Tag Archives: Fantasy

Judging a Book by its Title: Romantasy/Sci-fi Edition

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The cover of A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

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.

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Secret Santa Part 100: (Not So) Secret Santa’s Shelf Pick Delivery Service

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A pile of gifts that are vaguely book shaped.

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.

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Here Be Dragons (for the Lunar New Year!)

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the-book-of-dragons

According to the Chinese Lunar calendar, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, and I am a huge fan of dragons. They’re just very cool, and I find it fascinating and mysterious that almost every culture in the world has a dragon or dragon-esque creature in their legends, mythologies, and hagiography. I wonder if they came about in response to dinosaurs…

Funnily enough, I just finished reading The Book of Dragons, an anthology of short stories all about dragons by some of my favourite authors, and so I thought I’d combine those two coincidences into a fun, dragon-themed post! (You can read my response to this book on my own site, if you like!)

Before we get into the media recommendations, you might be wondering what’s with the title. I’d always thought ‘here be dragons’ was a phrase used by ancient mapmakers to mark unknown regions of the world. Apparently, this isn’t quite true! According to a National Geographic article, “apart from an inscription on a single, 16th-century globe, this claim is unfounded.” However, “mapmakers would often place monsters and other imagined creatures to marked unexplored areas” which might be why ‘here be dragons’ can often be found in fictional maps.

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