I enjoyed this #LiteraryCrew pick: I have only a hazy memory of The Scarlet Letter, so it was interesting to read this interpretation where primary character is living in a much later era and in a relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Explores issues like class, immigration, gender abuse, the Underground Railroad, and “witchcraft” in the earliest part of the 19th century. Jumping back-and-forth to Puritan Salem could be confusing, though.

I‘ve barely heard of Dorothy Sayers, so I thought I‘d try out the #authoramonth challenge. What I thought would be a novelette turned out to be a BBC audio drama, which I think is good enough: the drama really brought the posh “cheerio/righty-ho/old boy” language to life. Murder isn‘t my favourite genre, and I found the plot hard to follow with so many characters, and couldn‘t honestly get engaged with many of them.

Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster shells: we surround ourselves with them and then grow out of them and leave them behind as evidences of our earlier stages of development.

#Bookspin Feb
1. Saving Time
2. Humorless Ladies
3. Island of Forgetting
4. An Immense World
5. All the Devils
6. Sure, I‘ll Be Your Black Friend
7. The Prophets
8. Crossings
9. Kids These Days
10. How Much of These Hills
11. Greta
12. Swimming in the Dark
13. Cobalt
14. The Cheese & The Worms
15. Reuniting with Strangers
16. Constant Struggle
17. Ordinary Notes
18. Coming Out
19. Some People
20. The House on the Cerulean Sea

I loved this first #AuldLangSpine book from @Chelsea.Poole--hoping to get to more later in the year!
Sy Montgomery, a nature writer for children and adults, chronicles a year spent in New England with diverse people committed to understanding, rescuing, and deeply loving all kinds of turtles. The main focus is on the Turtle Rescue League in Massachusetts, who gently unearth and incubate eggs, and release the hatchlings /1

In Hindu and Buddhist mythology the tortoise Akūpāra carries the world on his back, upholding the earth and sea. From Alaska to the Admiralty Islands in Polynesia, people say the World Turtle hatched the eggs that turned into the first humans. In North America‘s Haudenosaunee, Lenape, and Abenaki creation stories the Great Spirit places the Earth on the back of a huge turtle and many now still refer to the Earth as Turtle Island.
#auldlangspine

#ThreeListThursday #TLT @dabbe

I‘m surprised at how many of these I‘ve never even heard of! All three of these are about strong young women, and two are still on my bookshelf. I‘m pretty sure I did a (voluntary) study of “A Wrinkle in Time” when I was in teacher‘s college.

Runners-up: The Grey King, Jacob Have I Loved, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Join in if you want: @Chelsea.Poole @TheKidUpstairs

“If you help a female across the road, you must handle her with great gentleness. A turtle who feels threatened will often release urine to startle or deter predators, but a nesting mother who has to do this on the way to the nest has to detour for another drink of water.”

I don‘t remember what this had to do with Jesus or the Bible, but when I was a kid my dad, who is a minister, taught kids how to help a turtle cross without getting peed on.

Absolutely compelling read for my IRL: the story of four very different but strong sisters and their mother living in Roaring Twenties Vancouver. The narrator is sometimes the sister who has had an abortion, sometimes a third person, and occasionally the family dog, which works surprisingly well. It tackles complex themes that include marriage and betrayal, queerness in an age when it was illegal, abortion, immigration, smuggling, and more./1

I always have a deep, deep feeling for the turtles. If I could take their pain for them I would. Caring deeply comes at a cost. The word “compassion,” contains within itself its emotion price. The prefix “com” means “with.” The Latin root “pate” means “suffering.” To feel compassion, therefore, is to enter into another‘s suffering. It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me, unless there is peace and joy for you.

Turtles are a red-hot commodity in the worthless world of the illegal wildlife trade. Turtle trafficking is networked, clandestine, and lucrative. A single three-striped Chinese box turtle, whose powdered plastron is rumoured incorrectly to cure cancer can fetch $25,000…Sea turtles, box turtles, spotted turtles, snapping turtles—no turtle is safe. Poachers mine scientific data and scour books and newspapers for clues on where to find them.

Most of us think of turtles as being silent but no, some of them are quite talkative. Various species croak, squeak, belt, whine, and whistle. For the velociraptors park in “Jurassic Park,” filmmakers used the sound of turtles having sex. Some species of Australian river turtle nestlings communicate vocally with each other and with their mothers while still inside the egg.

