Subject matters

 

     Another 'reading habits' question for you today: are there any subjects which would tend to draw you to a book?

    I don't mean genre here, rather what the book's about - what it features. So, for example, if a blurb or a review tells you a novel has a particular setting - exotic, domestic, an English village, a Tuscan villa, etc., or a character with a certain job - a writer, an artist, a musician or something more unusual, or that it focuses on a house or the creation or restoration of a garden, say, would that alone (quite apart from who the writer is or how starry the reviews may be) tend to make you pick it up?

    The question is not as daft as it may sound, as subject matter, when translated to title or cover design, can be the very thing which gets the potential reader's interest. For instance, you might be drawn to 'gates into a garden' books like this one or this, or something with a bit of balustrade! Of course our reading tastes and interests often range widely, but if you can put them in a nutshell and say something like "I'll always go for a country house in 1930s England" or "...a storm-lashed beach in nineteenth century Cornwall where a tortured composer walks by night", I'd love to hear about it.

(The picture is from the cover of this book, and those gates combined with: "As darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains ..." made me buy it!).