I have a weakness for interconnected short stories & this debut is a beaut. Each story stands on its own, yet the carefully crafted sum is even greater than the parts. I love the ambitious scope, beginning in 1897 & ending in 2050; the kaleidoscopic POVs; that actions have consequences; the settings that range from Nigeria to Poland to the USA; and a cast of characters that centers four girls who meet at boarding school.

[2050] Dele is doing well in film production since his post-quarterback career as a sports announcer ended, after American football finally got banned. He is getting yearly brain scans and diagnostic tests for the tau proteins that signal the presence of the Alzheimer‘s-like disease that‘s taken many of his teammates. Unlike the old days, now it can be treated and progression of the disease stopped if caught early.

If Betty ever wrote a mystery, it would be about a world without politics and what a mystery it was that we had to have them when everyone hated them.

She was full of interesting questions. Like, who was Jane Austen‘s father, that he had so many books? And why did we feel sorry for Jane Austen when she didn‘t have to work and could stay home and write? My student‘s original name was Huiyang Wang, but after she read Middlemarch—and, two-year marathon that it was for her, she did read the whole thing—she changed her name to Mary Ann Evans.

Book synchronicity: two that feature characters that live within regimes where they are ruthlessly oppressed because of their intellectual or middle class background.

Dear Mr Nixon,
I don‘t know if you will remember me, especially now that I am in heaven and you are in hell. I was one of the little girls you talked to when you came in 1972. Not the one in the famous picture. I was the other one.

A feel-good story about MG, a Filipina foreign domestic worker who faces many challenges, far from her loved ones, and yet ends surrounded by a caring, supportive community in Toronto that includes queer folk. The story is in the voice of MG‘s baby, being told to the aging trans woman MG cares for. Although I found that aspect a bit twee, I still found MG‘s life gripping and I cared for her very much. #Canadian #LGBTQ

Hello! Holy moly was that ever a good nap. I don‘t want to brag or anything because I understand that sleep gets progressively crappy as we age, but wow. That was restorative. I think I grew a little. What do you think? Does my onesie look tight on me now? Have my cheeks gotten fuller? I feel fuller.
(Internet photo)

Ate Marcy was busy cooking in the kitchen, while the children ran about the house holding Ellie‘s new Barbie dolls by the legs like machine guns and shooting at each other.

With each course, the server came and discussed not only the ingredients and their preparation, but their provenance, the sustainability, the minimal footprint—sprinkling a kind of virtue to garnish and balance the richness of the meal.

Lea Ypi‘s memoir of her childhood in Albania while the country undergoes major changes is eye-opening and moving. Her family goes from coveting an empty Coca Cola can as a decorative object, to being able to buy all kinds of soft drinks without even standing in a queue. Excellent audiobook read by Rachel Babbage with the author reading the epilogue.

In my family, everyone had a favourite revolution, just as everyone had a favourite summer fruit.

The mastery of the subtle boundary between following rules and breaking them was, for us children, the true mark of growth, maturity and social integration.

The day after watching Everything Everywhere All at Once, I came across this passage in the tagged novel: “it‘s everything everywhere all the time.” 🤪

Poetry and prose mingle in this enchanting collaborative travel memoir written by 2 people who have complicated feelings about their ties to Northern Ireland & decide to walk the length of the River Bann together. One is Catholic, one Protestant. Politics, family, memories, identity, being queer, landscape and language. There‘s a guide to Ulsterisms at the end, such as “the carry of the sky” (the drift of clouds) and jibble (to dribble or spill).

Friday Reads March 17: ?️‍?the Lambda Literary finalists, ☘️Irish lit, ??travelling, ??doppelgängers & ??the best book I‘ve read this year
https://youtu.be/GVVGea6ZkwI

Julie Morstad‘s delicate, whimsical illustrations capture the free spirit of a French woman who made a solo trip on a motorcycle around the world in 1973. The text is by Amy Novesky, who interviewed Anne-France Dautheville at her home near Paris before writing this, and includes the challenges she faced like mechanical trouble, falls & harsh weather. But the people she met were wonderful. (Dautheville wasn‘t a girl btw; she was 29.) #kidlit

What a young woman packs for a motorcycle trip around the world.

On her solo motorcycle trip around the world, Anne-France Dautheville stopped at a hot spring I know well: Liard! It‘s on the Alaska highway in the Yukon Territory and it is a great place to relax after a day on the road.

I want the world to be beautiful, and it is beautiful. I want people to be good, and they are good.
-Anne-France Dautheville

If you are up for a wild ride, this one is a lot of fun. A warm, witty logic puzzle made up of doppelgängers, autoscopy, murder, transdimensional cookery, and a large number of people with varying degrees of mental health. Bookshop owner Jean is an unreliable guide through the mayhem, but I loved her anyway. #CanadianAuthor

“No-mind is administered in small doses at first. That allows the subject to acclimatize to super-high doses before they get any of the negative side effects like death or sporing.”🤪

When Ian gets home, he encourages the kids to go downstairs and play a board game. This is like asking them to wear top hats, but their father has a convincing way.

“But death, at least, was certain. Every man needed to be certain of something.” The people in Irish author Claire Keegan‘s short stories tend to have many uncertainties — mostly due to circumstances. Being born a woman, or poor, or both, for example. They are interesting and seem true to life, no matter how eccentric. I enjoyed this audio production with three narrators: Aoife McMahon, Aidan Quinn and Aidan Kelly.

Your father moved into the other room but your mother gave him sex on his birthday. She‘d go into his room and they‘d have it there. It never took long and they never made noise, but you knew.

May was on its way, thank god. We were getting inoculations of sun. Winter here arrives, stays, persists, goes away a little, then comes back and people start leaping off the bridges. That‘s approximately March, when jumping is at its apogee, but even then, winter isn‘t over. What it likes to do is go away for a week in April and then return for three days and finish grandpa off.

I have a bookshop called Bookshop. I do subtlety in other areas of my life.

I talk about 6 books I‘ve read recently plus three live theatre events in my latest video:
Recent Reads March 14: The Power of the Powerless; pests, ghosts, migrants, shepherdesses & a magpie
https://youtu.be/ttyev5abdGA

An injury left Sam, mother of 3 boys, paralyzed from the chest down. Then, she & her Australian family adopted an injured bird. Healing ensued. The gorgeous photography is my favourite part of this book because the text is a little heavy on schmaltz. ie: “angels come in all shapes & sizes” & “we are all our journeys, hopes & dreams clad in mortal wrapping paper. It‘s a feel-good true story & I recommend it.

I love Cameron Bloom‘s photos of life with a magpie his family rescued when it was an injured fledgling.

It must be said, there is no such thing as potty-training a magpie—at least so far as we could tell. After Penguin added her signature flourish to the furniture, carpet, bedspreads, curtains, hats, television and computers for the umpteenth time, we decided she was old enough to get her own apartment.
[which was a tree outside]

Black Canadian poet Wayde Compton & Filipino Canadian artist April dela Noche Milne have created a surreal, beautiful & thought-provoking graphic novel about a resourceful young migrant who makes an Oz-like journey, looking for a home. Scribbly marks and rich hues of blue, green & brown illustrate this dreamy tale, suitable for ages 12 & up.

The Thicket of Tickets; the Great Swamp of Ink; the Rainbow Border—the names of the places in this fable make me smile.

The girl had lived in the Great Swamp of Ink for as long as she could remember.

It‘s all about perception: “the word ‘pest‘ takes away context & complexity, shuts down our curiosity, our desire to look for other angles or solutions.” This audiobook offers an engaging look at the way humans look at animals who refuse to stay where we think they belong.

Maremma dogs with the right training will defend almost anything. Maremmas are famous in Australia for defending the little penguins of Middle Island from foxes.

Peter Marra, who wrote Cat Wars, received death threats when it came out in 2016. The irony of people who hate the idea of killing cats threatening a scientist with death escapes neither of us.

The whole idea of pigeons degrading masonry was just something people said without any evidence.

A booktuber‘s review of Celeste Ng‘s Our Missing Hearts, a book which shows the power of art used as protest, led me to read Czech playwright & statesman Vàclav Havel‘s classic essay (written in 1978). It took me two weeks—I find philosophy slow-going—but I loved it. He wrote that living within the truth would cause the Soviet post-totalitarian system—which was founded on lies—to crumble. And it did. Havel is critical of western democracy too.

You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of the people.

Heraclitus said that you can never step into the same river twice. He didn‘t mention that some of us never get into the river in the first place. If the river stays in the atlas, it will always be an unchanging solid blue line, a river stepped into only once. Because most of us, most of the time, just stay at home, wherever that may be.

This is a stunning memoir by a queer South Asian woman who is also a devout Muslim. I listened to the audiobook read by Ashraf Shirazi.

I‘ve learned to reframe telling people as “inviting in” instead of “coming out.” 🏳️‍🌈

God is neither man nor woman, nor masculine nor feminine. This god who teaches us that we can be both & neither & all & beyond & capable of multiplicities & expansiveness. Nonbinary. Genderqueer. They. This god that is THE god. My god. My Allah, who created the world & created language & created the first person, Adam. This first person who was man & woman & neither & both & not a mistake. Never a mistake. Like me.

Another episode where I talk about what I‘ve been reading this past week:
Friday Reads March 10: the Centre for Literatures in Canada; nonfiction; queer muslim memoir; last slave ship; natural dyes
https://youtu.be/8CeyDSZD6Hg

Ancient myths continue to shape society through the entrenchment of cultural patterns (ie by the many dramatizations of sexual assault). Addressing difficult subjects (ie human weaknesses & abuse of power) is one reason why myths remain relevant. Classicist Helen Morales engaging approach shows how our attitudes can be shifted by reinterpreting & adapting these stories, & by paying more attention to the subversive tales. #LGBTQ

Revenge fantasies in ancient myths are not scripts to be followed, but they are adrenaline shots for the hurt soul, an essential part of the sexual assault survivor‘s emergency kit.

Ancient myths (stories) have subversive power precisely because they can be told—and read—in different ways. In the words of novelist Ben Okri, myths “always take wing and soar beyond the place where we can keep them fixed.”

“It was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with … they made us brave. They made us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.”
—Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

The myth of Antigone, as told by the Greek playwright Sophocles, is one of the most well known of the Greek myths and one of the most meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics. She has become an icon of resistance. Of pitting personal conviction against state law. Of speaking truth to power.