The default LaTeX Style is a no-nonsense, scientific paper like style, which is not really appealing for magazine like content or for literature typesetting. One thing I especially find boring is the table of content, which normally just lists the content.
If you want to have an abstract of what you will read or a picture, it gets a bit tricky to do. I played a bit around to get the following:
Table of contents with images and abstract
What do you need to do for this? First you need a style file which contains this:
Then you include this style file in your normal document (I used the book class, if you use something different, you might need to adapt the style file for it) and use it like this:
I have not yet used it outside of some examples, but it might work…