sasha_feather | Reading

Thought I'd post some flowers to break up the politics! Here's me, who used to get all my news from destiel memes on tumblr, now following three substack blogs. But I figure when you're living through History, best to pay at least some attention. And even here in NZ we have right wing bastards in government trying to fuck things up. Wrote my first email to my MP, Health Minister, Labour & the Greens protesting a recent directive ordering our Health Service to refer to all pregnant people as "pregnant women". Tossers. Hope you're all looking after yourselves out there.

As predicted, the weather finally ended our almost-drought with a LOT of rain. And thunder and lightning, and some floods and slips but not where I live now (whew). At my old place in the bush we'd definitely have had power cuts but these days I can just listen to the pounding rain and crackling thunder and relax.

The autumn garden's losing many of its flowers and going a bit wild, but I've planted a bunch of seeds which might grow and eventually flower, what with Auckland having weird subtropical weather. We'll see. Also, it's time for violas again! I love violas and pansies with their many colours and little faces.

The tithonia (Mexican sunflower) beside my dalek compost bin is literally taller than the house. Possibly a world record! People keep offering to cut it back for me (neighbour, and the heat pump maintenance guy although it's not menacing the outside unit) but last year it produced huge plate-sized yellow daisies in May so I'm hanging in there for those to reappear (1 so far, hopefully many more). Makes it a little tricky to park my car but I can sort of nudge it in underneath the triffid. Here's the evidence!

huge green leafy plant over ten feet tall, partly obscuring a red car.

huge green leafy plant over ten feet tall, partly obscuring a red car.


Red chard - I cut it off at ground level so the roots could rot into the soil but, no, it's the second coming. Appropriate timing anyway!	Impatiens still cheerful by my door.

Leopard spotted liguria in rampant flower for the first time.	a super-late daylily being lovely.

Cayenne peppers in profusion - nearly too hot for me (well, a quarter of one in a stir fry is ok).	Mystery sweet pepper - a Yugoslavia with a dark stripe or a Sweet Chocolate with a red stripe?

mific

Watch on YouTube

torachan

1. Back to work tomorrow. I am not enthused about that, but I did really enjoy my time off and I felt like being off for three weeks allowed me to actually disconnect more from work than I usually do if I'm just off a couple days or even a week. I did glance at my email and messages every day, but only responded less than ten times and even when I looked at the phone screen to see the messages, I only did so once or twice a day, rather than multiple times throughout the day. Tomorrow will be the start of a huge catch-up (thousands of messages to get through) and I think I will just work from home tomorrow unless something else comes up, so at least it will be a slow easing back into things. And since it's the last week of the month, there are less meetings, which means for time for catching up.

2. We had a lovely time at DCA this morning. I've heard that easter can be a pretty busy day but while it was getting a little busier by the time we left, it was super light in the first few hours and the weather was great.

3. I love getting shots of the cats looking out the window.

sorcyress

Finished Reading Recently:

This entry is not counting children's books, since I talked about those separately.

It took me longer than expected to read Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett, but that happens sometimes, and it spanned the Brain Be Weird part of the month where I was badly crashed out. I quite liked it, obviously. Here's what I wrote on Weds when I finished it:

Okay yeah, Feet of Clay was *really* good. I like the gender part --"we've got extra pronouns here", _be still my heart_ and I really fucking like the golems. And I lovehate Vetrinari so very much, he is such a beautifully sympathetic antagonist. If Vimes ever figures out how much he's been played...actually, I think Vimes would sulk for a bit and then be okay with it.

And then there's Dorfl, and Oh Man. The part of my ~~brain~~heart that loves community and solidarity and the inherent worth of all and trying to make things better for everyone is Very Aware Of How Good This Feels.

I'm obviously going to keep reading, but one of the unexpected things I really like is that I've read three watch books now and each of them is a fully complete story. No cliffhangers! Like, there's obviously more things that _could_ happen, but they feel like opportunities, not like frustrations. It's an astonishing feature of writing, and something I hadn't realized I'd been missing by some of the other fantasy I've read. I love Seanan, for instance, but you read enough Toby books and you know there's unfinished story that hasn't been resolved and it'll nag at you. Which is fine! The story she is telling is a longer one that takes a lot of books to get through! But it's still refreshing to know that I could never read another Discworld book and still feel like I've reached a satisfying end.