#FirstLineFridays #FLF @ShyBookOwl
Amid all the other homes on the suburban street—white, grey, beige, pale blue, light yellow—this two-story saltbox stands out.
(My first #AuldLangSpine read from @Chelsea.Poole !)

I wondered if we could have come up with the name of one woman who in the past decade had not lost someone. A husband, a brother, a son.
We who survived the war and the pandemic, we recovered-emotionally, mentally-despite our dreadful losses, didn't we? We went on. Why not Ahmie?
I thought of Dr. Blakeway, who first prescribed laudanum to Ahmie. To calm her nerves, the old man said.
Was he dead? I hoped he was.
Otherwise I wanted a word with him.

#TLT #ThreeListThursday @dabbe
So many memories here! My score was 56.

My favourites:
Anne of Green Gables
Narnia books
A Wrinkle in Time

Should have been on the list:
The Paperbag Princess
Stand in the Wind
Alligator Pie
Honourable mention: The Devil in Vienna is one of my favourite books of all time but maybe more a pre-teen book.

Would like to read (based on the cover 😉)
The Arrival
Julian is a Mermaid
Cianpollo the Little Onion

Flore, still seated, stretches her
hand out to Harriet. There's an endless second during which Harriet is certain she should never have come, but then Flore's mouth opens.
"You sexy thing," Flore whispers.
Now she has her arms around Harriet and
says, "Now take me dancing,
Harry."
And here, in these clothes, with Flore, Harriet is finally home. Relief, a spring river, floods every one of her bones. Every single one of them.

#WeekendReads @rachelsbrittain
My read for my IRL book club: I‘m about 15 percent in and finding it excellent. A novel about four sisters in the Roaring Twenties in Vancouver, who are dealing with marriage tensions, sexual orientation, abortion, parenting… Sound familiar?

I think this should be not be banned, but accessible in schools, libraries, youth clubs… Johnson provides a thoughtful and personal account of gradually realizing that he is a gay man in a culture where he had no concept this was possible. It shares both his inner struggles and his relationships with his peers and family as he comes out, with varying levels of acceptance. The audio is a bit stiff at times, however.
#Nonfiction2024 #AllBoys

#Nonfiction2024 wrapup: thanks to Riveted_Reader_Melissa for organizing this! Not a full board, but lots of good reads and interesting ways of finding them.

This powerful book shows three generations of women, Knott being the youngest, who claim space and support those around them while suffering from various kinds of racial, systemic, and personal abuse. Knott is going to find a new way with guidance from her Indigenous teachers and mentors. Throughout various challenges she navigates to a place where she takes joy in those around her, especially the women.

#Nonfiction2024 #Alaska
#SheSaid

An intriguing memoir blending the author's intense relationship with her new goshawk, learnings about falconry, and grief about the loss of her father; reflections on rural England; and the life of T.H. White, a fantasy writer who was also a falconer.This new take on White's troubled life intrigued me as a childhood reader, but MacDonald's developing relationship with her hawk amidst a complex life is what is most engaging.
#Nonfiction2024 #Kafka

Confession: Laurel has been a friend for 25+ years and I was the book pre-editor. It‘s an amazing blend of detailed personal nature observations and experiences with a mediaeval “bestiary” theme about 12 species that live in large groups in Coast Salish territory; Christian spiritual reflection with deep respect for Indigenous tradition; and an analysis of current ecological justice issues. Bonus: Laurel is hilarious! #Nonfiction2024 #Free

I resigned myself to being an observer of the living: one who observed half the time and floated away the other half. I wanted to reach out to strangers and ask them to pull me to shore: I wondered if any of them were drifting through life like me. I knew about sound and wondered how to pull it from the parts of me where it had been dormant. I knew that there were screams inside of me that became muffled whispers because I refused to hear them.

#Bookspin January
1. Saving Time
2. The Future Is Disabled
3. Island of Forgetting
4. An Immense World
5. All the Devils
6. Sure, I‘ll Be Your Black Friend
7. The Prophets
8. Of Time and Turtles
9. It‘s Ok that you‘re not OK
10. How Much of These Hills
11. Greenwood
12. Swimming in the Dark
13. The Toronto Book Dead
14. The Cheese & The Worms
15. A Market
16. Constant Struggle
17. Ordinary Notes
18. Coming Out
19. Some People
20. The House Sea

A man is flesh, fingernail, bone, dreams. and maybe some grit if he‘s lucky.
But sometimes a man is a door that a woman can walk through to enter a world that she cannot access on her own. Years ago, the snow-kissed skin of a white man could be seen as freedom by a brown woman, not only for herself, but for any children she might have. I wonder if Asu ever saw Papa as a door.

