charles barrow's writing

My summer tbr* shelf.  I set these books aside in June *to be read over the summer. I will often do this, choose a handful of books to be read in the coming months, and I am often spectacularly unsuccessful at sticking with my choices. Earmarking, or, bookmarking, if you will, five books to read in succession, patently ignores the fact that there are shops out in the world dedicated to selling me more books. And it also assumes that I have the willpower to avoid buying said books, and opening one of them instead of one from my existing, carefully curated, selection. What I'm trying to say is that there is very little chance I will actually read through this selection over the summer, and that there will be other titles, not pictured, that I will choose to read (on a whim) instead. This is the quandary of every reader. There are too many books in the world, all vying for our time and attention. And we wouldn't have it any other way. Also, despite knowing all of the above, in the

I've been thinking about re-designing my ebook covers, so I've been checking out book covers generally, seeing what's in vogue, what's not, and found these two inexplicably similar examples. One book is a novel, so fiction, the other is nonfiction, both with different authors & publishers. But surely the same designer, right? Same diver, in the same trunks, on the same board. Almost the same colour sky, and white & blue font colours. Weird. Too much of a co-incidence, surely. If these are done by two different designers perhaps one of them can claim/blame zeitgeist. I like that the diver is poised and ready in the first image, and just starting his fall in the second. A moment in time, captured nicely. I'd pick up both of these titles in a bookshop, judging them on their covers alone.