Book Cover of the Week: I Speak For The Trees – by Louise Tripp

 Maybe you recycle, ride your bike everywhere instead of driving and carry a thermos for water or coffee rather than create more container waste. That's cool. But you're still not as “green” as Dr. Seuss. Because long before everyone started becoming more planet-conscious, Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote a nifty little kids' book called The Lorax. 

The book has been a huge controversy in its time as well as a starting point for activism. With its bright, whimsical cover and playful rhyme, it taught young readers about a forest of “Truffula” trees and the creatures that relied on them – one of which is the Lorax. When the selfish Once-ler comes along, chopping down trees for various “needs” it is the Lorax who warns him. This all happened “back in the days when the grass was still green/and the pond was still wet/and the clouds were still clean” - but The Lorax is told in a flashback. A boy, wondering about why the Lorax was there and why it was taken away, goes to the Once-ler for answers and the Once-ler, from his hiding place, tells the sad story. All the trees are gone; the resources have all been depleted and the Once-ler is all alone. The factories and shops where he sold the things he made with the trees all closed when the last tree was chopped down. Everything the Lorax warned him about has happened.

Yes, it's a tragedy – but Dr. Seuss would never spin so bleak a tale without a shred of hope. The Once-ler gives the curious boy a seed to plant a Truffula tree, so that perhaps the forest can someday be restored. And perhaps someday, the Lorax will come back.

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in Edenton, North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: And The Paper Girl's Gonna Blow Away - by Louise Tripp

"This would be the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again."  - Paper Towns


I am glad it's time for Friday Favorites, because I just finished an amazing young adult novel that's everything I want my own novels to be. It's funny, wise, adventure-packed and filled with fleshed-out, likable and very realistically human characters. Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, John Green's Paper Towns was an accidental find. I stumbled upon it, thought it sounded interesting and discovered treasure as if I'd followed a map (or clues, like the book's protagonist). While the characters are fast-talking teens with smart mouths, their observations on life, friendship and the future (among other things) are devastatingly shrewd. 


In a (really roomy) nutshell, Paper Towns tells the story of Quentin Jacobsen - a bit of a geek with his future planned out like a map ahead of him - and his obsession with a charismatic girl named Margo Roth Spiegelman. Margo is the kind of girl that rumors fly around about - things like: she was a temporary circus member or she got in backstage at a concert just by sheer cunning. Quentin and Margo were childhood friends because their parents knew each other and the two shared a traumatic childhood experience (I will refrain from spoilers). Years later, they have different cliques and lives and don't talk as much. However, Quentin - known to his friends as Q - admires her from a distance and, we can infer from early conversations with friends, talks and speculates about her often. One night, near the end of senior year, Margo climbs into Q's window and talks him into driving her around for a night of antics that include getting revenge on her cheating boyfriend and breaking into amusement parks. The next day, she disappears. Running away is something Margo is known for, but this time she's eighteen and her parents decide not to look for her again. Q can't seem to help but get wrapped up in the mystery of her disappearance, though, especially when he starts finding clues to her whereabouts that seem directed at him.

That's the general plot of the book. But there are so many moments scattered throughout - of hilarity, of suspense, of wisdom - that make this YA novel defy age or genre. When a road trip ensues, you can feel the freedom of the parent-free excursion. And when Q and his friends are just talking and waxing thoughtful about Margo and her reasons for leaving, the dialogue is so true, so intense and so beautiful that you almost forget you're not reading Wallace Stegner or Raymond Carver. Toss in the references to poets (Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot to name a couple) and poetry and, well, you had me at page one. 


At the book's close, I felt like crying or dancing like a mad man in the rain - either one would have been appropriate.


Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week: Banned Books Week - by Louise Tripp

As I am writing this post, we are smack in the middle of Banned Books Week, which began September 26th and ends October 3rd. For this week's Book Cover of the Week, I thought it might be nice to revisit some of the many covers of the controversial, the challenged and the outright banned books of the last decade. 


Like many fantasy novels for children and adolescents, The Golden Compass was challenged for being anti-religious. Magic in books has long been frowned upon by the religious community, especially when the books in question are aimed at youngsters. The Harry Potter series and A Wrinkle In Time, for instance, have received many challenges over the years. 

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was banned for various reasons, among them: graphic sex and violence, profanity and depictions of torture and war. 

Lauren Myracle's teen book Ttyl joined the list of challenged books when parents in a Texas school district complained about the book being available in the school library, citing "references to sex, drugs, pornography, and an inappropriate teacher-student relationship" among their reasons. 

