Follow Friday - Dr. Sheldon Cooper Proved That 73 Is the Best Number

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Nette's Bookshelf Reviews and Cheerful Book Reviews.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Best Cover? What is the best cover of a book that you’ve read and didn’t like?

I hate book cover questions. I really really do. Being a science fiction and fantasy fan, one learns pretty quickly to mostly ignore book covers, especially since most of them bear almost no relationship at all to the book, and in any case so many are awful that you just have to brush past them on the way to the juicy meat inside the book. Needless to say, this doesn't leave a whole lot of good book covers, let alone good book covers that adorn bad books.

The key to finding bad books with good covers is to find books written by respected authors late in their careers. Because of their legacy of great books early in their career, they usually continue to be published by large publishing houses that can afford to spend money on book cover design, resulting in high production values. Sadly, the output of too many older authors leaves a lot to be desired. Books that are written as sequels to a book that originally written decades earlier have a track record of poor quality. Books written late in an author's career with a much lesser known coauthor also tend to be fairly lousy.

So when Arthur C. Clarke picked up his pen in 1989 and began to write a sequel to his 1972 Hugo and Nebula award winning novel Rendezvous with Rama with coauthor Gentry Lee, it was almost inevitable that the resulting book Rama II would be crap. And because as a result of Clarke's long and prolific career that had established him as one of the "Big Three" of science fiction, the novel was given a beautiful cover. To compound matters, Clarke was a weighty enough figure to get two further sequels, Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed, published as well. These three books are so awful that they almost, but not quite, manage to overwhelm the greatness of the first book. They do have lovely covers though.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Seventy-Two Degrees Fahrenheit Is Room Temperature

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: At the Third Quarter Quell Katniss Everdeen Participated in the Hunger Games for a Second Time

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