After, I dove into Richard Osman's We Solve Murders on a day in which I was going on slow meandery errands that involved lots of hanging out outside in the _almost_ bearable weather. Read from start to finish in about three and a half hours, nearly continuous, and you know? It was real nice to have a book that was both fluffy enough and captivating enough to do so. Osman writes incredibly human characters, with fairly clear good-vs-evil descriptors, and it's pretty fun to find out what they're up to.

On Thursday I read a couple of short works, the first of which was an 1884 Evangelical screed entitled There is no harm in dancing (a title, I want to be clear, that should be read extremely sarcastically). It's about thirty pages explaining how dancing is The Worst Sin That Ever Was and especially being simultaneously victim-blaming and slut-shaming about All Those Horrible Women That Do It And Corrupt Men, and then we get to the crown-jewel part, which says something like "most if not all of these sins can be found at every dance" and precedes to list about thirty sins, a great many of which I have never once seen because I am clearly not going to exciting enough dances. For instance, not once have I been on a dance floor that features "assassination", or "infanticide" although I have to admit, of late "sedition" has been appearing in most of my social experiences. Anyways, it turns out that if you're gonna hate-read something, choose something that's like a century and a half old, it's *way* funnier. And I wish I knew how to cross-stitch so I could make a proper art piece out of that last bit.

I followed it up with the Simple Sabotage Manual, which is neat because a lot of the specifics they offer are out of date, but the concepts feel real clear and lovely. I shouldn't say more about this one.

Thursday afternoon I stumbled into a copy of Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, which I haven't read in ages, so I grabbed it. It's still a pretty fun book! It is more of a love story than I remember, I think I think of it as "Ella becoming a whole adult" but it really is "falling in love with Char" as the central premise. It's sweet though, it's a damn good romance, and I like all the worldbuilding quite a bit.

Currently Reading:

I have cracked spine on Wyrd Sisters (metaphorically, all my Pratchett is in e-form) but literally only read about three pages. So I'll get to that all in a rush soon.

I don't know if I have properly mentioned, in part because I really don't know how to mark it on my spreadsheet: I have gotten pretty entangled in The SCP Foundation of late, which is several million words of collaborative semi-horror. It just _keeps going_ is what I am finding. It's serving as a nice thing to read when I don't feel like playing video games.

Reading Next

SamSam has never heard of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I'm visiting them soon, so that's going to get read aloud I suspect, at least a few chapters worth.

I have the next Vorkosigan book, so I really ought to do that. Also I downloaded like...fifty? eighty! Eighty things from Project Gutenburg. This is how I got the short stuff I mentioned above, but there's Oz and the coloured faerie books, and the complete Poe, and Man of La Mancha, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and all sorts of stuff.

And Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. Every year I've managed to get a little farther, but this'll be my third year trying it out. Let's see if I can finish the novel this time around!

~Sor
MOOP!

mecurtin

In general Purrcy is *not* allowed on the kitchen counters. But he seemed extremely interested in the back corner here, so I let him jump up and poke around as part of his Rodent Control Officer duties. No results at this time, but Constant Vigilance! is his watchword.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks back at the camera over his shoulder from where he stands in the corner between a tile wall and an uneven stone one. Plastic containers can be seen next to him. He looks quite concerned, but his eyes are a beautiful gray-green.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby looks back at the camera over his shoulder from where he stands in the corner between a tile wall and an uneven stone one. Plastic containers can be seen next to him. He looks quite concerned, but his eyes are a beautiful gray-green.

Purrcy jumped up on the kitchen Chair O Love and he was feeling *feisty*! He discovered a gap between the blanket & the chair, explored it, and saw that it was Good.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby crouches on a gray-green blanket-covered chair in a kitchen, looking a little wild.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby crouches on a gray-green blanket-covered chair in a kitchen, looking a little wild.

A gray-green blanket is draped across a chair. The white-furred nose of a tabby cat peaks out the bottom, whiskers spread but eyes invisible.

