So. I get heckin' tired of the ubiquity of hetero-normative and binary assumptions of the culture at large and amongst my friends. Yet LGBTQIA etc. gets to feel like reciting pi. This book wasn't what I thought it was. I expected a graphic exploration of queer experience: it turned out to be an illustrated, text-heavy summary of queer theory. Very academic. Much went over my head as I was reading more quickly than I'd have liked (Overdrive book).

I had some bits and bobs to do in town at lunchtime. It would have been remiss of me to walk past the library without dropping in. As it is, I may have got a bit carried away. #libraryhaul

I'm rattled.
I feel for the man but he didn't respect her boundaries and years later she's still feeling ashamed of how she responded. ?
It enrages me how some men foist themselves upon women and demand attention as if it were their right. Beyond naming it Mr Ramsay Syndrome (from "To the Lighthouse") to myself I have yet to formulate a satisfactory response. I really hate to be rude and don't want to make a fuss but LEAVE ME ALONE, right?

If it's got Virginia Woolf in, I'll want to read it. She comes across here as a tyrannical monster (whom I almost hated, actually) but that's not the problem I had with the book: it was the form. Seven years in the life of the Bloomsbury Group related through Vanessa's journal, punctuated by various telegrams, postcards etc. It was rather choppy and yet curiously static. I did enjoy Vanessa's voice, though, and seeing things from her perspective.

Skived off this afternoon to see "The White Crow" (based on the tagged book). I enjoyed it very much... though if I'd had my way I'd have added another hour's worth of dancing. ?

Time for a quick cup of tea and then it's back to the boring routine (specifically, grocery shopping). ?

I may have raised a monster!
Miss K is a merciless breaker of book spines. She also casually dog-ears pages.
She says she's enjoying this book but the author/father is rather defensive.

Really rather lovely.* I was concerned his lightness of tone would become cool flippancy but needn't have worried. He's an engaging writer, arguing that for humans birdsong is at once a context (giving a sense of location in time and place) and an event. And I have some intriguing links to follow up. 😊

*Aside from the penultimate chapter (horrible cruelty) and the final one (how the raging anthropocene threatens to shut the birds up altogether).

This morning's modest #libraryhaul. I'd reserved the tagged book (the sister in question being Virginia Woolf 😍) and the other insisted on coming home with me too. It was only as I was checking them out that I realised I had a theme going on.

Imagine if "Reservoir 13" had been written by poet Alice Oswald and experimental novelist Paul Kingsnorth. Dead Papa Toothwort, an amoral Green Man character, wakes and listens for the voice of marvellously strange little Lanny, child of mismatched Londoners, amongst the chatter of a stockbroker-belt village. It bodes, I tell you! Lyrical with an undertow of menace, at times heartbreaking, he had my rapt attention from the first page. Glorious!

So, in a bout of dedicated procrastination and in the interests of discovering the scale of the problem/opportunity, I put the whole of my owned TBR on Goodreads earlier. (Humble apologies to anyone whose feed I flooded!) 93 books in total: more than manageable! 😊

"And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."

Half nine in the morning and already the day is full-on Prufrock.

My Sunday so far: meditation, cardio workout, grocery shopping, quick bite of lunch, baking, doing the dishes, vacuuming. Plenty more domestic chores and admin to follow but for now I've shut my study door, brewed a pot of tea and am settling in with the birds. ❤🐦

Well that was an education (I'm not the most trans-savvy person in the world: should pay more attention). Wendy is a trans woman who learns that her beloved grandfather may have been trans, too. I'd have liked more about her Opa, and the family friend who tells her. As it was, I almost bailed: soooo much sex and drunkenness. Plett has a great ear for dialogue, though. I didn't enjoy it - I feel bruised - but I'll be thinking about it for a while.

I recognise what's going on here, of course: "if I adopt the habits of my heroes, maybe I'll write as well as they do." What the book shows is that writers' routines are as idiosyncratic as the writers themselves and if it works then it works. I wanted more. The book I really wanted to read would have been called something like "Writers' Rituals: What They Are and How They Work". It's not this book's fault that it isn't *that* imaginary book.

A house and a way of life that both turn out to be without foundations. This is the second book of hers that I've read and, to my surprise, loved. I can't bear being lectured in a novel and she certainly doesn't pull any didactic punches. Yet still I feel, reading her, that I'm in a safe pair of hands. I haven't got to the bottom of why I'll let her preach so: the characters? the satisfying patterning of her prose? She is GOOD, is all I can say.

Here's my wrap-up for April. It wasn't the best reading month as I went overboard with the gym and my reading time suffered in consequence (can't quite believe I've just written that! 😱). I've tagged my favourite, which I finished on the last day of the month and haven't got round to reviewing yet.

