Suggestion Saturday: April 19, 2014

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Domestic Work, 1937. Feministing continues to impress me with their daily poems in honour of National Poetry Month. The imagery in this one is excellent.

Valeria Lukyanova, the Human Barbie Doll. Halfway through this article I paused and wondered what the hell I was reading. I’m still not 100% sure, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into the life of a woman I’d never heard of before.

Instruments from Inside via morguefile_site. This is so cool. It reminds me of a dim memory I have from early childhood about my parents building a very strange instrument. It had strings like a guitar, but it was smaller and boxier than that instrument. Maybe it was a dream, but I remember being fascinated by all of the tiny pieces they fit together.

Bunnies, It Must Be Bunnies. Now this is my kind of Easter story!

Why Some Relationships Create Energy for Introverts and Other Relationships Are Draining via losapala. My lists of what I find energizing and draining in a relationship are a little different, and I don’t entirely buy into the Meyers-Briggs theory because it doesn’t seem to take mental health into account.  Two people can share the same label yet appear to have little in common on the surface based on how high or low functioning they are emotionally. There is still a lot of truth to this essay, though.

From Socially Awkward Isn’t An Excuse:

Here’s the thing about the socially awkward: they don’t want to trip over people’s boundaries. You can almost always track the exact moment they realize that they’ve done something wrong by the way they desperately try to backtrack, apologize and generally try to reassure the other person that they didn’t mean to and they’re so embarrassed and are kind of freaking out and, and, and…

You know what you don’t see? You don’t see them justifying their behavior. Or turning it around and making it about the person whose boundaries they just blew past.


I recently finished Beltamar’s War, an epic fantasy novel written by my friend, C.G. Ayling.

It would be dishonest for me not  to mention that the first few chapters were a little difficult to get through due to the number of characters it introduces and how many unfamiliar terms are thrown around in them. In the first few scenes the reader is thrown into a society that is quite different from anything you’d find on earth in 2014. There are few if any explanations of what certain words mean or why it’s so shocking for character X to break social convention Y.

The glossary at the end helps to explain many of these things without giving away spoilers. Other pieces of the puzzle snapped together for me as I kept reading, and once this happened I became completely engrossed in the people and places that exist in this book. The world-building is astounding.  My initial struggle to understand why certain things mattered so much to the main characters was rewarded many times over.

This isn’t something that should be skimmed. If you’re curious about this story, I highly recommend taking your time to savour each chapter. It’s well-worth the wait.

What have you been reading?

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0 Responses to Suggestion Saturday: April 19, 2014

  1. Dear Lydia,
    Thank you for your honesty, candor, and generosity. Three attributes I hold in high esteem, and which you so readily display. For me, your review hit everything about Beltamar’s War square on. Malmaxa is a complex world filled with complex characters and equally complex customs. I am grateful you saw it through, that you are so generous in your praise, and most of all that you didn’t offer any spoilers for the story. I will be pointing others to this review, and I hope you keep it up to facilitate that.
    We all lead such insular lives, sadly this phenomenon seems pervasive throughout the world. A major downside of insularity, is that we find it hard to comprehend that other people have valid beliefs, customs, religions, languages, and cultures that we just don’t understand. Too often we never attempt to comprehend them, and the result is a world of diversity unexplored. Though Malmaxa plays out as a Fantasy novel, I thank you for trying to understand a culture utterly foreign to your own, and I sincerely hope your efforts were rewarded.
    I do have a single question for you, “Do you want to continue reading this tale?”.
    Charles

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