A close-up of Purrcy the tuxedo tabby's face as he peers out from under a gray-green blanket on a worn brown vinyl chair. Only his eyes, little pink nose, and wide-spread whiskers can be seen.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby peeks out from where he crouches in a nook made by a gray-green blanket draped over a worn brown vinyl chair. His eyes look very large and solemn, his paws very small.

People on Bluesky were discussing a tweet by a TERF called June Slater, who posted:

These trans women. Do they ever do things like women actually do, run a home, cook, put the washer on, get the kids to school, visit relatives in care homes, budget the bills, clean the house, chauffeur kids about? You know the reality of being a woman!

One of the boggling aspects of this "thinking", to me, is the way she doesn't seem to be able to conceive of MEN cooking or taking care of children or living spaces.

Katherine Dickinson said

there’s a weird expectation of childishness in men among these women to the point it’s like these women aren’t attracted to functioning adults and it’s like two steps from Why Don’t You Take A Seat With Chris Hansen territory

And I remember things I'd read about the history of housekeeping and service work that I wrote up here, and wondered:

Compared to the US & the Continent, Brits tended to be resistant to labo(u)r-saving home tech & reliant on servants for the middle-to-upper classes right up to WW2. After the War, *huge* shock of not having servants like before, & I think maybe upper-middle/upper-class men just ...use their wives?

bcuz before the War they were certainly childishly dependent, by US standards. e.g. Gentleman's service flats, in UK, were bachelor apts with cleaning, cooking, and personal valet services provided. No equiv in US AFAIK

I looked at some stats about household work, but there's basically nothing about how the lives of upper-middle-class or richer people live in different countries.

Ach, I shall quit this now and finish my Andor re-watch, so Dirk and I can watch the new eps when they drop on Tuesday.

torachan

Last day of the Food and Wine Festival so last chance to ride Soarin' Over California before it goes back to Soarin' Over the World.

( Read more... )

torachan

Currently Reading
The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill
26%. The MC is a cleaner who goes in and deep-cleans the houses where people have lain dead and undiscovered for a long time. She stumbles upon a mystery when two of her recent jobs have had the same dried flower at the scene. Pretty interesting so far.

Architectural Follies in America
16%. This is a short, picture-filled book about various odd buildings in the US. Randomly found it in a neighborhood Little Library. It's interesting.

A Drop of Corruption
23%. This has definitely picked up now and I'm a lot more interested in what's going on. Just haven't been making much progress because I've been off work and the majority of my audiobook time is in the car. Also a note on the audiobook, and I had this problem with the otherwise excellent audiobook versions of The Locked Tomb series, but there are pronunciation changes from the first book! I'm guessing that after the first book's audiobook came out, the narrator got feedback from the author and then made changes for the following books, but it's really jarring and I wish that if the author really wanted names/words said a certain way (or in the case of The Locked Tomb, certain accents used) then they would make note of that first, rather than changing mid-series. (And if it's just the narrator making changes rather than author feedback, I wish they wouldn't make those changes, either. Pick a pronunciation and stick to it!)

Hidden Figures
44%.

Recently Finished
Winterborne Home for Mayhem and Mystery
Sequel to Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Virtue. This felt like maybe there was supposed to be more books in the series and it all got wrapped up quickly in the end? It was all right, but I wasn't super into either book.

The Boney Hand
Sequel to Charlie & Frog. Another mystery in the town. This was cute. Seems like the author maybe wanted it to be a series but there haven't been any more books after this.

The Amelia Six
Middle grade book about a group of girls who win an overnight stay at Amelia Earhart's childhood home, but while they're there, her goggles go missing and they have to solve the mystery. It was just all right.

Murderburg
Apparently originally a web comic, this graphic novel is about a small island town inhabited mostly by criminals. The actual name is Muderburg, but everyone calls it Murderburg. The main characters are not even thinly veiled Morticia and Gomez, though the children are not Wednesday and Pugsly. It was fine. Somewhat funny in places but mostly just there.