And last but not least in today's line-up of Banned Book covers, a cute picture book about a couple of male penguins who partner up to hatch an egg:  And Tango Makes Three. You can probably guess why this was banned, right? 

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or  got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week - by Louise Tripp

Sometimes a book cover just speaks for itself. Or rather, sometimes a book cover - or perhaps the book's title alone - just leaves me speechless. 

I just know there must be some kind of S&M theme underlying the stories in this book. I'm almost curious enough to locate a copy and find out. 

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or  got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: Blake Nelson's Girl - by Louise Tripp

What can I say about the 1994 fictional chronicle of a girl named Andrea Marr in grunge-era Portland, Oregon? There's so much to Andrea's story that it would be hard to tell you everything about it (and the 1998 movie based on it is a bit of a mockery of the whole thing, not doing the very wide-eyed, honest teen tale justice). After ten years of creative writing classes, workshops, lectures and advice books, it's a book that does everything “wrong” that still feels so right for me. Blake Nelson spins the story in the first-person voice of Andrea (which is so authentically female that it's hard to believe a guy wrote it), with the details of her high school life tumbling out in what feels like a breathless rush (mostly because of all the run-on sentences).

I discovered Girl via a review in the gone-but-not-forgotten magazine Sassy, which often introduced me to unusual new literary charms in my adolescence (you may have heard me reference it before). To say I've re-read the book quite a few times is an understatement – at one point, I could quote portions of it and it rivaled Pam Conrad's Taking The Ferry Home in the number of times I'd visited its pages. And I've recommended it to many friends, with mixed results: one, for instance, was enamored with the young protagonist's use of the word “fuck” to differentiate between two kinds of sex (slightly T.M.I? Perhaps, but you're curious now aren't you?) while another loathed Nelson-as-Andrea's sometimes Valley Girl-esque stream-of-consciousness storytelling, unable to make it to the end.

But of course, this is about my own connection to the book – a tricky subject. I'm not entirely sure what it is about it that fuels my adoration for the novel. On the one hand, like I said, it does so much that some would consider “wrong”: it “tells” more than it “shows,” and it introduces scores of characters and yet only expands on a dozen or so. On the other hand, however, it's about (in as succinct a summary as one can manage) an introspective girl who rocks out to local bands, shops for funky vintage rags at thrift stores, has a lesbian best friend and eventually travels far from home for college. In other words, she's a lot like me in my twenties (sans the lesbian best friend – mine was a gay guy) and a little bit like that girl I always wished I could be. I couldn't help but love her – and the book – flaws and all. 

Book Cover of the Week: A Day Late - by Louise Tripp

Bonsoir mes amis. It's been a full week and as you can see, I got a little sidetracked – and completely forgot to post Wednesday's Book Cover of the Week. Ah well...better late than never? This week's post features multiple book covers and is my current top ten “to-read” list done in photos (in no particular order):

1. Girlbomb by Janice Erlbaum – A former friend gifted me with this book several years ago and it's just another one of those I have never gotten around to reading. Erlbaum was a columnist for one of my favorite magazines, Bust at the time she wrote this about a time in her life when she fled her home to live on the streets because her mother let her abusive stepfather come back.

2. February House by Sherill Tippins – This is a little nonfiction book about a little house in Brooklyn that, during WWII, housed W.H. Auden, Carson Mccullers and Gypsy Rose Lee, to name a few. I've heard so many terrific things about this book (and considering my deep and endless love for all things Carson Mccullers, it had to make my to-read list, no?), but it's been on my shelf since 2006 without a single crack to the spine.

3. The Whole World Was Watching by Romaine Patterson – A memoir by the best friend of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student killed in Wyoming 12 years ago next Saturday.

4. Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie – I was excited to find this, an Alexie novel I haven't read, among a stack of book donations at the library where I work.

5. Everybody Into The Pool by Beth Lisick – My girlfriend and I picked up Lisick's “creative nonfiction” at a Sister Spit reading earlier this year because the writer was so funny and charismatic when she read her work. I'm looking forward to finally getting around to this book.

6. Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford – A biography of one of my all-time favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Poetry and the Jazz era – what could be more intriguing?

7. A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz – I discovered this book when I signed up for the Goodreads book giveaway, but unfortunately didn't win. I'd like to read it anyway, though. I love a good fairy tale retelling.

8. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – Oh, how many times have I tried (and failed miserably) to read this much-beloved Tolstoy novel. Maybe the third time is the charm.

9. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama – I actually attained my copy of the president's memoir by accident. I'd ordered a different book, this was sent by mistake and the seller sent the correct book along after I messaged her, telling me I could also keep this one for my inconvenience. Kind of a happy accident if you ask me.

