Welcome to Hour 5 of Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon! The first 1/6 of the event is in the books (hehehe), and I hope you're all still going strong. Now might be a good time to break out a tasty snack. Just sayin'.

I first participated in Dewey's in October of 2014, and it is not an exaggeration to say that my experience is the whole reason I'm part of the book blogosphere today. A year later, I've gotten back into writing for pleasure, read new favorites I never would have discovered otherwise, taken part in a smattering of other readathons and challenges, and even made a few new friends out of the deal. Despite never having met her, all this is to say that my life wouldn't be what it it is today without Dewey. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

Anyway, enough of that mush. On to the challenge!

As we bury ourselves in books today, I want to make sure that all of them get some love, not just the shelfie-worthy. I'm not talking about plain-looking reads either. Those are a dime a dozen and are uninspiring rather than actively off-putting. No, I want to extol the virtues of the downright ugly.

To start, I want to sell you To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.


This cover needs some major help. It looks like someone in the art department got a little collage happy; from a glance, we've got a dude, what looks like a ghost, a map of a building, spires from another building, a cat... and that's just what I can pick out. The title design fonts and placement aren't awful, but they're obviously dated and overshadowed by the clutter of the rest of it. Other editions of the book didn't fare much better. I looked through the covers on Goodreads, and they're pretty much all uniformly ugly.

Regardless of its terrible cover, this was a total treat of a genre-bending book (we've got well-researched historical fiction and time travel here!). From my mini-review:

"TSNotD goes full-tilt comedy of errors/romance/mystery in the Victorian era. Willis is masterly in her attention to historical detail without devolving into textbook-style writing—I learned plenty about the customs and architecture of Victorian England while following Ned and Verity's desperate attempts to correct an accidental historical incongruity, all the while juggling lovesick schoolboys, pedantic professors and quite the difficult cat. ... [T]his was an absolutely worthwhile, utterly enjoyable romp. I'd recommend it for anyone who likes a dash of historical fiction with their sci-fi/spec-fic."

Here's what I want from you:

Want to earn extra entries in the drawing?