Break Out
Heavy-handed graphic novel about a world where mysterious and possibly alien cubes appear in the sky and start randomly kidnapping people. But it only happens to teens, so when the governments of the world have done all they can and can't find a way to stop it, they just say well, it's just a few people here and there, we'll just have to live with it. Then the kids save the day. Obviously paralelling school shootings, but it felt like the message was more important than the story itself, because the plot is just one of those types where so many coincidences happen just right that it feels unbelievable.

Do Da Dancin'!: Venice Competition vol. 1-2
I'm not enjoying this quite as much as the original series, but it's good enough that I'll finish it.

Umimachi Diary vol. 8-9
Overall this series was just okay. I originally read the first three volumes on a limited time free promotion and liked them a lot, but when I finally got around to reading the rest of the series now I just found it kind of dragged. Not bad, but just okay.

jesse_the_k

Declaration of Interdependence from queerspacepunk (aka emmett)

A tiny snippet from a lovely thread

i want to be asked to come over and help put my friend's kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it's on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone's at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people's houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it's still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people's mending by my couch

i want to be surrounded by reminders that 'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do

https://queerspacepunk.tumblr.com/search/interdependence

Today I learned there are graphic resources—icons and banners—on the Archive of Our Own!

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Banners%20*a*%20Icons/works

(Sadly AO3’s metatags don’t create RSS feeds, so I can’t add one here.)

New DW community for people who archive information from the web: datahoarders

timeasmymeasure provides resources for would-be archivists without tech skills: https://datahoarders.dreamwidth.org/3299.html

Of particular interest to me:

AO3 Downloader: a life-saver for any person who has thought, "God, I wish I could download all of my bookmarks, but that would take sooo long to do individually." Another Github download which is saved by its thorough instructions!

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

torachan

1. We went to the farmers market this morning. I wish it was on Sundays instead of Saturdays because we usually go to Disneyland on Saturday morning, but this week we're going tomorrow instead, so we could go to the farmers market today. Sadly the Filipino tamales guy was not there this week, but we did get some of the delicious chocolate dipped macaroons we've gotten the last few times we went.

2. For dinner we ordered pizza from a fancy local place we have been meaning to try for years and never get around to. Sadly the one pizza I was most interested in from their menu was not available (butternut squash), but we got a zucchini one and a meat lovers one and both were very tasty. Definitely would order from there in the future, though it's not an every day place, that's for sure.

3. Usually I make a chocolate sheet cake for Carla's birthday but because we were out of town, I totally forgot about it, until randomly a channel Carla follows on youtube had a video about it, so I decided to make it today. I don't bake very much anymore and this cake is a lot of work, but it's soooooo good. After I'd already started mixing ingredients, Carla mentioned making a half-batch, but it was too late by then, but for next time I definitely will. We hardly use our large oven anymore and it's become a cupboard instead, so it has to be made in two small sheet pans to fit in the Breville, and that made it a little more annoying, plus we just don't need that much cake. I can give a good chunk to Alexander to take home with him tomorrow, at least.

4. Chloe and Molly were twinning on the bed.

torachan

Up until just recently (April 1st, as it happens), the rides in Fantasy Springs were virtual queue only, so you really had to get there early to lock in the return times, but as of this month, they now have regular standby lines in addition to the paid premier access for three of the four rides (the Tinkerbell ride is standby-only). Still, I wanted to make sure we were in the park right when it opened to get those premier access passes, especially for Frozen, since that is the most popular ride.

So I went over to the park around seven and got in line, and Carla planned to meet up with me before nine. ( That was definitely the right plan! )

sovay

From my office window, I just watched a visitor deliberately smell a Bradford pear and regret it. The trees have really broken into bloom, so I took my camera out into the blotter-paper overcast that kept thinking about raining and then not quite.

( Once I was outside Penn Station, selling red and white carnations. )

spatch has been showing me Hill Street Blues (1981–87), which after a season and a handful I can see resembled nothing else in the Nielsen ratings of its time, structurally, tonally, perhaps even politically, since what I would not have expected from a cop show of the early Reagan administration is so much emphasis on what we would now call non-toxic masculinity as an ideal if not always achieved. Its attitudinal snapshots are fascinating. It is working seriously for diversity. Its interlocking narratives and human messiness make sense of it as the yardstick for J. Michael Straczynski in creating Babylon 5 (1993–98), which is how I heard of the show originally and what it is currently doing in my eyes. I am also enjoying the worldbuilding of its fictional city, whose geographical location is deliberately obscure but whose individual neighborhoods and businesses and sports teams are throwing out runners all over the plot. Actually, to my surprised pleasure, it reminds me distinctly of Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride.