10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – While I am not fond of her sister Emily's most famous novel and have not read her sister, Anne's books in years, I thought I'd finally get around to giving Charlotte a try. 

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or  got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: Childhood Revisited - Louise Tripp

There are days that I feel sad and that sadness leads to nostalgia. I get nostalgic for a childhood where I was free to balance between tree branches, run after ice cream trucks, get so high on the swings that I felt like I'd touch the sun and play with my imaginary friends - one of which came in the form of a to-the-hip tall plastic doll named Sara. At six years old, you could not tell me that Sara was a doll, though. Sara was real. She had black braids, pouty red lips and eyes that opened and closed. My parents had to set a place at the table for her, too, or I wouldn't eat. It just wouldn't have been fair to Sara. 


I guess that's part of the reason that, to this day, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams remains one of my favorite picture books of all time. If I ever had children, it would be an essential part of their personal childhood library. For now, it's an essential part of mine - one that I do revisit from time to time. And it still makes me cry. 

My copy has beautiful pictures in it. The book itself is about a child who loves his velveteen rabbit so much that he thinks of the rabbit as "real." But when the boy becomes ill, the little rabbit doll must be parted from him. It's a classic tale of unconditional love and what a gift it can be. 


If you've never read it, you're never too old. 




Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week: Eat Your Vegetables - by Louise Tripp

I realized it's already Wednesday night and I haven't posted a book cover! It's been a rushed week with little slowing in sight - that's my only excuse - which makes it seem as if, instead of exclaiming "it's already Wednesday" I should be lamenting "it's only Wednesday?" Yes, indeed it is. Ah, well. Onward we shall go.


What I've been thinking about a lot lately is food. Yummy, healthy food to be exact. I am having guests over in a couple of weeks and some are vegetarian while others are weight-conscious. However, I wanted our snacks to be fun and comforting, accompanying our movie night and general socializing the same way a giant bowl of buttered popcorn might. I've actually been a vegetarian myself for over eleven years, but that doesn't mean I always eat healthy food. And honestly, I don't think I could ever be vegan - I love honey and cheese too much. Nevertheless, when I decided that this week's cover should be from a cookbook, it was a vegan one that I chose. 




Sarah Kramer's line of vegan cookbooks (which are also sometimes manuals on switching to a vegan diet and how to incorporate being vegan into various aspects of your life) are a marvelous addition to any cookbook library, whether you're vegan, vegetarian, "flexitarian" or just entertaining guests of the veggie-only ilk.

What I like about the covers of Kramer's recipe bibles are the bright pastels and the pictures, often of the tattooed author surrounded by or holding up some kind of food. On the cover of her calendar, she even poses as Rosie the Riveter with an apple in the crook of her elbow. 

Challenge: Recreate a book cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week. Or  got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email:lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: Zine Scene – by Louise Tripp

It's been a zine-ful week, hasn't it? Wednesday I posted about my zine collection and my obsession with all things xeroxed-and-stapled. For this week's Friday Favorites, I thought I'd continue in that vein and tell you about a teeny little D.I.Y guide to making zines that I happen to love. It's Stolen Sharpie Revolution (#2, because it's in its second edition) by long-time zinester Alex Wrekk.

If you've ever wondered the best way to write, print, promote and distribute your zine, this book is full of the kind of information you will find invaluable. The author begins by offering suggestions on how to start planning your zine (for instance, she lists the materials you may need and discusses the importance of thinking about your audience), then offers up the skinny on everything from the most efficient and least expensive way to make tons of copies to how and where you can sell your masterpiece of zine-dom. She also includes listings of outside resources: distros (short for distribution sources), zine libraries and stores, online zine resources, places to read zine reviews and more.

a look inside Stolen Sharpie Revolution

As much as I love blogging, I know that the production of zines has decreased due to this faster and yeah, cheaper, method of getting your voice out to an audience. That makes me sad. But zines aren't dead (!) and reading Stolen Sharpie Revolution reminds me of this. It makes me want to throw caution to the wind in order to create something more tangible. You can get your own copy of Alex Wrekk's little red zine guide (as well as other merchandise of her creation: zines, buttons, etc.) at: http://smallworldbuttons.bigcartel.com/

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at: http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week - by Louise Tripp

The cover this week is not from a book exactly. It's not even one cover. It's a series of covers from a collection I've been periodically adding to since the early '90's. These are my zine covers. 

