Book Recommendations June 2025

Otherland - We love every Fantasy Trope

Every couple of weeks, a confused-looking person gets lost in our glorious halls, looks around with a frown and pulled down corners of their mouth and always thinks it’s necessary to tell the (un)suspecting employee standing behind the cash machine, that they don’t like all this „weird fantasy stuff“. This always awakens the dragon in me, I do a little magic and lo and behold: the person leaves with an Otherland bag.
But where are the roots of the prejudice that genre literature is trivial? Perhaps it's because of the flooding of a particularly hackneyed genre trope, that has the mass media holding in a firm grip. Twilight, Sarah J. Maas and lots and lots of hideous covers with two people looking deep into each other's eyes while one of them holds a sword. Have you guessed it?

Yeah baby, you’ve got it: Enemies to Lovers.

My mission for today's newsletter is to find a few exceptions even in this trope that won’t suck and even if it took some convincing, each and every one of my colleagues came up with something. But then most of them gave me more Lovers to Enemies things...somehow none of us is really into that trope, I guess. Let's start with THE standard work: Enemy mine. The 1985 movie is based on a short story by Barry B. Longyear and describes the cautious rapprochement between a human and a lizard-alien. A good read, and not at all cheesy. Personally, I was always hoping for a kiss between Brienne and Jamie in George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire", but tbh I felt more or less repulsed, when they showed it in the incredible awful last season of the Series. The deep friendship between the two of them was probably far more loving for me than a bad sex scene. I've also grown quite fond of Nina and Matthias in „Six of Crows“ by Leigh Bardugo. All the bickering and snickering…and the slow burn Romance, Yes that convinced me!

A whole book about Enemy to Lovers that is really really good is „This is how you loose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Not only is it well written, but it uses time travel and small, intelligently placed messages from the two protagonists, who aren't actually allowed to love each other.

It has long been a fact that Ursula K. Le Guin was incapable of producing anything bad. In the Earthsea Chronicles, or more precisely the Tombs of Atuan, there is a subtle rapprochement between Ged and Tenar without any annoying label being imposed.

Joe Abercrombie also has a knack for breathing new life into fantasy tropes, but where exactly the Enemies to Lovers thing takes place I'll keep a secret, just read the whole everything! 

If you're going through a breakup and would rather see your ex-partner's head on a pike, I recommend the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. Definitely a lasting way to break up with someone.

And that's it for now, because that's all I can think of.

Have fun with the novelties!
Yours (loving) Esther, from the Otherland

Book Recommendations May 2025

50 Shades of Otherland

With spring, color is finally returning to our dull lives! However, here in the Otherland we have less of a problem with the world turning 50 shades of Gray (pun intended), as we are surrounded by book spines in every color printers can produce. And guess what's the shelf with most of the clown colors? You've guessed wrong, it's Horror! Here, the Emperor of horror - Stephen King - is especially beautifully dressed in all the colors of the rainbow. Perhaps so that the dark content is no longer so overwhelming? Or does it have exactly the opposite effect of making it even worse?

Lovecraft presents us with a particular uncanny color (in the freudian "unhomely" sense), in the short story "The Color out of space". Here he describes something that we cannot even imagine, namely a color that does not exist. Wow. Only literature is capable of doing something like that. If you still feel like playing Twister with your brain afterwards, Tom recommends "The Case Against Reality" by Donald D. Hoffman. Here the author explains to us that the colors we see are not real at all. Great. Nope, I'll just close my eyes and boom, problem solved. That's why they call me the Solvem Probler. Speaking of funny, some say that Terry Pratchett might be more hilarious and, in keeping with today's theme, you can pick up his "Colors of Magic" right away! In fantasy, by the way, color is a popular tool not only to hide symbolism, but also to establish new systems of magic. My personal favorite here is Brent Weeks and his Lightbringer series. He presents us with a new word for magic: "chromaturgy" and delivers directly: the red spectrum has a lot to do with fire, blue can be used more (or less) for shooting, while green mages can create particularly hard armor, among other things. And what white and black can do is also pretty cool. But magic has its price and practitioners can literally see it when they look in the mirror - If the color bursts the iris, they lose their minds. Speaking of eye color, Caro immediately thinks of Sarah J. Maas. In "A Court of Thorns and Roses", the eye color of EVERY character is ALWAYS mentioned. And they have ALWAYS the color of a gemstone. Whew. Jasper Fforde's "Red Side Story" and "Shades of Grey" are both more political. Similar to Michael Marshall Smith's "Only Forward" or Pierce Brown's "Red Rising", colors are used in these dystopias to divide and oppress people into evil systems. Prettier than brown, but just as shitty. Incidentally, the yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist classic "The Yellow Wallpaper" is particularly ugly. It's so hideous that the protagonist slowly but surely loses her mind. Just like me, when I try to read Sarah J Maas.
While we're on the subject of yellow, Caro's current favorite "Viriconium" also deserves praise. The color "gamboge" (a deep yellow pigment extracted from the gum resin of the Garcinia tree) is used a lot here, although the city that gives the book its title is actually called Pastel City because of its pastel-colored towers:

"About him rose the Pastel Towers, tall and gracefully shaped to mathematical curves, tinted pale blue or fuchsia or dove-grey."

Wow, how picturesque. Brandon Sanderson's "Tress of the Emerald Sea" is also particularly colorful. The protagonist comes from the emerald green sea and surrounding the world itself are moons of different colors, from which sand trickles down to fill the seas of sand, which are also of different colors. Certainly pretty to look at, but the color changes the properties of the sand, which can be deadly. Attention Indiana Jones Flashback!

So now let the King inspire you, rebel against the greyness of the big city and dig out your most colorful piece of clothing, we're waiting for you here - with lots of colorful recommendations!

Rainbow greetings from the Otherland,
yours Esther (rocking the frog-green tracksuit today!)