Current Music: Passion Pit, "Take a Walk"

sorcyress

Today I had a good morning of ADVENTURES!

I am visiting Tuesday in Providence, and ke found out about EscapeRhodeIsland's Eggscape scavenger hunt! (There was also an egg hunt which we mostly didn't participate in). The scav turned out to have ten locations to visit throughout downtown PVD: six local businesses, three interesting clocks, and a set of coordinates that led to some pretty great mushroom murals.

It was a really nice adventure through the town! We came in third, but we came in first in our hearts, mostly because we weren't at all treating it like a competition, we were treating it as a nice stroll through the city. After, we wound up chatting with Dizz and Chase who run the place for a goodly while, about internet culture and cool scavenger hunts and the like.

The weather was absolutely perfect for a long walk outside. It was sunny, but not brutally so, deliciously breezy without being chilly, and warm and not-too-humid. Hats off to the showrunners for getting us such a good day! Of the six locations, Tuesday and I had definitely been to one of them before (the Weird Lovecraft Bookstore in the PVD arcade!) but most of them were new-ish, and a few definitely felt like places to visit again in the future! Mostly it was just really nice to connect to the community so much, and get to visit a bunch of very local shops.

Afterwards, we got sammiches at Geoff's, and then strolled slowly back home, sitting sometimes to enjoy the sunshine and snuggling each other a bit. It is so good to get to hold hands with a pretty partner while you walk through the spring weather! It was also lovely to get to see lots of murals and interesting graffiti, and other nice bits of the city. I'm slightly regretting not having brought my camera!

We had a very lazy afternoon, to make up for the fact that we got up at like 7:30am on a weekend in order to make it to the hunt on time. Lots of lying in bed with the window open, enjoying the breeze and snuggling and napping. Eventually we woke up enough to have snacks, which turned into dinner when we actually looked at the clock.

Now I've settled in to write words and hang out online, and Tuesday is checking in on ker local puzzle-hunt team as they do a different big puzzle-hunt (which ke apparently did last weekend). Tomorrow I think we have no plans at all, which probably means playing rock band and watching telly and maybe going on another good walk outside. On Monday I have to return to Boston, which turns out to probably be the worst timing known to man (I have been so good about not traveling anywhere on marathon Monday for so many years...) and then on Tues I take a bus to BurlingtonVT for a few days to wander around a different city with a different partner. Then back to Massachusetts for NEFFA and back home somehow on Sunday. No sleep at all, just straight into work again.

Still, I am glad to have some vacation time, and doubly glad that at least some of that time is being wrapped in sunshine and spring breezes.

~Sor
MOOP!

celli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

cofax7

Hey folks!

Still alive, still employed! Booyah.

Not loving the job right now: it's never boring, but I had never intended to be a manager of people, and it's really quite stressful. Plus, you know, ::waves vaguely:: the omnishambles of everything is not helping.

But I did take the Tornado out for a 7-mile hike this morning, and she behaved quite well, and we just did some agility practice, and she got six weave poles in a row! Five times! So great. (If you have never seen dog agility, it looks like this, although that's one of the top dogs in the UK, and the Tornado is just beginning her agility journey.)

I call her the Tornado because she is Very. High. Energy. (And tends to knock things over.) I fear she will be one of the dogs barking all the way through the agility course.

Anyway, I'm planning some vacation time this summer, although it feels a little weird to be planning an international trip at this time. I plan to do some judicious app-deletion before coming back through Customs, because that's the world we live in right now.

Currently very excited about both Andor and Murderbot! I've already gotten a tiny bit spoiled for Andor, so I think I will have to lock down my browsing for the next few days. I understand the next Star Wars animated show (after Underworld) is also going to be about Darth Maul, and I'm kind of dubious, but maybe they can do something interesting with it. Myself, I would rather have learned more about Omega's adventures in the Rebellion.

