I love to collect vintage/antique books and my favorite terrible cover that I own is for a copy of The Road Through The Wall by Shirley Jackson. It's about an upper middle class neighborhood where people are upset that a wall separating them from lower class homes will be torn down. There's also a mystery about a missing child. The cover shows a couple embracing with a tantalizing tag line "A married woman prowls the back streets!" It has almost nothing to do with the actual book and I fear anyone who picked it up based on the cover will believe it's some sort of romance when it definitely isn't.

I can listen to audio books but I have to be in the right mind and doing certain tasks to absorb them. For example, I can listen when I'm driving to or from a familiar place or cleaning but not if I need my focus on whatever task I'm doing.

For me it's a bit of nostalgia and some magic that other places don't have. As a child there was a bookstore and bindery on our main street that had cats wandering the aisles. Besides the library it was the place I attribute most to nurturing my love of reading. Or in New Orleans there was a bookstore with books precariously stacked throughout and a small box of free books out front. In another one I visited there was a pair of high heels inexplicably sitting on a high shelf behind a register. I asked about them and the woman said she thought the original owner put them there but didn't know for sure. I think they speak to me because each one is like a book to me. Each one is going to have a unique story to tell.

I typically do physical for fiction and non-fiction I'll do audio. I also find I can digest most classics (most recently Camille by Sheridan Le Fanu) better in audio format.