*only a small portion of my actual zine collection

The Zine World website defines zines as "a self-published, small circulation, non-commercial booklet or magazine, usually produced by one person or a few individuals" and goes on to say that "zines are publications done for the love of doing them, not to make a profit or a living." I couldn't have said it better myself. Zines can basically be about anything. They can be a collection of stories about your life or fiction stories. They can be about anything you're obsessed with: celebrities, books, music, knitting, poetry, taxidermy. Zines are sometimes cheaply made and filled with poor-quality writing, it's true. But more often, zines are true literary gems, the ultimate small press offering.

So where do you find zines? There are a ton of places online and off to find them; many big cities have zine libraries or bookstores that sell zines. Chicago, for instance, has Quimby's; you can use Google to find such stores, etc. in your area.

Online there are many sites where zine writers post to advertise and try to sell or trade/give away their zines. Here are just a few:

Zine Scene - Livejournal Community

We Make Zines - Social Network for Zinesters

Zines on Facebook

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: New Love - by Louise Tripp

Everyone has heard of “love at first sight.” But what about “love at first read?” My pick for Friday Favorites this week is a book that's still new to me. It's the book I am currently in the middle of: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Not having completed the book, it's hard to tell where I will end up in terms of my feelings for the book; but at this moment, it is fast becoming a favorite.

Initially my decision to read it was because the movie based on it is coming out this fall (see trailer below) and I have a slight crush on one of its stars, so I knew I would probably be seeing it. I like to read books before I see their film adaptations. At first, the narrator, Kathy, is incredibly clinical when she speaks of the strange boarding school, Hailsham, where she grew up: its emphasis on creativity, the mysterious “training” to become “carers” and “donors,” but never quite explaining in detail what this means. The assumption is that the reader knows; she keeps saying things like, “I don't know if it was the same in your school.” But as the story unfolds we learn of her bond with other students: most importantly, a boy named Tommy, at first ridiculed by his peers, and Ruth, Kathy's dearest friend.

Ruth is imaginative (when she and Kathy first begin playing together as children, it is Ruth that makes up games about invisible horses and secret guards and later, she seems to enjoy fibbing) but also a short fuse – when Kathy and Tommy try to comfort her at one point, she takes their remarks as insulting and explodes, sharing with them a bit of hurtful truth. Reading it, I get this feeling that what people like about Ruth is the moments where she is intimately inclusive: Kathy tells of nights where they sit up late, drinking tea and confiding their news of the day.

Tommy is Ruth's boyfriend, but it's clear by the way Kathy talks that she's had a crush on him herself. His attention to her shows that the feeling may be mutual.

At Hailsham, the students are supposed to create things – all sort of artwork, from sculptures to sketches to poems – and participate in “Exchanges,” where they exchange the things they have created for tokens that then buy them other students' work. An outsider, simply referred to as Madame, comes to the exchanges and selects especially nice work for something called The Gallery. No one ever sees this gallery, though. In the beginning, Tommy's problem is that he is not creative – or at least, not yet – and this leads to him being made fun of.

The book seems to be taking a turn towards tragedy – some foreboding scenes indicate this: Miss Lucy, one of their "guardians" or instuctors, gets upset about Hailsham and what it's not teaching its students and Madame cries when she witnesses Kathy slow-dancing to her favorite cassette, pressing an invisible body (Madame presumes a child or lover) to her chest. It's all very strange so far, but I love the almost sci-fi mystery of it. I also love how the three friends communicate and empathize with each other; their unspoken understandings are lovely, even if they do border on “love means never having to say you're sorry” territory. Kathy understands, without Ruth ever saying so, that Ruth is apologizing for a blow-up by the way Ruth treats Kathy with extreme kindness (she goes out of her way to explain the jokes she and her other friends are laughing over, etc.)

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Book Cover of the Week: Hiding The Hideous - by Louise Tripp

This week's book cover, that for the book Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace, was submitted by Alexandra and features a man with a paperbag on his head, which reminded me of the cover of Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors (see right). It's not a bad idea for an image, I think, to hide something when you are trying to attract the interest of a reader. I know I find myself drawn to books with veiled faces or cropped bodies on the covers and I have to wonder: Is it because it's interesting thinking that there is a secret to be found within the covers? That the author (or more likely, the book designer) is alluding to something hidden? I know that I am never thinking this consciously, but on some level, that must be part of it: Intrigue. Fascinating thought. 

Challenge: Recreate this cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week.

Got an idea for a Book Cover of the Week? Email: lulutripp@gmail.com

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com/.