I'm halfway through this month's book for book club, but it's heavy going: Therese Raquin, by Zola. I have liked Zola: he's very grounded, very vivid. Not at all romantic. But these characters are really very unlikeable. I may end up skimming a lot to finish by Tuesday.

***

I feel like I'm running out of plotty time-travel fixit fics in which determined heroes (and heroines) go back in time and prevent the errors of their forebearers. I suspect I have not found the right tags on AO3...

In other news, I am listening to Mind the Tags, a charming podcast about fandom, specifically fic-writing fandom. And although the hosts are quite nice, they're so young, and I found myself talking back to them as they fumbled their way through a discussion of the early days of alt.tv.x-files.creative. They tried to talk about show-specific archives and auto-archiving and never even mentioned Ephemeral and Gossamer! There are plenty of us fandom Olds still around!

(Although, how cool is it that Gossamer is still up? WTF.)

Still, it's a very friendly and upbeat podcast full of enthusiasm for fandom and fannish institutions, so I encourage y'all to give it a try if that's the sort of thing you enjoy. I found them because one of the hosts got interviewed by Anne Helen Peterson on her Culture Study podcast, which is also great.

In other other news, I lined up a group of local pals to go see our local minor league baseball team next month! So that will be fun! I like minor-league baseball because it's cheap and low-stakes and you can sit outside and drink beer and eat corn dogs and it doesn't really matter except you're there with a crowd and it's just fun. And all the seats are good.

firecat

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/judge-blocks-passport-ban-citing

There’s lots to like in this temporary ruling, but the bit that makes my geeky soul sing is where the judge bases her ruling in part on the ban violating the Paperwork Reduction Act.

sovay

I may be toast at the end of this week, but I would not trade the gorgeous double feature of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) with which

rushthatspeaks and I wound it up. Late to the party, I saw Hoosiers (1986) for the equally first time last month and Dennis Hopper at the top of his game really could do anything. We were passing Porter Square afterward when we saw a loose collection of action along the sidewalk that turned out to be a troop of redcoats marching down Massachusetts Avenue, presumably on their way to fight Lexington. Thanks to the street we lived on in my childhood, my very favorite iteration of Paul Revere's ride was the year in which, instead of clattering under the window shouting per usual, he came in a truck and explained his horse had broken down. No kings.

Current Music: Lana Del Rey, "Video Games"

torachan

1. Nintendo announced that preorders for the Switch 2 will start on 4/24 and the price will stay the same. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to get one.

2. I had ordered some jeans from Target the other day but have to return them because they don't fit (they discontinued the style of jeans I have been wearing these past few years so now I have to try to find an equivalent), so we were planning to go to Target to return them today, and then last night we watched a video about the new pickle menu items at Popeye's, and there is no Popeye's conveniently nearby but there are two near Targets on the other side of town. So we decided to go to one of those Targets and then get lunch at Popeye's. Sadly they seem to be already out of the fried pickle chips, but Carla did get their pickle brined wings and a pickle lemonade. I just got regular chicken tenders, but they were really delicious. I wish we had a Popeye's or even KFC nearby but the only fast food chicken near us is Chick-fil-A. :( Anyway! Returned the pants, stocked up on cat food, and had a nice lunch. Oh, and Popeye's also right now has strawberries and cream biscuits, which are very tasty.

3. Chloe was being so tolerant of Jasper being near her, and Jasper was being a good boy and not pestering.

sorcyress

(I began this entry a week ago, which is why it implies today is Wednesday. Obviously it is not)

Tonight is a very special Wednesday Books, both because it's actually on a Wednesday, and because it is from babysitting and reading a great number of books to a very wee child! So here, have some board books and other children's books reviews, in roughly the order that the one particular wee child I look after picked them off the shelf:

Animals in the Snow: This was a children's nonfiction book! At this point removed, I can't remember if it rhymed or not, but it did have very beautiful illustrations and lots of keen information about various forms of animals.I especially liked the two page spread that looked identical to the land behind St. Grandma's house, and the fat-positivity about the woodchuck being able to live off their stored energy.

