I didn‘t get into how Appa never knew of my bisexuality, or that Amma cried for 30 days when she saw me kissing a girl. She had stopped speaking to me too. When Appa was working overtime one night, I locked the tv programming on lesbian porn. Amma called me, crying & apologized. She had said, “Fine, fine. Do whatever you want, Damani. Just stop the boobies & poonies. What are these women doing?”
pickSuffering from burnout, a woman tries out five alternative jobs successively, with the help of an employment councillor. Each new job has surreal or possibly supernatural elements, nicely capturing the fraught psychic relationship many of us have with working for pay, especially in Japan where this story is set. Amusing & thought-provoking. Audiobook read with a soothing warmth by Cindy Kay. Translation from Japanese by Polly Barton.
You never knew what was going to happen, whatever you did. You just had to give it your all and hope for the best.
May Wrap-up & Friday Reads: #gardenwriting #LGBTQ #CanadianAuthors #poetry #comics #audiobooks #nonfiction
https://youtu.be/ul1bVH4yT9Y
pickSweet chapter embellishments add to the charm of this nostalgic tale about the course of one man‘s life in rural Cotswold. Bert Pinnegar, like the author, was born at the end of the Victorian era and witnesses the many social changes in England from the viewpoint of 6 decades of employment in the same manor house garden, going from most junior underling to head gardener. Gentle, funny & highly recommended for any reader who loves garden writing.
Bert Pinnegar never stopped marvelling at the early arrival of an English spring. He had always supposed that nothing happened in a garden until about March, yet here were these jolly fellows in their frilled ruffs putting up as brave a show as a field of buttercups.
Soph had a genuine passion for flowers—of the right sort. Not the ordinary kind you found all over the place, like mignonette, sweet williams and silly snapdragons, but the more showy sorts that only grew under glass. She would stand with her nose pressed against the pane of a greenhouse, imagining herself sweeping into a ballroom, smothered in orchids.
pickThis lavishly illustrated book about humanity‘s obsession with orchids is full of fascinating and entertaining information about plants and people. Readers who are similarly obsessed, or newly tempted, may be thrilled with the detailed growing instructions for specific orchids at the end of each chapter, which I skipped.
Orchids may have caught on with queer people at this point in history because the flowers so often confound our expectations […]. Gay men might have taken to orchids because of their erotic flower structures, or perhaps because orchis is Greek for testicle. Orchids, along with carnivorous plants and a few other shocking tropical flowers, were often described as “queer” in fiction and nonfiction by the late 19th century.
One of the most ridiculous examples of her forced anonymity was her 1838 The Young Lady‘s Book of Botany: A Popular Introduction to That Delightful Science. [Jane Loudon] had to publish anonymously, yet use the persona of a male narrator in her text, to launch the idea that botany could be an acceptable pastime for women.
Tagging one of my favourites this month. I'm falling down in the review department, but reading so much great stuff!
#readingstats
If we back up—back way up to 78 million years ago—we find vanilla in the late Cretaceous period among the dinosaurs. Vanilla made it through the extinction event that killed 75% of life on earth, and eventually diversified into more than 120 species.
Unlike in much of the West, in Japan, the orchid‘s shape, root tips, variegation, connection point between the axis and leaves, as well as presentation of the plant upon its moss mound, are all more important in defining a valuable variety than its blooms. Root tips are especially important because they come in many surprising colors: red-brown, yellow, shades of green, and ruby/hot pink.
When aficionados would scrutinize the orchids up close, they were expected to place a piece of paper in or across their mouths to avoid breathing on the plant—exactly the practice one would follow if inspecting a shogun‘s heirloom sword.
The fashion for gardening easily transferred to something as far afield as women‘s dresses and extravagant hairstyles of the late 1700s.
Linnaeus himself had written of male and female flower parts decades before, assigning them the roles of husbands and wives, with flower petals serving as their marriage beds.
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, proposed a project to “modify continental weather patterns by advocating that European navies tow icebergs to the equator to moderate northern winters and cool the tropics.”
In her poetry collection The Small Way, Onjana Yawnghwe wrote about about her spouse‘s transition. It‘s nice to see that her former spouse, Hazel Jane Plante, dedicated the tagged novel to her.
pickA fictional memoir of Tracy St Cyr, a trans punk rock star, written in two parts: 1993, pretransition; & 2019, after a traumatic romantic breakup & the dissolution of her band. Both parts are set in an unnamed foreign city, in second person addressed to a loved one back home. I like the way this gives access to her inner thoughts & character growth over time. It‘s a sex-positive (lots of sex!) portrayal of the healing power of creativity. #LGBTQ
It would be like a librarian who‘s trying to write a novel. How could you feel like you had something to say if you were always aware of how many books had already been published? I mean, what kind of narcissist would be able to sit down and write a novel thinking, Oh yes, millions of other novels have been published, but wait until you read the humdinger I‘m going to write?! I feel sorry for any person who thinks that way.