I think of the complex histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to put easier, safer histories in their place. The fields in Cambridge, farmed organically, are teeming with life. These are not. The big animals are here: the deer, the foxes, the rabbits; the fields look the same, and the trees, too, but this land is empty. There are few plants other than crops, and few bees, or butterflies, for the soil sprayed with chemicals that kill.

I am becoming fascinated by her quality of attention. I'm starting to believe in what Barry Lopez has called "the conversation of death”: something he saw in the exchange of glances between caribou and hunting wolves, a wordless negotiation that ends up with them working out whether they will become hunter and hunted, or passers-by.

"Why should I? You're crazy as a loon!"
Luciente beamed, capturing her hand in his dry, warm grip. "Ever see a loon, Connie? It's the sound they make that's crazy. They're plain but graceful birds that glide with only the head full out of the water. Like turtles, they swim low.
Maybe I can show you loons when they migrate through....Don't fear me.

Roxane Gay takes a deep dive into what it feels like to be a very large Black woman who “built her body into a fortress” after a preteen gang rape. Lots of powerful insights here into all the ways fatphobia and racism manifest themselves, and her story of working toward claiming the space, physical and social, that she is entitled to.
#Nonfiction2024 #Blubber

What a fabulous list from @Chelsea.Poole ! I‘ve never read any of them, and 14 are available as audiobooks in my library. What great matching, @monalyisha ! I think I‘m going to start with Crossings.

In 2012 I sat among the Mam Indigenous people in Guatemala impacted by mining. We were gathered in the basement of a church for ceremony and I noticed that the colours in the four directions were the same I knew: white for North, red for East, yellow for South, black for West. I smiled at the sight of shared knowledge that made me feel closer to home. They were in a state of active recovery of traditional practices—again, same deal as us.

I turned toward the big scary things looming in the distance and let myself feel them, and to let myself fall apart, trusting that Creator would put me back together again after it had passed. Mama rarely cried or showed fear, and I knew a part of this had to do with her desire to protect us. I couldn‘t follow her down this path. I made a mark in my map, broke the endless loop, and created a new way. #SheSaid

I was intrigued by this from the #Nonfiction2024 list, and hope to read the first volume when available. This sequel centres on the author‘s challenging interviews with his father and their complex relationship, intertwined with his father‘s grim narrative of survival and liberation from a series of Nazi death camps. I consider it non-fiction although it‘s often labelled as a graphic novel: creatively portraying people as various animals. #Maus

#Bookspin December:

1. Hunger
2. The Future Is Disabled
3. All Boys Aren‘t Blue
4. Woman on the Edge
5. The Reason
6. Swimming in the Dark
7. Crip up the Kitchen
8. It‘s not about the Burqa
9. The Argonauts
10. Dutch Girl
11. Greenwood
12. Swimming in the Dark
13. It Could Happen Here
14. You or Someone You Love
15. All Boys Aren‘t Blue
16. Freedom
17. Ordinary Notes
18. Coming Out
19. His Name Is George Floyd
20. Ordinary Girls

Deeply moving account of three orphaned sisters who are brought by their uncle from Pakistan to America and kept in a separate house, sometimes with randomly selected tenants, so that he can obtain childcare benefits and otherwise neglect them. They struggle to survive together, with differing feelings about their cultural and religious identities, but life takes them in different directions as they grow older.