Raven's Ribbons: A sweet little two-spirit tale, with a couple excellent repetitions, both of which I caught The Toddler quoting to herself. Stomp stomp shuffle shuffle!

Miss Leoparda: This is a charmingly illustrated tale about how much cars suck, and I am absolutely here for it. More pro-transit children's books, hell yes! Although it occurs to me, that really, children are already inherently pro-transit, what kiddo doesn't love a bus? (especially whose wheels go round and round)

Bears in Pairs: This does indeed have the bears paired up! The best part is the strong variety in the illustrations as to what the bears specifically look like.

Touch and Feel: Animals: Do I include books with no literary merit? The point of this book was to feel different textures, and I couldn't even really find an author, possibly because no one was willing to own up to "the koala's fur is soft. the lizard's skin is bumpy" style prose.

The Number Devil: We read one chapter of this, which was _delightful_ as I knew it would be. It's one of my favourite books, and it's impressive that the kiddo was chill to listen through the entire chapter because while it's illustrated, it's really not a classic children's book, it's a chapter book if ever I saw one. I was very happy to revisit this one, it's been a while and I should finish reading the rest to myself sometime soon.
The Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes: I believe I have already reviewed this one. On a second re-read, it's...fine? I like that Toddler identified it with the word "Humbert", referring to the hamster owned by our protagonist.

Corduroy: Someone (EveZed, maybe?) was extolling the virtues of this one recently, and saying that they think every child should have a copy because of how nicely it is a found family/everyone belongs with someone who will love them as they are. It is a very sweet book, without being at all saccharine, and reads out loud extremely nicely.

Goodnight Moon: Another one that is classic for a reason! I really like that the cadence isn't quite as poetically strict while still being extremely good to read.

Mommy Hugs: I remember nothing about this at this point, but it is lots of hugging animals, so that's quite charming?

Pajama Time: Another Boynton, one I'm a little less familiar with, but the rhythm was so good that I actually wound up singing it starting halfway through. She is such a treasure!

The ABCs of Contra Dancing: I own a copy of this as well! It rhymes and the scansion is good! It's a very sweet little board book that does an extremely good job of fitting into its very specific niche.

Hop on Pop: Ah, the first of several Seuss! I don't think I had realized/remembered how late into the book the actual titular hopping occurs, but I also was unsure if the board book version was slightly abridged or rewritten.

The Foot Book: Not Seuss's finest work, but you do get to say feet and foot a lot, which are very good readaloud words.

Ten on a Twig: This was a cute batch of birds, but felt mostly designed around its gimmick (pages of changing length, with the twig crossing over them.

If Animals Kissed Like We Kissed Goodnight: This is the one that's still in my head the next day, and you know what? _that_ is a mark of a well cadenced board book. I had read this one nine years ago to the RBeast, quite a few times I believe, but it holds up pretty nicely to endless rereads.

The Going to Bed Book: More Boynton, and I think one of my unexpected faves? It's not one of the ones I can quote or nearly, but I think I particularly like "when the moon begins to rise, the animals all exercise" and "with some on top and some beneath they brush and brush and brush their teeth". Boynton is just a _really good writer_, okay?

That's Not My Kangaroo: You can't judge this particular line of books on their literary merit, because they have basically none --they're stim toys for babies, with the added bonus of some teaching of physical descriptors. As a stim toy, this one was _okay_. I felt there was a little too much repetition in textures, although the nose-was-too-rough was a particularly good feeling piece of velcro.

There's a Wocket in my Pocket: More Seuss. Another one of his less great works, although it does feel extremely quintessentially Seussian with all its creatures. As a mature adult, I did giggle a bit at the bofa on the sofa.

Max's New Suit: Rosemary Wells is also just really damn good. I love Max and Ruby stories, and associate them very strongly with being at St Grandma's house, so I feel like she must've had several. This one is a board book rather than a picture book, so it's very short, but I still quite liked it!

All the Hippos Go Berserk: Everything Sandra Boynton writes is absolute gold. This is no exception, although as a more refined reader, I can't help but notice that the six hippos are not actually shown leaving, just distraught as the seven hippos head out. But serious bonus points for a counting book that goes ahead and acknowledges that sum of all the numbers we've just counted to.

