Asakiyume mita

Diary of a Cranky Bookworm
by Aster Glenn Gray

This remarkable book not only captures EXACTLY what an adolescent diary can be like (the intensity! the self drama! the emotional whiplash!), but also tells a really honest, raw, funny, painful, joyful story about how friendships change, why and how friends can fall out of alignment, and how we make new friends.

A lot of coming-of-age stories feature socially alienated protagonists who eventually manage to find a circle of friends that accepts them, maybe in the context of breaking free of their awful communities or families. But plenty of people come of age and have to deal with a widening sense of what life is like, what friendship is, and who they themselves are who aren’t particularly socially alienated and who maybe have a fairly happy home life, thanks very much.

Sage, the titular cranky diarist, is one such. She’s got a supportive group of friends that she loves and who love her. She’s maybe not the queen bee of her high school, but she’s definitely not a bullied social outcast. She’s smart and enjoys being smart, but she’s not a revenge-of-the-nerds-style nerd. She doesn’t have any life-shaping problems. If the story’s protagonist had been her friend Arielle or her friend Georgie, there would have been life-shaping problems, but then it would have been a much more conventional story. One thing that’s special about Diary is how gripping Sage’s struggles are even though they’re maybe not NPR-worthy. Choosing colleges for example. Stressful! Drama-filled!

Here, Sage is finally admitting to Georgie that maybe she doesn’t want, after all, to go to the U, which is Georgie’s dream college. Georgie speaks first:

”Why are we visiting St. Olaf?”
“My parents want me to.”
“Haven’t you told them you’re going to the U?”
I shuffled my feet on the porch floor and looked down at my Beloit sweatshirt. “Well,” I said, “I’m not totally-for-sure going to the U, so … and they want me to visit St. Olaf, and …”
“But we’ve been planning to attend the U forever!” she cried.
“You’ve been planning that we’re going to attend the U,” I said.
“Since when?” Georgie demanded. “Since when was it only my plan?”
“Since—since, like, always, Georgie, it’s not like there’s a specific moment when I didn’t agree to it.”
“But you never said!” Georgie cried. She glared at me. “So are you planning not to go to the U?”
“Georgie! I don’t have—I haven’t made any definite decisions yet.”

Speaking of college applications, Sage’s list of potential essay topics is pretty hilarious:

1. College Is the Portal Fantasy I Was Looking for All Along


2. A Time I Experienced Hardship. Would be more compelling if I had in fact experienced hardship.


3. An Invented Experience of Hardship. I would never have the moxie to actually make something up for a college essay. Curious to know what Arielle wrote about, though--


4. The Hardship of Having to Write a College Essay When You Are Far Less Impressive Than You Ever Realized


5. Who Invented the College Admission Essay, Anyway? A Study in Human Depravity

It’s against the backdrop of college applications, planning birthday parties, and joining a club (Sage: ugh!) that the most high-maintenance of Sage’s friends starts becoming more and more erratic as meanwhile one of Sage’s sworn enemies (there’s no enemy like an enemy you make in second grade) might actually be turning into a friend. (Maybe even ... ) And all this is handled so real-ly and so feeling-ly, it’s just a delight to read.

I also have to mention that during the course of the story, Sage writes a novel. And … it’s got problems (Surprise! High school student does not write a flawless novel), as she comes to see from conversations with her friends. This all felt very real indeed, part of the process of growing as a writer.

So much growing in this story!

Because it’s AGG writing, there are also reflections on literature and art. I’m going to close with one of those:

For our final, Mrs. Helton had us analyze a poem, Fyodor Tytchev’s “Silentium,” as translated by Vladimir Nabokov. I don’t remember it all of course, but a line stuck in my head:
“A thought once uttered is untrue.”
It struck me to the heart, as if it is really deeply true. And yet is it?
I think it’s impossible to tell the complete truth, especially about feelings which are so complicated and often contradictory. But I don’t think a partial truth is necessarily a lie, do you?
It just seems so sad, the idea that we can never communicate the things that are deepest in our hearts. As if drawing them uppermost in our souls, so that we can show them to others, transmutes them to something irrevocably different and unreal.

Truly a great read. I’m a whole generation older than the characters, didn’t grow up in the midwest, and was much more withdrawn and outsider-ish in high school than Sage and her friends, and I still loved it.

