Book Traveling Thursday: A book for a lazy day

Every week, Danielle (from Danielle’s Book Blog) and Cátia (from TheGirlWhoReadTooMuch) host a feature called Book Traveling Thursdays on Goodreads. They give you a topic each Thursday and you choose a book that you think fits. Then comes the fun part: a cover showdown! You post the original cover, the cover from your country (which I won’t be doing because the books aren’t published here), and then your favorite and least favorite cover from any edition around the world.

This week’s topic is a book you would want to read in a lazy day at home or the beach. For this I decided to go with And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie because it’s a classic of the mystery genre and it’s a very easy and entertaining read. Now, let’s check out the covers!

ORIGINAL COVER

The book was first published in the UK in 1939 under a different title which contained the N word, so I don’t feel comfortable adding the actual original cover. Instead, I added the original 1940 cover from the US with the current title. I don’t like the skeleton hand because it makes it seem more like a horror novel than a mystery, but it’s not the worst I’ve seen.

FAVORITE COVERS

   

On the left is the Polish edition and my favorite, and on the right is another US edition. I like the simplicity of both covers, the creativity behind the Polish one and the colors of both, even though they are different. They were the ONLY ones that I liked among the many many covers this novel has. There were so many bad ones for this book! None of the others truly represented the story as I wanted them to, except these two.

LEAST FAVORITE COVERS

     

As a consequence of the original title, many of the covers took an offensive or problematic turn. I decided to ignore those types of cover because I don’t feel comfortable sharing them here, even though I consider those to be my least favorites. Instead I chose terrible covers design-wise. On the left we have the Portuguese edition. It’s so bland. It doesn’t even say mystery, it says boring. On the center is the Thai edition. If you don’t know this novel, at first glance you might think it is a children’s book. Then you notice the noose around his neck and everything changes. The illustration is too childish for the subject at hand! Finally on the right is the Arabic edition. I don’t like the illustration nor the decision to include Death as part of it and the colors are so bad!

Do you think not adding the offensive covers was okay or do you feel like it’s better to show them and point at their errors? Do you agree with my choices?