One of my favorite books this year so far has been Bill Konigsberg’s Out of the Pocket, and you can read my whole review here. It was an accident to find and read this one since it’s a sports story, but I loved it.

The cover is pretty memorable: the football player looking into the dusty distance. The sepia clouds and black ground just look unique and different to me, as does the orange title font. The reason I even found the book was it was faced out and the cover caught my attention (see – it is important!). Out of the Pocket was published September 2008 by Dutton.

Then while browsing books online recently, I found this one:

Tim Tharp’s Knights of the Hill Country (and, yes, this is the same Thrap of 2008’s The Spectacular Now) was published in 2006 by Laurel Leaf and explores similar themes to Konigsberg”s book, minus the issues surrounding the acceptance of one’s sexuality.

Sure the covers aren’t identical, but it’s remarkable how many similar elements they use, particularly because there are many overlapping themes. There’s the football player looking out in the dusty distance, the sepia tones, and the dark ground. Though they aren’t the same, the fonts are very similar, right down to the use of orange.

Regardless of how alike they look, I have to say that these covers really strike a chord with me as a revolution in the traditional sports novel. Working in my town’s public library in high school, I loathed reshelving the sports novels because they all looked the same (and uninteresting — sorry Matt Christopher!). These, however, are much more intriguing to me, and I think they would definitely draw readers who may otherwise believe they have no interest in a story revolving around sports.

—–

Though it’s probably obvious, the three of us at stacked have been a bit swamped the last couple of weeks. But that doesn’t mean we’re not reading and preparing some fabulous reviews. Personally, I’ve got three or so books on the docket for this week, and by the end of next week, we’ll have up our first round robin review of a very different book (I’d say *awesome* book, but I’ll wait to see what the others say first).