Book Cover Review: is a website solely dedicated to reviewing book covers. David Pearson and team have put to rest that old saw “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Each cover review is a 500 word essay about the book, its cover, how the two relate, and other relevant opinions. I happily wasted an hour there.

Here’s a bit of The Left hand of Darkness cover  review by W.H. Chong:

Tim White’s intensely felt illustration for Le Guin is a romance of winter: blue snow-covered hill, a stipple of snowfall, alien vegetation, glittering lights against the dark – growing up in the tropics, it had an aching appeal for me. (The central cowled figure is an exact contemporary of the movie poster of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman featuring a cowled Meryl Streep.) The story opens with the brilliant: ‘The King was pregnant’, and climaxes in a sublime, superbly sustained, emotionally harrowing escape over a glacier. Ironically, my own mental images of the story have nothing to do with the cover (as a cover designer I wonder, how is this possible?) – I imagine an action film by Kurosawa, fleet and austere, with subtitles and a glassy, angular soundtrack, and as Le Guin insisted, without any white people.