There are only four1 of us, and I’m going last, so ‘surprise’ Sumayyah! I’m your HOTS Secret Santa. I hope I can live up to the standards you set when you kicked off this initiative, which our fellow writers have upheld for the past couple of weeks. So now I have three tough acts to follow, and poor Sumayyah has had to wait most of a month to get her Secret Santa shelf picks. This post is also going live on Christmas Day, so I’m too late for the rest of our readers to get physical copies of any of these books before we reopen on the 27th. To that end, if we have both a digital and physical copy of an item, the picture will be a link to the digital, while the text will be to the physical. A final note before we dive in: it will probably shock you to the core2 that I haven’t read every book I’ve ever recommended on the HOTS blog3. There are too many books and not enough time. I do read/watch/listen widely, though, so to give proper Secret Santa recs to Sumayyah, everything in this post is something I’ve gone through myself at one point or another. This has the added benefit of improving the recs for the rest of our readers, which is a lovely side effect. So read on for some reading recommendations tailored to Sumayyah, but hopefully relevant to your interests as well.
Following in the footsteps of my fellow writers, I’ve re-read through Sumayyah’s posts to see what kinds of things I should recommend, though I also had a chance to read a bit of her own writing, thanks to a link to her website in her Here be Dragons post. I read a fable she wrote titled The Peacock, The Crown, & The River. It’s a short read, only nine pages, and it’s a tale well told, so do yourself a favour: stop reading my post and go read it; I can wait. Or the post can wait. I don’t have any stake in when you read this. You know what I mean. Anyway, reading Peacock made me want to recommend a fable, and I found one from one of my favourite children’s authors: Oliver Jeffers. If you’re unfamiliar with his works, check out Lost and Found, which I’ve just discovered has a short-film version. It’s a good starting point as a poignant story about friendship, but for Sumayyah, I have two books I’d like to recommend, one thanks to Peacock and the other simply due to vibes. The Fate of Fausto is the fable I’m recommending, in which Fausto, a man who believes he owns everything, has that belief tested when he tries to claim the sea. You can probably see where this is going, but it’s told in a gentle way that reminds me of the tone Sumayyah took in Peacock, though the message of the fables is undoubtedly different. For vibes, it’s A Child of Books. It’s a book about the magic of books, so it’s an easy rec for anyone who loves to read, but it’s also absolutely gorgeous. The art style is simple, but it incorporates text from all kinds of books as part of the pictures, some of it obscured, others very readable, and figuring out the source of the text is part of the fun. Given Sumayyah’s appreciation of interesting art styles, she’ll easily enjoy both aspects.
Moving away from cozier vibes and into something that can get slightly scary, my next recommendation is Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. Fforde is a master of show-don’t-tell, and his worlds are wonderfully weird and incredibly British4. Early Riser follows the exploits of Charlie Worthing, a newly appointed Winter Consul to an out-of-the-way hibernation silo that’s been having a problem with a shared dream that’s driving people bonkers. No, I don’t expect any of that sentence to make sense to someone who hasn’t read the book, but I’ve written it like that deliberately. Fforde drops you into the world, and you get bits and pieces here and there as you go. Winters are brutally cold, and humans hibernate in a network of silos heated by nuclear power. Winter Consuls are the people who stay awake all winter to ensure the safety of the rest of humanity. Hibernation is supposed to be dreamless, but something’s happening at this silo. So why is this slightly scary? Well… hibernation doesn’t always work out. There’s a chance you’ll wake up as a nightwalker: mostly braindead, and if not kept well-fed, you’d be none-too-picky about what you can get between your teeth. It’s a zombie by another name, and Fforde ramps up the tension in scenes involving them. Sumayyah, if Forde’s style sounds fun, but you want to avoid the scares, try out Shades of Grey & its recent sequel, Red Side Story.
So, in her spooky stories post, Sumayyah mentions Legion, a show about a mutant with split personalities. I have beef with that version of Legion because I’m familiar with Brandon Sanderson’s Legion; the Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. This set of three short stories makes up one novella, and technically5 fulfills my desire to recommend a trilogy somewhere in this post. However, I initially thought it would fit nicely in the cross-genre bucket and will use it to cover both categories. Stephen Leeds is… I guess a problem solver? Private investigator? He ends up solving mysteries but mostly just wants to be left alone.
Stephen has a highly unusual talent: he can master any skill in just a few hours. But this quick learning comes with a cost: every skill he learns creates a new personality in his head to house that skill; to him, these personalities are real people and must follow the rules of the real world. Each one has their own room in his mansion6, they have to get into the car if he’s going out or they’re not there, and consequently, he doesn’t have the skill they embody. The novellas blend the sci-fi/fantasy elements of Leeds’ condition with mystery and thriller elements as he works on the three cases, one per short story. Though… I say sci-fi/fantasy, but after a conversation with Maya while writing this post, I’m not so sure. The quick skill learning absolutely is, but Maya said the personified alternate personalities sound more like the real disorder Stephen’s resembles than most media depicts. So why do I have beef with Marvel’s Legion? There was a TV deal for Sanderson’s Legion, but then that show, with the same name and a similar premise, came out, and it killed producers’ appetite for the one I wanted to watch. It could have been so good. There’s still the book, though, and Sumayyah, I think you’ll enjoy this one.
Now it’s time to Mortify you with tales of the Reaper Man and his granddaughter Susan to cover the Death & the Maiden & Media post. This might not be Soul Music to your ears, especially when you’re expecting a visit from the Hogfather, not a skeleton, but I assure you these reads are well worth it and aren’t just some kind of Thief Of Time. I gleefully admit that the wordplay here is a stretch, but I’m just so giddy that I get to recommend Sir PTerry’s Discworld again that I had to do something fun to start this paragraph, so you get me playing with the titles. I’ve linked to Markham Public Library’s Overdrive collection, as they have more of the series than we do, but you can access them with a VPL card. Now… I’m also stretching with the Maiden part of this equation. Susan Sto Helit is no love-lorn maiden dealing with loss. Sure, in Soul Music, she’s a bit miffed at her grandfather for not saving her parents, one of whom was Death’s adoptive daughter, from a carriage crash, but she gets over that by the next two books she’s in, and she’s a no-nonsense, reality-saving badass in those books. And that’s mostly because she’s no-nonsense. Common sense is the least common thing on the disc7, though her supernatural abilities do help. As for her grandfather, Discworld’s Death is one of the most beloved characters in the series, and that’s saying a lot in a world that contains Granny Weatherwax, and Samuel Vimes. Death’s appeal stems from the character that he’s become by the time of Mort. He appears where and when death occurs so he can shepherd the soul to the afterlife it deserves, a proper psychopomp rather than a malicious killer. He’s also obsessed with humanity and the way we live our lives, as it’s not something he can truly understand, being a personification of an immutable concept. His first couple of books deal with what happens when death doesn’t work as it’s meant to, which goes a long way to endear readers to the idea that Death isn’t a bad guy. Soul Music is more of an introduction to Susan, while Hogfather and Theif of Time see grandfather and granddaughter defending the disc from reality-ending threats: bureaucrats. Sumayyah, there are 41 Discworld novels, so this recommendation is the gift that keeps on giving. You don’t need to read them in order, but there are recommended reading orders for the various stories. Going through them in publishing order does let you see characters develop in books where they aren’t the focus, though. And Death shows up in most of them.
The item I’m going to recommend now has no ties to a specific post; I just haven’t put much multimedia stuff in this post, where Sumayyah talks a lot about movies. So naturally, I picked a book for this. And it’s not even a book about films. But it is still multimedia because it’s a photography book detailing tiny sculptures made to represent the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan is a delight to flip through; a given verso contains a short excerpt from the fairy tale, and the recto is a full-page spread of the accompanying sculpture. There’s also a brief introduction by Neil Gaiman and a glossary that gives the gist of each fairy tale at the back. The sculptures are weird and wonderful, varying between beautiful and unsettling, just like the stories they represent, and they do represent the story, not just a specific moment. Take a look at the preview on Amazon, which shows The Companionship of the Cat and the Mouse and Hansel and Gretel, to see what I mean. And since I’m on the topic of Shaun Tan, I read a couple more of his books for this post, including The Lost Thing. This book’s animated short film version won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2010, beating out Pixar’s effort, Day & Night, that year. Huh… between this and Lost and Found above, I’m recommending two animated shorts, both with interesting styles that fit into the Artistically Astounding Animated Films category. Although we don’t have The Lost Thing‘s animated version in the collection, it’s not too difficult to find. Also, is it weird that I only just noticed as I typed that paragraph that both titles involve something lost?
Well, I’ve gone almost double my typical length for this post, so I’m sure everyone, Sumayyah included, is tired of reading me rambling on. I hope there’s something in this list, Sumayyah, that you’ll enjoy reading/flipping through. For now, that’s the HOTS team done for 2025. We’ll be back next year with more of the usual fare and possibly a surprise or two for our regular readers. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Io Saturnalia, Happy New Year, and more generally, Happy beginning of winter.
1 Before anyone gives me side eye for the title, remember that I’m a Digital Creation Specialist. 4 and IV were taken.
2 No it won’t.
3 Insert picture of Kevin McCallister aftershave scream here.
4 Do I need to make that distinction?
5 The best kind of correct.
6 He’s good enough at what he does to make lots of money doing it.
7 And, sadly, that’s true here in roundworld too.