Diary of a Cranky Bookworm

I came across this great story elsewhere on the interwebs, an 89-year-old guy in Puchong (near Kuala Lumpur), Malaysia, who's set up reading stations in a public park. He also has helped libraries in Thailand and China. (Article here.)

There's also a short video linked in the article, which is great, because you can hear Mr Lee in his own words:

"I think Malaysia should follow China, where every village has one library. That's good."**



I was thinking of Little Free Libraries in this country. I think they're a great idea in places where there's foot traffic, where many different people might stop by and look over the books. I sometimes see them, though, in places where I wonder what traffic they'll get. On winding country roads with rather large houses situated far back from the roads on ample, gracious properties. And at the roadside, a little free library. But who's going to be walking by? I guess maybe the neighbors? But there's just not the same thickness of people.

Also, this guy thinks of himself as lending the books, not giving them away. He doesn't mind if you keep the book a month, six months, a year, and in fact he probably isn't going to be upset if a book doesn't come back, but the *idea* is that it will come back--and that means that the borrower has more connection with the site, and there's a sense of mutual responsibility. Plus the story says that people like to come and chat with him.

There can be more than one pattern! Little Free Libraries have a kind of spy-drop-box vibe. Ships passing in the night, taking books, maybe leaving books. That can be fun too. But I like the actual social interaction involved in what Mr Lee is doing.

Do any of you oversee a Little Free Library or frequent one (or more than one)? What's your experience been?


**Not exactly his words, which are Malaysian-English word order and has some special words I didn't catch, but that's how they're glossed and mainly what he said.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
--From "Song of Wandering Aengus," W.B. Yeats

I went out with my tutor, her dad, and her older brother through the flooded forest so they could show me fishing, and it was exactly like in "The Song of Wandering Aengus." My tutor's brother had a piece of line tied to a stick, with a little hook attached. "Over here, look at all the berries here; the fish will love this spot, they love these berries," their dad said excitedly.

And her brother put a berry on his hook, threw it in the water, and came up with a fish. One, two, three times he did it, one, two, three times he caught a little fish.



So many berries for the fish, so many fish for people fishing.

Centipede Perfume
So much everything all the time, pressing on your senses all the time--this is what I love here.

I divided my time between my tutor and her family and my friends the guide couple and their family. With them I visited a nature reserve on the island of Santa Rosa, in Peru. At one point we were walking a forest path, and the wife, L, was showing me all the centipedes on the ground, quite large. She could sex them!

"This one's a male," she said. "See? Here's its member." Sure enough, there it was!

"Do you want to hold it?" she asked.

"Sure!" So I held out my hand. It crawled near my hand ... then veered away. We tried again. It approached... then moved away, back to her hand.

Then I remembered I had bug spray on. The centipede must not have liked the bug spray. That's what you get for wandering around an environment doused in poison! Smart centipede.

Most of the centipedes we saw she determined were males, but finally she found a female one. "They have a nice smell," she said, after setting it down. She held out her hand, and sure enough, it had a beautiful citrusy smell to it!

I tried to find what species of centipede this was, afterward, but there are something like 700 species of centipede in the area, and the internet is eager to recommend to me the giant Amazonian centipede, but these guys were big but not THAT big, and the color wasn't quite right. And then I looked for fragrant centipedes, and instead found some American millipedes who have a scent like almonds because they're poisonous. So... similar but not the same.

Roots
There were some beautiful, largish, red-brown seeds on the ground. I picked one up, and underneath it had split and a root was pushing out. I picked up another: same. And another: same. These seeds were wasting no time getting started.

Where I live in western Massachusetts, in fall, you get acorns and hickory nuts. But they don't put out roots until the following spring ... Things that move slow in my cool zone move fast in the Amazon.

I only have a drawing, no photo


This reminds me of a story I heard the other day about soil forming high in the canopy in temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. Up to a foot of soil, from mosses and things growing on the branches, decaying, new stuff growing, decaying, building up. A soil scientist was looking at what was growing up in that aerial soil, and found some roots that... connected back to the hosting tree. It turns out that that new soil is very rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, and especially in spring, when all the terrestrial plants are competing for the nutrients in the ground, this extra soil, high up in the canopy, is a good vitamin boost for the tree. Marvelous. (Link to the transcript.)

