Lazy Book Covers

There's a regular feature in Private Eye magazine called "Bookalikes," comparing the strangely similar cover art for bestselling novels. In many cases the images are identical copy-and-paste jobs.

This leads me to wondering, why do so many novels from China and East Asia feature naked women on the cover, regardless of the content?

Geling Yan's The Uninvited, for example (see previous post), features a naked woman on the cover despite the fact that no one takes their clothes off at any point.

This is a disappointment to everyone. A feminist would call it sexist. A chauvinist would call it false advertising. I just call it lazy.

I'm particularly annoyed by the way Haruki Murakami's novels are packaged almost like pornography. Granted, Murakami writes about sex, but there are so many other things going on in his fiction which the erotic cover images fail to reflect.








See what I mean?