Cover Love?

As many of my GReeps know, I am not the sort of person who goes crazy over covers. In point of fact, I can't even pretend to understand the degree of fascination many people have with book covers. Sure, sometimes they're pretty, I guess, but on the hierarchy of Book Things of Importance, they rank somewhere below the consonance of the author's name.

However. While all of that is still true, it is not the point of this post. The point of this post is this: the other day (calendrically appropriately), I had an epiphany. I'm actually not totally indifferent to covers! For the first time in my life, I looked at a book (The Assassin's Curse, on the left) and said, "Ooo, pretty. Waaaannnnt," without even looking at the description (which does, as a matter of fact, sound like something I would really enjoy, so double bonus there). Isn't that great?

Yeah, yeah, you don't really care. But what I want to talk about here is the part of my calendrically appropriate epiphany where I realized what I like in a cover and the reason I thought I didn't care for so long. See, most covers out there, especially ones that make bloggers ooh and ah, have one of three things: a) a girl, preferably in either a lovely gown that is somehow appropriate even though no girl has ever worn a dress even remotely like that for anything other than her prom, or looking questionably under-clad for a super bad-ass warrior mage shapeshifter vampire whatever, b) a shirtless hunk, which, while appealing enough to look at, somehow fades to mediocrity among all the other shirtless hunks out there, or c) a single object with a monochrome background, a la The Hunger Games or Twilight. And while all of these things are fine, they don't really wow me.

Here are a few things I have recently discovered I like in covers.

-A cool font. I realize that "cool" is among the most subjective and least helpful adjectives I could have chosen, but I have never taken an art class in my life and can't come up with anything significantly better. Just look at the covers here, okay?

-Clean design. Nothing crazy going on, not too many colors, but attractively simple. Or maybe simply attractive.

-No people. I can't think of a single cover with a person on it that I really, really like. Of course, since the list of covers I really like has approximately four entries, that's not actually saying much, but there are so many covers out there with people on them, you'd think I'd have liked one of them if I were ever going to.

So I don't not care about covers! Granted, the list of covers I love wouldn't even cover half of a top ten list, but I consider this progress. Go me.

What kinds of covers do you like?