British barrister Simon Cox has suggested that international instruments should have initially called refugees “people in a refugee situation.” No one should have to be defined forever by the worst thing that has happened to them.
pickIrish foreign correspondent Sally Hayden was contacted via social media in 2018 by an Eritrean refugee being held in a Libyan detention centre. She began reporting on the humanitarian crisis happening in Libya, where the EU & UNHCR are preventing thousands of refugees from reaching Europe. In Libya, refugees are subject to enslavement, rape, torture, ransom, execution & starvation. 6 desperate people die every day in the Mediterranean. 💔💔💔💔💔
I transitioned because being an invisible girl became intolerable.
pickI felt so much better about the world in general after listening to this audiobook. Research shows how the arts support our wellbeing—in particular our mental health—and amplify learning, among other benefits. There‘s a questionnaire type thing at the beginning that gave me the impression this would be a workbook, but it‘s not. It‘s an engaging combination of research reports and personal stories. I loved it.
“Many adult relegate art and the making of it to those they deem professional artists.”
[Not me! Creating stuff is so much fun. #LitsyCrafters]
Real life often defies genre. It‘s more like those strange plays Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career. I think they were called late romances. Kathleen loved those plays but I didn‘t get them. In one of them, a character‘s wife dies and comes back to life 10 or 20 years later. What the what?! I couldn‘t give myself over to the mystery. It was too unsettling. But sometimes that‘s how life can feel.
We exchanged goodbye and good luck texts adorned with heart emojis in neutral hues. (Purple from him. Blue from me.)
The end of your letter made me happier and sadder than I can say. I‘m sitting in this ratty chair, letting good and bad emotions wash over me as I listen to the whoosh tink, whoosh tink, whoosh tink of the dryer. My heart feels like it‘s on a tumble cycle.
When he left the village school he was the scrubbiest little scrap of nothing that you ever saw. To match the dignity of his new position, they rigged him up in a pair of corduroy trousers, cut off at the knees and reaching up to his armpits. Not the sort of corduroy affected by Chelsea artists of a later day, but real honest stuff that lasted forever.
pickManga artist Asuka Miyazaki writes about coming to terms with their nonbinary gender and their attraction to women in this memoir. Their editor said, “Powerful emotions will make your manga more interesting.” There‘s no shortage of extreme emotions here. The content is for adults and includes passages about porn and kink. Their final line in the afterword is perfect: “May you live as your most authentic self!”
pickThe 19th century English heath setting is immersive, the characters are over-the-top, and the plot is bananas. I was entertained… and I rolled my eyes. If you‘re in the mood for star-crossed love, going blind from reading too much, losing everything through gambling, and dying of a snake bite… then this is the misery read for you. #Audiobook read by Nadia May
pickA shocking, devastating work of history. Author James Daschuk began with the question: why is the health of Indigenous Canadians so much worse than that of other Canadians? The answers go all the way back to first contact between Europeans and the peoples of North America, and then later on, with the collapse of the bison population, the deliberate use of starvation as a political tool. I listened to a new audiobook edition published in 2022.
Audiobook knitting continues; I still have all the ends to weave in.
This is the Stripe‘aganza shawl from Julie in Paris on Ravelry.
#craftersofLitsy #knittersofLitsy
Friday Reads May 19: living as your most authentic self & other aspirations #readinglife #LGBTQ
https://youtu.be/7AJlmnnjz8s
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
—from Peonies by Mary Oliver
Little Dog‘s Rhapsody in the Night
He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I‘m awake, or awake enough
he turns upside down, his four paws in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.
“Tell me you love me,” he says.
“Tell me again.”
Could there be a sweeter arrangement?
Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to answer.
—Mary Oliver
His familiars were creeping & winged things & they seemed to enroll him in their band. Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air & tugged at the heath & furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod.
Tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskilful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man.
I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don‘t mind
a little dying
(From the poem The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver)
pickI always have trouble reviewing the books I love best. Every short story in this collection is strong. Alexander MacLeod captures vivid, crucial moments in the briefest of passages, condensing a novel‘s worth of narrative and emotion into each story. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
so-soI like the premise: what happens when the youngest child of a Mi‘kmaw family goes missing, and that it‘s told in chapters that alternate between the two youngest siblings. We know from the prologue that they are reunited 50 years later, so there isn‘t suspense in that regard, but there is much drama & tragedy. Unfortunately the writing is so cliché that I found myself skimming sections. Maybe Amanda Peter‘s style will work for you? #CanadianAuthor
I felt irritated by Amanda Peter‘s style throughout her debut novel. ie:
“The room was too small for all the people in it. It smelled slightly of mould, the kind that comes with old houses, houses that hold happiness and grief in the walls. Houses where laughter has been absorbed into the cracks in the plaster and tears have washed the floors many times over.”
Aunt Lindy was Dad‘s older sister by 11 months and she was a fat woman—no other way to say it than that. She hugged me with such strength that I thought I might be sucked into her roundness, but I survived, breathless but alive.
pickComics creators Amy Chu & Soo Lee set this steamy lesbian vampire tale in 1990s New York City Chinatown. Athena is a queer Chinese American social worker and a serial killer appears to be targeting young women, many of whom were her clients. The police don‘t seem to be doing much, so Athena decides to investigate on her own. Soo Lee‘s colours are especially beautiful, shifting with the moods in the story. #LGBTQ #graphicnovel
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Alarm bells! Getting involved with this woman is obviously bad news.
Friday Reads May 12: Asian Heritage Month; Canadian authors; art; book chat plus knitting & travel to the Yukon
https://youtu.be/ooLDx6L0V3c
#booktube
Experiencing awe enables someone to change their view of themselves and their place in the world.
![[tagged book]](https://image.librarything.com/pics/litsy_webpics/icon_taggedBook@3x.png){kind=icon}