I liked it a lot but didn't quite love it. Count Rostov is held under permanent house arrest in the Metropol Hotel and resolves to master his circumstances, rather than be mastered by them. Bravo! Though it doesn't make for a lot of narrative drive. He is charming and I enjoyed the urbane humour but my inner Bolshevik won't quite forgive his privilege either. I read Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova: they and their loved ones weren't dining in the Boyarsky!

50 contemporary poets respond to a poem of their choice from the past: great idea! As with all anthologies, there are hits and misses. I regret to conclude that in many cases the original poem was clearly the stronger of the two and, for me, the smirking smart-arse school of poetry was over-represented. Brought to mind the Salvator Rosa portrait whose Latin motto loosely translates as "either say something better than silence or shut the hell up."

Composed amidst the pots and pans, Human Work is an enquiry into the nature of the heart(h) of the home and of the basic sustaining of our human-animal selves. Life feeds on life and it is not a delicate business. I was more taken with Borodale's conclusions than with the reaching of them and would have welcomed a greater variation in tone and pace. But this keeping of body and soul together, what a violent and fragile mystery it turns out to be!

I treated myself to a new teapot/reading companion and some posh tea. You probably can't see it but, just below the sticker, the box boasts of a "non drip pout". It proved to be beyond my powers of resistance (as did the great fat medjool date, whose sweetness was a perfect counterpart to the smokiness of the tea).

"So while duelling may have begun as a response to high crimes... by 1900 it had tiptoed down the stairs of reason, until they were being fought over the tilt of a hat, the duration of a glance, or the placement of a comma."

(It never quite got to red pens at teatime behind the filing cabinet when I was a proofreader but I can't say it didn't get close sometimes!)

"If you try to suppress that urge... All that creative energy, an inextricable part of you, will be diverted into self-torture, and you will create doubt and anxiety and hostility and stress and paranoia and anger and resentment. In the end, you see, you can't really suppress your creative urge."

Yesterday was meant to be a day off: I spent most of it doing domestic chores.
Today is suffering, as a result. ?

So, Mr Thomas. Dylan, if I may. Paint a picture for me. These poems you've written: who is your target audience?

(Me! I am: I love this poem! ❤)

This is the remains of the Roman underfloor heating system in Bath.
Miss K said, "That looks like your room, Mum!" Whatever can she mean?! ?

I actually bought "Fen" by Daisy Johnson as I liked "Everything Under" and am curious about her short stories, and T S Eliot's Collected Poems as somehow I didn't already have anything of his (aside from pieces in anthologies).

A strong contender for the strangest book I've read in a while, once past the brutal prologue I enjoyed this very much. Dublin orphan become "Mayo Heathcliff" Mahony returns to the village of his birth to uncover what happened to his hellraiser of a mother. He's aided by Mrs Cauley, retired actress and the brains behind the operation. Oh, and he sees the dead. By turns violent, tender and darkly funny, this crime story is quite the wild ride!

I'm not usually one for the selfies but I wanted to show you my new do!
I felt a (highly symbolic!) need to cut off all the hair that grew during my most recent run-in with anxiety and depression.
I didn't expect at this moment in time to be rocking a slightly Joan of Arc vibe but here we are.

Corrag is a solitary girl with a knowledge of herbs. She's also a witness to the Glencoe massacre. Put them together and she's set to be burnt for a witch. I loved Corrag's voice with its vivid, keenly felt experience of the Highlands. She is quite simply in love with life, however difficult, and with the natural world. Such beauty! The love story felt superfluous: can't she be an interesting, fully convincing character without sighing over a man?

"Hey, Kate: how's the book-buying ban?"
"Um... it's enjoying a well-deserved rest."

Oooh, exciting! 😍
It has 111 poems in 23 different languages, with the original on the left-hand page and the translation on the right. Looking forward to discovering these new-to-me poets! ❤
(This secondhand copy cost me less than £1.)

Miss K and I went to Bristol yesterday to see an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. Very interesting!
We made a detour to Waterstones on the way back to the train station. I've decided that, provided I am actually writing, poetry books don't count towards my book-buying quota. So I came away with Raymond Antrobus, Kaveh Akbar, and Sean Borodale's latest.
Attrib. and By Grand Central Station... have been on my wishlist for a while.

"They all threw out the word like it was a curse, at first. But then, later, they said it as if it was a precious word. They used softer voices. They would put their heads on one side, say Sassenach..."

Major "Outlander" vibes, anyone?

It's ages since I did one of these!
1. England. Gloucester, currently.
2. The Pembrokeshire coast, Wales.
3. 18th century Scotland (Tagged)
4. Double Gloucester cheese! There's even an ancient custom of chasing a whole cheese down a ridiculously steep local hill on the Whitsun bank holiday. The winner gets the cheese (and most likely a sprained ankle, at the very least.)
5. Will do.
#frideas @SailorMoon

"Some people cannot have a peopled life. We try for it. We go to markets, and say hello." ?

