What's with the Book Covers and the Birds?

Franzen on the Oprah TV show
discussing Freedom

After reading two of the three Jonathan Franzen books that I had bought at the Brisbane Writers Festival, I did a Google search on him and found this interesting blog post about him at 
'The New York Times' site;
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/jonathan-franzen/#
Which is where I found the above picture, as well.
I also found an audio interview with Suzanne Collins about Mockingjay, 

the final book in her Hunger Games trilogy, and Sam Tanenhaus and Greg Cowles discuss Jonathan Franzen’s new (at the time) novel, Freedom.
You can listen to it here;
Book Review Podcast: Suzanne Collins 
I found it quite an interesting audio to listen to.
The latest book that I am reading is called Awakening Intuition by Frances E Vaughan.

And yes, I did start reading it because it had that bird imagery on the cover, but I had originally purchased it because Frances (or Frank) is my father's Christian name, and Vaughan is my brother's ... just by coincidence.
I also like the orange orb representing the sun on the book cover, for some reason.

My photo of the orb at the
Byron Bay Writers Festival, 2011

Another book I intuitively thought I should pick up and start reading, for some reason not quite consciously known to me, is a book about the city I grew up in called Brisbane written by an author by the name of Matthew Condon, who is one, or two years older than me, and grew up in this city as well ... although he did leave it for twenty years, before coming back to it, while I never did for more than a fortnight at a time, and rarely at that.

I thought that there might be a bird to connect this book with the others here somehow, but looking over the cover I couldn't find that connection.
Until I started reading through page 11 and stumbled upon this passage;
"When Oxley (the guy who discovered the spot Brisbane was founded on) arrives,'the wild bird of  Freedom fled away'. 
Then, suddenly, there is 'a sweet young city 
laughing in the sun'."!??!
I should also mention that I had this book with me at the time of the Byron Bay Writers Festival in 2011 
(the day of the orb photo, above), because Matthew was giving talks there on the day and I thought I would get him to sign this copy (which I had bought at a Brisbane bookshop, but not read, and have only just started reading it today) if I ran into him there, which alas I didn't, and still haven't. 
There's so much water, so close to home ... as the Paul Kelly song goes.
At least I got to meet Paul at the Writers Festival that day;
"... And There's So Much Water So Close to Home" Paul Kelly

and

"Fortune Used to Hide in the Palm of His Hand."

In fact, it was only through reading the Paul Kelly book  
How to Make Gravy that I read  about Paul's enthusiasm for reading 
Franzen's The Corrections that I noticed this guy Franzen was in Brisbane the week I had just read about him in Paul's book and decided that it was a sign to see Franzen speak at the  
Brisbane Writers Festival.

It's amazing where life can steer you, through these little coincidences it seems to throw out.

I like the little blue bird on the writer's shoulder

 I also came across this image while doing an image search through Google about Matthew Condon and Brisbane, which is from this site -
http://www.ciprecinct.qut.edu.au/archive/details.jsp?news-event-id=26795

"Brisbane writers Matthew Condon and Benjamin Law will talk about the importance of putting together a professional portfolio to showcase your work. 
This session is not to be missed by anyone trying to carve out a career as a writer."

This artwork was a short walk
 from Franzen's talk venue

A t-shirt design of mine I made a while ago.