giveaways in the past - it's such a great idea and I love looking at the pretties and discovering new books! The covers of the books we let you guys choose from should be gorgeous and relatively freshly revealed. I admit that some of mine have been around for a while but the books aren't published yet and I'm excited about them, so I guess that's okay ;) Here's my selection, click the covers to learn more about the books and make sure to read the rules below carefully.









The Rules

• One winner can choose one of the books listed above
• Open internationally provided The Book Depository ships to you
• Only one entry per person/household
• If you cheat, I will disqualify and delete all your entries. Make sure to read what to put in the rafflecopter box carefully! Writing 'done' or copying the message of the tweet does NOT count! If I say I want the link, then please copy-paste the link.
• I check all entries BEFORE I choose a winner
• Winner will have 48 hours to respond to my email, after that time frame I will pick a new winner (seriously, use a rafflecopter email that you actually check!)
•  I will provide you TBD's tracking number and notify you when the book actually ships (most of the books above are preorders)
• You must be at least 13 years old
• I reserve the right to add/remove books from the list, make slight changes to the rules, or end the giveaway early.
• I am not responsible for books lost in the mail. Once I've put in the order, I am no longer accountable for what happens to the book.

Good luck everyone! Let the cover-drooling begin!

Also, make sure to check out the other blogs participating in the linky below :)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers Of Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week the participants post their top ten to a specific topic.

So this week is about favorite covers of books we've read... and it's soooo hard to choose!!! So much pretty! I'm sure I will forget something totally obvious and want to bash my head into the wall because of it. Ahem. Anyway, here goes in no particular order...




I imagine Varen to look just like that. I love that the models wear clothes the characters wear in the book. And I love all the writing on the image - it hints at Varen's mysterious notebooks.
As for Fragile Eternity, the butterfly looks just that - fragile. Frozen. I also adore the font! And it was one of my favorite books in the seris :)


Black City was a book I wanted to read for a whole year before it came out. The wait was agonizing. I love that shatteredrose, the font, the colors, the city in the backdrop. It's perfect.
Throne of Glass - so badass! The clothes. The hair. The daggers!! The colors and font. The UK cover is just so much better than the US one.


Masque's cover is even more beautiful in person because the paper has a shimmer to it that isn't visible on the screen. The colors, dress, and parasol fit perfectly. I love it!
Dearly, Departed is another parasol cover I love. The colors are perfect and again, it fits the actual content. I also adore the font!


Splintered's cover is just so vibrant!!! The colors are even deeper when you see them for real, and I love how there are so many details you only start to notice as you read the actual story.
With Chantress, the combination of the colors, her hood, the font, the tag line, and the thing she's holding in her hand intrigued me.


I have very mixed feelings about hte Fallen series, but I love the covers. Torment is my favorite. It looks eternally cold and mournful and you can just see the inner turmoil of the girl. It's stunning in its simplicity.
Something Strange and Deadly is another one you have to see in person because it shimmers so prettily! The model looks really close to how I imagined Eleanor and I think the detail of the cogs and wheels in the background is awesome.

Nevermore, by Kelly Creagh
Fragile Eternity, by Melissa Marr
Black City, by Elizabeth Richards
Throne of Glass, by Sarah J. Maas
Masque of the Red Death, by Beathany Griffin
Dearly, Departed, by Lia Habel
Splintered, by A.G. Howard
Chantress, by Amy Butler Greenfield
Torment, by Lauren Kate
Something Strange and Deadly, by Susan Dennard

This was really hard! I thought there would be less pretty dress covers and more graphically interesting ones but those are mostly covers from the TBR pile. Also, it's hard to separate my feelings of the story from those of the cover. There were many books I love whose books are pretty but just not quite awesome enough to make the list.
Anyhow, here are some runner-ups from other books I've already read:



Wither, by Lauren Destefano
In the Shadow of Blackbirds, by Cat Winters
The Pledge, by Kimberly Derting

With Wither, it's that the cover fits so perfectly! Also, mostly I chose it because the inner design of the book is so special and gorgeous! In the Shadow of Blackbirds was fantastic and I love that the cover photograph appears in the book, along with other copies of actual photographs from the time period the book is set in. The Pledge is so gorgeous, and what I think is special about it is that the word is juxtaposed on the image again and the texture is different from the rest of the cover. You feel the words when you trace them.


Oof. Alrighty, what do you guys think of my choices? Anything that is glaringly absent? And please leave your links, I can't wait to see what covers you chose and find new things to drool over ;)

Discussion: what ultimately makes you pick one book over another?

Hello lovelies :)

I've decided to try my hand at a discussion post again and I want to aim at making those a more frequent feature if I can. I really enjoyed the last one, where we talked about romance.

Today's topic is something I think about quite a lot and find really interesting to compare with other poeple.