Moo Baa La La La: Both my mother and I have this one memorized, so it's a cute party trick where you can get one of us to start reciting it, and the other will join in, either chorusing or swapping lines back and forth. Anyways, this might be the single best board book ever written. I am not tired of it yet, and I have read it way more times than most people.

Meena's Saturday: this one feels culturally complicated to write about, because on the one hand it is abhorrently "oh yeah, the boys in the fam all get to chill out while us woman and girls have to constantly work" but on the other hand, it is very clearly about a group of people which I do not belong to, and *also* it feels very much like it does not approve of the status quo and is not willing to accept "boys just get privileges over girls for no good reason". The descriptions of food were delectable though.

The Magic School Bus Learns About Electricity: This was the last book before bedtime, very cleverly chosen as a pretty long one. I only read the core text and would've liked to read all the side notes (which contain puns and tons of extra information). Anyways, the crew goes through a power plant. Having read only the core story, I gotta say MSB is a little weak without any of the extra zjujing you get from the interstitials or the animations. Which is fine, it's got those things under ordinary circumstances!

Whew!

I should write a proper books as well, since I've been reading a fair clip, but that is probably going to wind up as a separate post. Part of me feels like maybe this kind of thing shouldn't count for my medialog, but no, fuck that, books are books. This is part of why I don't track "oh I read a hundred books this year" sorts of things though, because okay, yes, I did read 23 books this evening, but the average word count was probably somewhere in the low hundreds.

I do kinda wish it were acceptable as an adult to go sit in the children's section of a library more often and work through the shelves. I completely understand why I, an un-child-accompanied adult should not be allowed to do this, but I still wish it were occasionally an option. Sometimes you want to explore cadence and rhyme without worrying overmuch about plot!

~Sor
MOOP!

soc_puppet

If anyone would like me to make a tutorial about something Dreamwidth related, or how it compares to Tumblr, I've got request posts up on Newcomers and The Great Tumblr Purge. Also on Dreamwidth Sharing on Tumblr. Leave a comment at one of those places or direct message me, and I'll see what I can do!

Current planned tutorials include cut tags, icons in general, and image uploading/sharing on Dreamwidth.

Current Mood: tired

Profile

sasha_feather

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Page Summary

mific - Apres le deluge, moi
mific - Tell it, Barack
torachan - Daily Happiness
sorcyress - Wednesday Sundays
mecurtin - Two Purrcys; housework
torachan - 2025 Disneyland Trip #28 (4/20/25)
torachan - Weekly Reading
jesse_the_k - boost: Declaration of Interdependence & 2 AO3 Resources
celli - Poetry Month 2025 day 20: De laudibus sanctae crucis by Rabanus Maurus
torachan - Daily Happiness
torachan - 2025 Disneyland Trip #23 (4/5/25) Tokyo DisneySea (Part 1)
sovay - Tomorrow some new building will scrape the sky
sorcyress - Scavenger Hunt!
celli - Poetry Month 2025 day 19: Sonnet 104 by William Shakespeare
cofax7 - Happy Saturday
firecat - Judge rules against anti-trans passport ban
sovay - I heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?
torachan - Daily Happiness
sorcyress - Books for children!
soc_puppet - Now taking tutorial requests

Style Credit

Style: Green for Basic Boxes by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 01:16 pm

Violate the dress code

Reading

Apres le deluge, moi

Tell it, Barack

Daily Happiness

Wednesday Sundays

Two Purrcys; housework

2025 Disneyland Trip #28 (4/20/25)

Weekly Reading

boost: Declaration of Interdependence & 2 AO3 Resources

Poetry Month 2025 day 20: De laudibus sanctae crucis by Rabanus Maurus

Daily Happiness

2025 Disneyland Trip #23 (4/5/25) Tokyo DisneySea (Part 1)

Tomorrow some new building will scrape the sky

Scavenger Hunt!

Poetry Month 2025 day 19: Sonnet 104 by William Shakespeare

Happy Saturday

Judge rules against anti-trans passport ban

I heard that you like the bad girls, honey, is that true?

Daily Happiness

Books for children!

Now taking tutorial requests

Profile

April 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags