2025 is almost over. Literally, today is the last day. I’m always surprised by the end of a year, as it seems like we just rang it in. Wasn’t that just a few months ago? No? It was a whole year ago? Huh.
But one of my favorite activities to indulge in as a year wraps up is to pick out the highlights in entertainment. What did I watch or read that ignited my imagination and all of my fangirl instincts? My favorite things may not be yours but that’s part of the fun. Taste is subjective, and a discussion about this kind of thing helps you get to know someone and may give you some recommendations of things you may not have thought to try.
After reading Adam’s latest post, I just had to get in on the book-judging action, with my own little twist. Now, I know that the age-old adage is to not do what I’m about to do, but let’s face it. So many of us do judge a book by its cover, especially when choosing what to pick up next, and, as it turns out, publishers have made it increasingly easy to guess what you might get out of a book just from the cover (at least in terms of the genre). New romance books love slapping on that bright, vibrant-coloredillustration style onto their covers, and it’s easy to spot a historical fiction book from a mile away (if there’s a woman facing away and an easily recognizable landmark in the background, you know exactly what you’re holding). But playing a game of “Generic Book Cover” isn’t very fun, so, while we will be breaking one of the oldest rules in existence, we will be doing it in a rather unconventional, non-generic way. And by unconventional and non-generic, I mean a pop quiz! Trust me, it will be more fun than it sounds because you will be the ones judging the covers here. After extensive research (aka, a deep dive through our catalog), I’ve gathered what I can subjectively say are some rather genre-nonconforming book covers, and it will be up to you to guess what genre they really belong to. So, get your thinking caps on. Are you ready? Let’s go!
It’s possible I had too much fun with the last one of these, so I’m back with another one. The original intent was just to keep it to pure fantasy books because I read a lot of fantasy, but many of those titles don’t strike me as silly or on-the-nose enough to run with for my fake blurbs. I suppose I could pick many of Sir Pterry’s books, but they’re invalidated by the fact that I’ve either read it or know enough of his style to potentially have a decent guess as to what he was getting at. Branching back into romance got me marginally closer to the kinds of titles I need to really make a post like this work. Also, full disclosure: I picked a sci-fi book because it has the exact style and title I’m looking for. Also, unless it’s hard sci-fi, there are a lot of similarities between fantasy and sci-fi anyway.