Friday Favorites: Writers in the Movies – by Louise Tripp

The only thing I love as much as I love books is movies. I wish I had nothing but time to fit more of each into my crazy schedule. When considering what I might write about for this edition of Friday Favorites, I found myself stubbornly unable to get my mind off the movies. I thought: Why not post about movies centering around writers? The following list is my (much-boiled-down) offering of five wonderful movies that prove the pen is mightier than the sword.

1. 
   Wonder Boys – My favorite of the five, Wonder Boys is based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name and takes place during an annual literary convention at a cushy university. The story centers around Professor Grady Tripp, a creative writing teacher and one-time lauded author who is experiencing the opposite of writer's block: he can't seem to finish his novel because he can't stop writing. That's the least of his problems, of course: his wife just left him, his boss's wife is pregnant with his child, one of his students keeps throwing herself at him and another of his students may or may not be suicidal. There are so many brilliant moments in this movie, I want to live inside of it.
   
   
2. 
   The Squid & The Whale – The Squid & The Whale is about the collapse of a marriage and its affect on the children. Joan takes up with a tennis instructor and her husband, Bernard begins a flirtation with one of his students (Anna Paquin). Both parents happen to be writers and oddly, the children, Walt and Frank, act out in ways involving literature and books. Walt, a sexually-frustrated teenager, writes psuedo-intellectual reports about books he's never read and gets caught plagiarizing a song by Pink Floyd. Frank, their younger child, jerks off in the library and smears his ejaculation on the books. It's all pretty disturbing, but the performances are inspired and the film does a great job of portraying the literary family (Bernard's snobbery, scoffing at “philistines” rang especially true). And its demise.

3. Deconstructing Harry - In this Woody Allen directed dark comedy, Allen himself plays the role of Harry, a novelist about to be honored for literary achievement while his personal life turns to chaos. He has a hardcore case of writer's block. Half the people he knows are angry at him for ways he portrayed them in his novels (one of his ex-lovers, played by Judy Davis, even threatens to kill him and fires shots to show she's not kidding). His latest young girlfriend has run off with his best friend, planning nuptials. And in order for his son to attend the ceremony where Harry is to be honored, he will have to kidnap the boy. The film uses Harry's stories, one of a journey into hell and another about a man whose life is so out-of-focus that he becomes a blur, literally, to give a peak into the psyche of a struggling writer.
   
   
4. 
   Quills – Even today, it's hard to imagine a writer more...shall we say, naughty, than Marquis de Sade. This movie, a fictionalized account of his last years incarcerated in an asylum, shows us the importance of an independent press: de Sade's erotic novels are being sold with the help of an asylum laundress, who smuggled his manuscripts out and into the hands of a publisher. While probably not the most truthful look at the notoriously sadistic scribe, Quills is nonetheless an achievement for its look at the banning of books and for outstanding performances by Geoffrey Rush (as Marquis de Sade) and Kate Winslet (as the laundress, Madeline).

5. Henry Fool – A garbage man named Simon Grim, apparently the target of neighborhood hoodlums and bullies, lives aimlessly with his pill-popping mother and whiny, chain-smoking sister. He meets a drifter named Henry Fool, who gives him a black-and-white-covered composition book and tells him “if you ever feel like you have something to say and you can't get it out, stop and write it down.” What Simon ends up writing is a poem; it's even in effortless iambic pentameter. Meanwhile, Henry's roguish wit is found to be a facade covering up a lack of talent and a load of lies: he's not “in” with a publisher, as he has said, and he is actually a convicted sex offender. While that's a sour look at heroes, what makes the movie wise is that Simon Grim becomes world-renowned as a poet anyway – despite the person inspiring him to do so being a dishonest character.
   
   
   Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com.

Book Cover of the Week - by Louise Tripp

I don't read romance novels. At least, not the kind that you find in the romance section of your usual library or bookstore. I don't look down on those who do – it's a perfectly valid genre and I think plenty of very intelligent men and women read from it – but it's just not my thing. As I've admitted before, I sometimes judge books by their covers – and bodice-ripper covers rarely intrigue me.

picture by Bill Ohms

Nevertheless, as a tribute to romance fans, I chose this week's book cover from the section that usually holds books by Danielle Steel, Jude Devereaux and Debbie Macomber. Only, this book (by a lesser-known author than any of the above titans of the genre) looks less like the usual fare and might just as well fall under the newish label of “chick lit.” I noticed it while shelving one night awhile ago and coming across it still makes me chuckle. What library-lovin' lady (or man) couldn't find humor in the title The Dewey Decimal System of Love?

Challenge: Recreate this cover in photographs and I'll post it here next week.

Louise Tripp grew up in North Carolina. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is revising her first YA novel and working in a public library. You can read her regular blog at http://risktoblossom.blogspot.com.