I was in a bookstore at Pearson Airport today. I was just killing time, and I noticed the usual display of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels with their stark black covers and gothic fonts. Er, hang on. I looked a little closer:
They’re an entirely different set of vampire werewolf novels by Kelley Armstrong. Is it me, or do those books look a little too much like the Twilight covers? Here’s the cover of Eclipse, the third Twilight novel, for comparison:
Right down to the wide kerning (or is that tracking? I never know) on the author’s name, eh? Doesn’t the design of Ms. Armstrong’s book covers seem like an incredibly cynical attempt to trade on Twilight’s success?
“Borrowed Tunes” is one of my favourite albums from the nineties. It’s a two-CD set, featuring 37 Neil Young covers by Canadian bands. Like Young’s classic Rust Never Sleeps, the first half is acoustic and the second is electric.
There are so many good songs on this album. The Rheostatics and the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir do a wonderful, loosey-goosey cover of “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere”, Marc Jordan sings “Borrowed Tune” like it’s a lullaby and Crash Vegas kind of reinvents “Pocahontas”:
I forget exactly how (it originated with Cover Lay Down, an excellent blog of folky covers), but yesterday I learned that last year a second “Borrowed Tunes” was recorded, by a (mostly) new generation of Canadian artists. I have yet to hear any songs from it, but I’ll definitely buy a copy. Not from Amazon.com, mind you, where it’s listed as an import and priced at $47.99. Instead, I can get it at Amazon.ca for $21.99 or Chapters.Indigo.Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher.ca for $20.99. Or, I suppose, there’s always iTunes for a mere $14.99 (link goes to iTunes store).
I don’t really want the physical CD, and buying digital is greener. Unfortunately, I can’t find the album on eMusic or Zunior, so I may have to buy it from iTunes and convert the songs to MP3s.
Proceeds from sales of both albums (plus another earlier, more indie cover album) go to support The Bridge School, a California instution which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. Both of Young’s sons have cerebral palsy and his daughter has epilepsy.
While hunting around for a Farley Mowat quote for the preceding entry, I encountered this Flickr set. It’s 52 scans of book covers–some old, some new. It’s unclear from the description whether the person who scanned them actually read the books, or just has a bit of a scanning fetish.
