extraordinary green cress 🌱

they/them

evil fic writer / future booker prize winner

winterjan on ao3

fic masterpost

hermitcraft / life series

ethubs 4ever

top 5 books of all time:

the world according to garp, john irving

crook manifesto, colson whitehead

trout fishing in america, richard brautigan

life ceremony, sayaka murata

god loves haiti, dmitri elias leger

i think good titles are normally very evocative and give you a good idea of what the story is about, and should intrigue you enough to make you want to pick it up and read the blurb. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a decent example: you immediately get the feeling for the comic book & stage magic elements of the story (it also helps that, having read the book, the title is constantly reconciled throughout, but you obviously don’t know that before reading it)

bad titles don’t really give you a good idea of the tone or contents of the book. i just read Alchemised and that’s a godawful title imo. all you get from it is that there’s alchemy (you could argue that it’s a metaphor for the war changing the main character but the book never really tries to make that connection and it is not a subtle book (whereas the title drop of the title from when it was a fanfiction was so goofy that it made me burst into laughter). i also tend to think that titles that are just names are normally bad. Magnolia Parks is a bad title. Edith Holler is a bad title. who are these people. why should i spend my time reading what this book is about.

there’s obviously nuance. imo A Court of Thorns and Roses is a great title. super evocative, perfect balance of romance and danger and setting, brilliant for a book that is a beauty and the beast retelling. but the next two books (A Court of Mist and Fury and A Court of Wings and Ruin) are dreadful. thorns and roses are related to one another and give the vibe of a setting that is both beautiful and deadly. what do mist and fury have to do with each other? what idea are they trying to evoke? a place that’s mysterious and… angry? what about wings and ruin? what relationship does a wing have to a ruin? what is this title ringing to tell me other than the fact that winged fairy people are going to war with each other? wings maybe symbolise freedom… except feyre is no freer in this book than the last. and the book has a (pretty) happy ending so what is the ruin a metaphor for? and even notwithstanding all that, the titles are so similar that outs easy to get them mixed up. which one was it where feyre meets the bone carver? umm. a court of something something