And why is it that, whatever the nature of a woman's perceived transgressions, sooner or later she ends up being called a whore? As though she can only be understood, and categorised, in terms of sex. I am so beyond tired of this (I don't mean the book, which is great so far)!

We went to see KT Tunstall last night, in Bath. She's fantastic live but gigs do horrible things to my anxiety levels (the crowds! the strobe lights! the decibels!). I took William Blake along, to keep calm while waiting for the show to start. The chap next to me was four chapters in to "Murder Out of Commission" (I think). Couldn't see what his wife was reading but she had a further two books in her handbag. And then I felt all right! ?

There's a lot going on in this inventive retelling of the Oedipus myth: fate, identity, family, belonging, and (that which especially piqued my interest) the degree to which those things are determined by language. It's well written and I had a hard time putting the book down but it's necessarily a murky and disturbing tale. I recommend a brisk walk after to clear your head (maybe steer clear of waterways, though!).

This is interesting! Linguistically-determined fate. 😶

This morning's #libraryhaul : four poetry books. This amply illustrates the difference in the demand for fiction and that for poetry (in my neck of the woods, at least). I had to wait since October for the Booker Prize shortlisted books I've been reading recently. Hannah Sullivan's "Three Poems" won this year's T. S. Eliot Prize. I reserved it, along with these others, on Monday.

Oh, this book! I don't recall my ever being someone for whom humans are the only (or even at times the primary) species of interest. This book made me weep with rage, frustration and inconsolable sadness. But that's not to say I didn't love it. I liked following the seemingly separate narratives as they came together. I felt for them through what came next. And I loved having plenty to think about. So worth the four months I waited for it! 5*

Baba Yaga and I go waaay back!
With themes of female friendship, the parent/child relationship, and the power and policing of the spoken word, this offers wit, sadness, poignancy and hope. I thought that choosing to combine the stories of traditional folktale witch/scary godmother and contemporary teenage runaway in poetry, particularly, gave each the space and opportunity to encounter each other and co-exist, enriching one another in the process.

Oh! Is that an allusion to Brave New World?
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin."

"Once you've bought a novel in your pyjamas, there's no turning back."
*Gulp!* ?

My reading wrap-up for February.
I had the most magnificent birthday bookhaul, to which the #jbuk Littens made a generous contribution! And then later in the month the Booker Prize shortlisted books that I'd reserved from the library way back in October came through at last. My shelf runneth over.

I am loving this book even though it makes me want to weep with rage and despair at times.
Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by arboricidal maniacs, from the Councils who cut down healthy trees because it's cheaper to kill them than maintain them (which is arguably true of most things, if you want to start down that road) to neighbours who cut them down because "they block the view". The tree *is* the bloody view, damn it! ??

Mr K and I took this lovely book for an afternoon's outing to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust today. It was gorgeous but it doesn't feel right to be outside in February without a coat!
For your viewing pleasure (or indifferent yawning, as you choose) may I present my duck of the day: the gadwall. He doesn't look much at a glance, granted, but when you take the time to really look his plumage has the most delicate patterning. 😊 #birdnerd

Small but mighty #libraryhaul . I reserved these way back in October.
I ended up carrying my coat for much of this morning's walk to the library so it might even be warm enough to sit out in the garden for half an hour. ❤

It started as a leisurely-paced story of two arty families living in each other's pockets: all very nice, but... . Then she dropped a plot bomb that made me see how skilfully she'd lulled me into a false sense of security. And that turns out to be the warm-up act for an altogether more unsettling story.

Family, relationships, friendship, contemporary art, mental illness, how we perceive ourselves and others, the improbable endeavour of living...❤

I've been pondering how to rate this short book of poems translated from a renegade Zen monk. I've read it three times in the past fortnight and each time have enjoyed it more. I like the poems' brevity, and especially how that emphasises Ikkyu's clear seeing and general sensuous response to the world. BUT he is as attached to extolling the joys of his rejuvenated appendage as I am averse to hearing about it.
A pick, then, but with reservations.

Thank you everyone who humoured me with my impromptu Galentine's giveaway. 😁
I can confirm that I have read: Lolita, The Bell Jar, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, The Great Gatsby, Ulysses (don't ask 😫), A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and Mrs Dalloway. Ten, in total, which means that the winner is.... 🎉 @eraderneely 🎉. Congratulations, Emily! I'll get a parcel in the post to you in the next week or so.

Happy Galentine's Day to you, too, @Caroline2 , and thank you! I'm curious about the marmite nature of this one (I've not read her before) and wonder what I will make of it.
How lovely is that card, too? Here's an idea for the wonderful #jbuk Littens: the first person to guess correctly how many of the books depicted I've read wins a prize! Comment below if you want to play. One guess each! 😉
(#jbuk members only, because of postage costs)

I just downloaded the SoundCloud app: I'd love to have your bookish podcast recommendations, Littens! (I've found a handful of poetry ones to get me started.)