What ultimately makes you decide you want to read/buy a book?

I'm not talking about finding it vaguely interesting, I mean that moment when you really make the decision 'I am buying this instead of the 10+ others around it' at the bookstore or put it on your 'I really really want to read this' list or the moment you choose it from the unread ones on your shelves. How do you decide what to read and what to pass on?

The cover
I think that's an important point for many people. We do judge books by their covers, for better or worse. Is it pretty? Shocking? Appealing? Does it stand out because of colors/font? Quite often I need only look at the cover to guess the genre.
Personally, I love looking at pretty covers. They often make me pick up a book and turn it around to read the description. But that doesn't mean I auto-buy the book. If I read the description and I'm not convinced, I won't buy the book unless I've read some great reviews. I've heard of people preordering/buying books by virtue of the cover alone though. How do you handle it?

The description
I think that's the most important thing to me. If the book sounds like 3 other ones I've already read (very frequent in YA paranormals/dystopians), I will get bored. If it sounds like tons of drama, I'll put it away. But if it intrigues me, I will buy it no matter how ugly I think fhe cover is. So one of my absolute pet peeves is books who have a lot of review quotes on their back instead of actual info of what they are about! I don't care what these people thought, the publishers only put the positive reviews on there anyway!
How do you feel about descriptions? Do you read them? Does a book sounding similar to another one you've already read make you more or less likely to buy it?

The title
This is tricky. If the cover got my attention, I often don't read the title before I've read the description on the back. I tend to skip big, bold text and get to the details immediately. Weird, I know. I often skip newspaper headlines. However, if the book is not lying on one of those tables but on the shelf, all you have is the title on the back of the book. So then it really depends on whether it sounds interesting to me. Is it funny? Does it have some of my favorite words in it? That will make me pull out the book to see what it's all about.

Length / how 'big' the book is

I don't own this picture. Source.

Some people like huge tomes, others feel daunted by that and prefer thinner volumes. As a teen I felt that anything shorter than 300 pages wasn't worth my time. Now I get fidgety at everything over 500 pages and have learned to appreciate shorter ones. Ultimately though, I don't really care as long as it sounds interesting and is well written.

Reviews / hype
If a book got great reviews from people I trust, I'm more likely to give it a shot even if it's not what I usually read. But I get a bit weary of a book being hyped too much or compared to other, really successful books. ('The new Twilight/Hunger Games!' Even if it has zero to do wit the book that sticker or whatever is on)
How do you feel about that? Does a hype attract you or put you off?

'Instinct'/'Feeling'
I don't know how to properly describe this but it's actually the most important thing to me. Call me superstitious but some books just call out to me. I see them and I know 'I have to read this'. It's like a jolt. When I read the description, I just know that I'm going to love it and I am right about 90% of the time. It's happened a few times that a lot of people got all excited about a title that just made me shrug my shoulders... and then the negative reviews began to trickle in and they pointed out all the bad stuff I had feared about the book.
Does any one else get this type of hunch about books? Or, you know, for some inexplicable reason pull one from the shelf only to think 'oh my god this sounds amazing'? Call me silly but I think that for each of us, there are books we are just meant to read, and they will find their way to us somehow.


There are many more factors that I think come into play, such as having read the author's other work, read an interview, the genre, your mood... feel free to discuss those too, or anything else you think I have forgotten! I'd really love to hear how you pick your reads :)

Top Ten Favorite Book Covers of 2012

Hey guys :) Merry Christmas to all of you! I hope you can spend some relaxed days with your loved ones and eat tons of cookies ;) I'm sure eating more than I should, but my mom's are just too good to resist ^^''

Anyhow, today is the second day of the Top 10 of 2012 event co-hosted by Rachel from Fiktshun,  Lisa from A Life Bound By Books, Jessica from Confessions of a Bookaholic and Jaime from Two Chicks on Books and Mindy from Magical Urban Fantasy Reads.

And it's all about the cover-pretty of 2012! Choosing was really hard for me and I'm sure I simply forgot about quite a few really amazing ones. They must be for books published in 2012, and it would be better if we'd actually read them though it's not necessary.


Here I go... click the covers to get to Goodreads.







I haven't read Opal, Ten Tiny Breaths, and Blackbirds yet but the covers and descriptions sound awesome! I generally tried to choose different types of covers. I like the more abstract, illustration-design of Unspken and Blackbrids a lot, but of course I also like girls in pretty dresses... and there are so many amazing covers of that type around now! Also, I would love to have included Clockwork Princess and Splintered but those won't be out until next year.

Here are my three honorable mentions:


Two more pretty dress covers I really liked. And I like the simplicity of the cover for Confessions of an Angry Girl.

What do you guys think of my choices, and what made it onto your lists?