An eye-opening and vulnerable sharing of the author‘s coming-out story as non-binary, in a culture that still is largely fixated on people identifying as one gender or the other, even if they are LGBT. I particularly appreciated the author‘s emergence reflected in varying responses of friends and family and ongoing fear of coming out and how to articulate it. I could also appreciate the extreme pain of a Pap test! #Nonfiction2024 #Genderqueer

McGhee takes the concept of a “zero-sum game“--someone always *has* to lose, --and skillfully uses it to analyze a form of white racism that manifests as resistance toward racialized people benefiting, even when white people are also set back: racism has a cost for all of us. Examples include barring access to public pools, union repression, lack of equal access to education and home ownership, and more.
#Nonfiction2024 #ToKillAMockingbird

To stand apart means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. It is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and contemplation that this entails. #SundayFunday #BookmarkTavern

This is a bail for me, simply because of her voice; I pretty much only do audiobooks, and O'Connor's reading voice is just too much of a grating drone. I'm disappointed, because she's someone I've admired for a long time, and the book deals with key issues re Christianity (I was in university when she tore up the Pope's picture on SNL) and family abuse, mental health/trauma, abuse, and religious conversion.
#Nonfiction2024 #MexicanDaughter

Before I go to a restaurant I obsessively check the restaurant‘s website, Google Images, and Yelp to see what kind of seating it has. Are the seats ultra modern and flimsy? Do they have arms and if so, what kind? Are there booths and if so does the table move or is it one of those tables welded between two benches? How long do I think I can sit in those chairs without screaming?
#Nonfiction2024 #Blubber

November #Bookspin
1. Saving Time
2. Cerulean Sea
3. The covenant of water
4. The Bandit Queens
5. An Immense World
6. Saving Time
7. Swimming in the Dark
8. The Prophets
9. It‘s not about the Burqa
10. The Argonauts
11. How Much of These Hills
12. Matriarch
13. Greenwood
14. Swimming in the Dark
15. It Could Happen Here
16. You or Someone You Love
17. All Boys Aren‘t Blue
18. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
19. Ordinary Notes
20. Big Men Fear Me

An excellent exploration by political analyst Naomi Klein into how being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, a writer who's moved to the political right, has prompted an analysis of how the left/right binary isn't as simple as it was. She looks at a “mirror world“ where the axis can sometimes be a diagonal one, revolving around issues like Covid and anti-vaxxing, big pharma, conspiracy theory, global and online media, and wellness.
#Nonfiction2024 #1984

Such a powerful collection of 13 short stories: almost all with South Asian/Canadian characters reflecting complex issues related to queerness, family and relationships, racism, transformation out of oppressive identities and expectations (hence “Chrysalis”), abuse, and paranormal/Magical realism/spiritual elements. Each one is very different, and a few fall flat for me, but the lyricism and deep explorations of complex issues are captivating.

Somewhere in the city, the family into whose hands I was born mourns the boy I never was, fails to see who I am, who I've always been. The failure is theirs, not mine, and I am strong enough to let them go, to speak of my body with gentle words, to make of myself a woman who is sparkling and strange and whole. There is space for all these things. This too, after all, is love.

Today, I am a fat woman. I don‘t think I‘m ugly, I don‘t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body, in this world, and I hate the way the world all too often responds to this body. Intellectually, I recognize that I am not the problem: this world and its unwillingness to accept and accommodate me are the problem. But, I expect it‘s more likely that I can change before this culture.

#Bookspin October
1. Saving Time
2. Cerulean Sea
3. The covenant of water
4. The Bandit Queens
5. An Immense World
6. Woman on the Edge
7. H is for Hawk
8. Saving Time
9. H is for Hawk
10. Swimming in the Dark
11. Afraid of the Sky
12. The Prophets
13. The Bandit Queens
14. Big Men Fear Me
15. How Much of These Hills
16. Some People Need Killing
17. Greenwood
18. Swimming in the Dark
19 The Covenant of Water
20. It‘s OK that you‘re not OK

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
“The first time lightning struck Bhupati's shrine to Goddess Lakshmi, it set her face on fire.”

Loved this last year so chose it for my book group pick this year: our discussion tonight was interesting and fruitful, although not everybody loved it. It was good to have an artist in the group. Good insights about how dedication to community is part of resisting the attention economy, the value and challenge of attentiveness, and our own relationships with social media, and how they vary with younger age groups.
#Nonfiction2024 #SmallThings

#Bookspin September
1. Saving Time
2. Cerulean Sea
3. The covenant of water
4. In My Own Moccasins
5. An Immense World
6. Fresh water for flowers
7. H is for Hawk
8. Saving Time
9. H is for Hawk
10. Swimming in the Dark
11. Afraid of the Sky
12. The Prophets
13. The Bandit Queens
14. Big Men Fear Me
15. How Much of These Hills
16. Some People Need Killing
17. Greenwood
18. Swimming in the Dark
19. When We Cease
20. It‘s OK that you‘re not OK