book cover preliminaries

*Book One: 

1. Ender's Game
2. Orson Scott Card - Born in 1951 in Washington and raised on the west coast, Orson Scott Card attended Brigham Young University and spent two years as a Mormon missionary Brazil. Highly influenced by his Mormon upbringing, in his introduction to Ender's Game Card mentions that Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy inspired him to write science fiction. He claims that in high school he was fascinated by military strategy and especially the crucial role that a leader plays in an army. The idea of the Battle Room, the game around which the novel Ender's Game is organized, came to him when he was sixteen years old, but he did not begin to write the story until years later. Since Card came up with the basic concept of the book at such a young age it is not surprising that his young characters have considerably more penetrating thoughts and complex emotions than children in most other stories. This emphasis on children is one that Card very consciously molded, and he states that one of his goals was for everyone to have to see things from their point of view.
3. Lost Boys, The Abyss, Robota
4. Set in Earth's future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien race also known as the "Buggers"). In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders. The world's most talented children, including the novel's protagonist, Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School. There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room where Ender's tactical genius is revealed.
5. isolation, mechanics, darkness, space, inhumanity, depression, deprivation, separation, maturity, games, dichotomy, identity
6. Amidst the manipulation of outside forces, it is questioned whether one can preserve what makes them individual.
7. Andrew "Ender" Wiggin  - chosen to eventually lead humanity's efforts against an alien menace.
8. Formics or "buggers" - Alien race that has invaded Earth twice nearly wiping out humanity and is feared to invade a third time.
9. - "Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you."
   - "I am not a happy man, Ender. Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it."
10. I would like to design a cover that emphasizes the human element of the book rather than the technology that past covers have done.

Book Two:

1. Things Fall Apart
2. Chinua Achebe - Raised by Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory.
3. Anthills of the Savannah, A Man of the People, Arrow of God
4. The novel depicts the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umuofia—one of a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria, inhabited by the Igbo ethnic group. In addition it focuses on his three wives, his children, and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo community during the late nineteenth century.
5. struggle, change, tradition, masculinity, difference, fire, locusts, colonialism, family, ignorance, influence, religion
6. When society begins to change there is a question as to whether or not the change presented is an improvement.
7. Okonkwo - a prominent village leader who has met many successes in his lifetime, but is challenged by the growing European influence
8. Europeans - following the colonization of Nigeria, various European characters attempt to convert the native Nigerians to their customs.
9. - "Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
   Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
   - “Does the white man understand our custom about land?” “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
10. Colonialism and Postcolonialism tend to be interesting genres for me to read. I'm also interested in the visual elements of African tribes and would like to try and reflect that in my designs

Book Three:

1. Invisible Man
2. Ralph Ellison - Lauded for his brilliance as a writer of modern fiction, Ralph Ellison has produced works that continue to have a profound impact on the understanding of race and social thought in the United States. His often surrealistic images reveal how people—despite their diverse geographic, racial, or social backgrounds—share a universal “common humanity.” Ellison’s early years as a classically trained musician and jazz trumpeter taught him to approach “the arts analytically.”When he sidelined music to take up writing in the late 1930s, he embarked upon a career that took him from obscurity to national fame. His 1952 novel Invisible Man is considered a masterpiece of modern literature and has been translated into fourteen languages around the world. A fiction writer, essayist, and educator, Ellison spent the last decades of his life at conferences and college campuses lecturing on the value of art and its ability to explore the complex relationships of the human experience.
3. Shadow and Act, Going to the Territory, Juneteenth
4. The narrator, an unnamed African American man who considers himself socially invisible, tells of his life in the present, looking back into his past. Thus, the narrator has hindsight in how his story is told, as he is already aware of the outcome. The novel addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
5. racism, individuality, identity, manipulation, marxism, stereotype, blindness, invisibility, jazz, allusion, Harlem, america
6. Change in culture and politics can be achieved by even the smallest and minute parties, whether others are aware of it or not.
7. The Narrator - An African-American man who joins a political group, known as the Brotherhood, uses his oratory skills to attempt to improve things for the society in Harlem.
8. Ras the Exhorter - A radical black nationalist who embodies the fears for future of the civil rights battle in America of the narrator.
9. - “Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.”
   - "And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man."
10. As corny as it sounds, this book was quite moving emotionally. If I could translate the struggles and tribulations of the main character onto the cover that would be pretty neat.