Book Recommendation
( Usurpation, by Sue Burke )

I've adored the two volumes in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series (and fully intend to read the other two), but I've been daunted in trying to branch out because the guy is SO prolific. But thanks to the recommendation of someone on here, I landed on Elder Race. It's a novella--handy! I read it in airports on my way to and from Leticia, and it was absolutely right for me, because putting aside the plot, what it's about is communication across a chasm of cultural difference, when you're not sure how what you're saying is being received, and you're also not sure if what you're understanding of what you hear is what the speaker intends. And on top of that, you're dealing with vast differentials in resources and--so you arrogantly assume (you're right in some respects, but very wrong in others)--knowledge.

It's also about what's wrong with the Prime Directive, namely, that once you're watching a thing, observing a thing, you're party to it, part of it. Your act of watching changes reality. Like with photons, or whatever. Schrödinger Heisenberg etc. If you weren't there, then yes, things would just unfold however they were going to unfold, but you are there, and so if you decide not to get involved, then it means you're permitting whatever bad things might happen that you might be capable of stopping.

Don't get me wrong: messing around and getting involved can be equally bad. All I'm saying is that once you're there, you ARE involved, and doing nothing is as much of a game changer as doing something.

Nyr is the resource-having character, assailed by depression because he's realized, upon being wakened from his most recent cryo-sleep, that his society back on Earth has likely died off, that he is the last of his people. He's woken by Lynesse Fourth Daughter, to whose lineage he made a promise some great grandmothers ago, when he last woke up and broke the Prime Directive by helping out said great-great (etc.) grandmother. This time, there's a demon to fight...

And the story unfolds. It was very fun to see Nyr from Lynesse (and her ally Esha)'s point of view, and to see them from his. The demon (it can't be a demon, Nyr thinks to himself, but in fact for all intents and purposes it IS a demon, very Stranger Things-ish) is suitably awful and scary.

There were two ways (to my mind) that the story could have ended for Nyr, and I definitely preferred the ending that Tchaikovsky chose, which goes along with his general outlook as I know it from the Children of Time books. About the only niggle I have with the story is that I'm not very satisfied with the finality of the demon vanquishing. I was kind of expecting more exploration/explanation of what it was, which would then let me believe in the permanence of its defeat, but as it's an eldritch horror from the Upside Down, pretty much, ehhhhnnnn, I feel like it might find its way back? But it's gone for now, and that'll have to do.

Things have been stressful around here--there was a health scare for a family member, but they're quite fine now, happy to say.

But there are a number of nice things, too. Last week I took R to a doctor's appointment, and afterward, we had a meal together, including some siwa (also romanized suwa), a Eritrean homemade fermented drink. I think I've posted about it before, but I can't find the post, so maybe not? Maybe I just talked to some of you about it. R has brewed it in a blue Lego container, one that once upon a time held those bigger-style Lego bricks. Now it contains a modestly alcoholic drink! And she has a gorgeous handmade strainer for it. If you click through to a larger size of the photo, you can see the mesh.



And I'm going back to Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia! By myself, leaving this coming weekend and coming back the following weekend. I'm terrible at preparing appropriate presents and gifts and things, but I have some stuff like maple syrup, locally made earrings, and picture books, and I'm happy with these clothespins, that I decorated myself. I hang out laundry, and they hang out laundry, and I like decorated, useful things, so maybe they will too. I have three households I'm bringing stuff to, so these will be divided into three sets. (This photo is click-through-able too, if you want to see it larger.)



Truth is, at this state of pre-trip, I'm in the dying-of-anxiety phase, but it'll be fine once I get there. I hope!

I was taking a shortcut from one strip of depressing stores to another, and it had me scrabbling down a slope, covered in these landscaping rocks, when I spotted this playing card and nips bottle:



Like out of a story.

The Jack of Hearts strikes me as a trickster character. Is that an established thing, or just something I'm imagining? I mean, the jack isn't as powerful as the king, he's the interloping male who can enchant the women, steal them away from the king. And hearts! Hearts is hearts.

(Side Quest: You are in charge of creating four new suits of cards. What are they?)

And then the nips bottle. Cards and drink are stereotypical downfalls, but there's something extra mean and tragic about a nips bottle, fortunes fallen so low that that's all you can afford. Maybe the Jack of Hearts was your lucky card... now it's lying in a wasteland between strips of stores, beside a state highway, next to the nips bottle.

(Side Note: Actually now it is lying in the pocket of my coat. I am not sure what quest I've accepted by picking it up.)

The real-life Captain Morgan raided Spanish galleons hither and yon, plundered cities, engaged in torture now and then, and owned several slave-run plantations. He also drank a lot. I wonder what he'd think about his image decorating nips bottles?

(ETA Side Note 2: Wow, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" is a great story-song! Thanks sartorias and pameladean for recommending it!)

What a Fish Looks Like
by Syr Hayati Beker

Read this thanks to skygiants' excellent review (here).

I loved the style of storytelling--love the way the author's mind works--and enjoyed aspects of the story a lot, but overall, I wasn't the right audience for the book. The right audience would be someone who is as interested in all the ideas as I am, but who is also very invested in portraits of people experiencing all the emotions associated with a breakup. The various narrators are really feeling their feelings about one another, and to enjoy the book fully, you need to be there for that.

It's the climate apocalypse, and some people are fleeing earth and others are staying, and there's conversation about what those decisions mean and what goes into them, but with a very loud undertone about what commitment to a lover means and what abandonment is, and bravery, etc. I was interested in the conversations about commitment to Earth more than the associated subtext (sometimes supertext) about commitment to one another.

So I read about halfway through with deep absorption, then skimmed the rest.

But the language and ideas are great. This quote, about hosting extinct animals' DNA, shows how marvelously the author explores the idea (and also how they nudge you about human relationships).

It's not like sharing a bed, struggling at first and then finding a rhythm. It's not like grafting an apricot branch to a plum tree. It is: your DNA turned into a factory for the DNA of extinct species until the day the world is safe enough that we can let the ghosts out, resurrected. Until then, it's a shorter life, but maybe less lonely. Maybe that's all there ever was.

There's also a great part where a character may or may not be talking to a collective mer-consciousness. The author plays with "A Lone" (a single, noncollective being, alone) and "Re-member" (come back into collectivity, remember). I loved the mer-collective's voice:

We remember what we eat
One Song:
One time a sailor fell off his ship. "Can you swim?" we said
No
So we ate him. Drank his tears
Now he is not
A Lone

And there's also a part about putting on a play (Antigone) that keeps doing "X, but Y" in very funny ways, e.g.,

The Sphinx, but with affirmations instead of riddles. It says, "what you are is fabulous, and that's what you are." It says, "the thing that walks on any number of legs belongs."
...
Your life, but in Thebes. Thebes is nice. It has no laundry, only sand.
...
A break up, but so well lit, you overcome your differences and fall back in love.
...
Romeo and Juliet, but with cell phones. Their elopement succeeds. Nobody dies. They move to a small apartment in Milan. They love and hate one another their whole lives, sheltered from the cold, touching all the old familiar walls.

Those are just some; there were more. The last of those X, but Y examples grated on me a little. I know "they love and hate one another their whole lives" is a thing that really does happen, but it feels very overrepresented in theater and literary fiction, and "touching all the old familiar walls" feels like every single young rebel's blithe certainty that they're going to live life differently.

But maybe they will! And people get to declare what they want for audiences that are thirsting to hear it.

So: good book, great ideas, me: not the target audience, but very glad to have read it.

ETA: I've gone this whole review without acknowledging that this book is queer centered. This book is queer centered! The lovers are nonbinary or trans, most of them. This was neither a plus nor a minus for me, but if you're yearning to spend time in a fully realized queer space, this story provides that--so that would be an added mark in its favor.

It's been more than a week since I posted! Part of that's just life being busy; part is that osprey_archer is here!

Today we went to Bright Water Bog, swung on a swing, ate some cranberries, and saw ice forming. It was sunny, but a cold wind was blowing, and a few flurries of snow came down.



(We also went to the Smith College Botanical Gardens, but this is a drive-by post! So there's only the one photo.)

I was so shocked to hear you have left us, minoanmiss. You are a fountain of art and fic and joy at making babies smile. You've sent me poems, you've sent me stickers that have decorated letters I've sent people. When the pandemic hit and I posted about the Japanese amabie, you made a fridge magnet of one. She's on my fridge above your Minoan dancers.



Do you remember when you sent me a postcard for a pine tree, and I took it there?

You made magic happen.

I will think of you every time I see someone making a baby smile. I will talk to that pine tree about you. Maybe it has your forwarding address, and I can send you a postcard.

Today's prompt word was "cascade" but what I ended up thinking about was apocalypse-revelation.

Have something portentous!

( what level of apocalypse are you on? )