Over on Reading In Bed, Laura makes some good points about book reviews, and I took away from it that maybe don’t review something unless you have something new, different, or unique to add to the conversation. But, equally, if I stop reviewing books, Netgalley will stop giving me free books, so I’m in a bit of a quandary because I have nothing new, different, or unique to say about Herding Cats except that I love it, and that Sarah Andersen and I are secret, over-thinking, heavy period, anxiety-ridden, introverted best friends (secret because I know we are best friends, but she doesn’t yet, because being introverted and living far away from her, there has been no chance for us to meet and me to stare creepily at her rather than approaching her and saying hey I’m meghan and I love you so much and be my friend okay?).

My nine year old, after also reading Herding Cats: You and this person are exactly the same mom!

See. See! SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen went on sale March 27, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s. So. Beautiful.

The epub.

I am so used to getting epubs that aren’t final versions or are final versions and just suck, with weird margins and fonts, and low-res images I can’t make head nor tails of. Ramadan by Ausma Zehanat Khan is just so beautiful and colourful and laid out in such a way that what I’m focusing on is the fact that someone, somewhere (I guess, to be specific, someone(s) at Orca Publishing) knows how to make beautiful epubs.

So beautiful.

Content: A good introduction to Ramadan for kids, probably up to early high school. There are recipes (lassi, yay!) and information, but it’s so beautiful it could have just been lorem ipsum text in parts because the pictures and layout, be still my graphic-design beating heart. It would be good for a classroom discussion, maybe taking the pressure off any Muslims to feel like they have to be ambassadors/educators to everyone else (I remember a classmate fasting for Ramadan for the first time growing weary of having to explain again and again and again).

But the beauty. It’s so beautiful the book. It’s worth it for the beauty alone.

Ramadan by Ausma Zehanat Khan went on sale March 27, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

No more book length plot like the last Phoebe and her unicorn book I read 🙁 The two of you who regularly read my reviews know what a sucker I am for plot. Man, I love plot. Cute little few pages story-lines are all right, but plot: plot is like pancakes, I could eat it all day.

So it’s cute. Phoebe and Marigold get up to this-and-that. Dakota is snotty as ever. I think there’s a Hallowe’en party? See — without a nice, rigid, plot-scaffolding, I’ve already forgotten most of what I read. Sigh. But Tesfa still likes these books, so that’s all that matters, and the next time Netgalley has one to review, you can bet I’ll be hitting that request button straight away.

Unicorn of Many Hats by Dana Simpson went on sale March 20, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Once upon a time I read a book about the Czech Republic where someone (the author? the editor?) translated some of the Czech words but none of the German ones, which annoyed me because I took Russian in university, not German, and could often suss out the Slavic-based Czech on my own, whereas the German remained incomprehensible to me. Similarly (sort-of, maybe — okay it’s a bit of stretch), I keep putting the ‘z’ in Urzidil in odd places where I think it should be because I guess even the more Slavic parts of Czech culture ended up being just as incomprehensible to me as the German words in another book that is in no way related to this one, The Last Bell, that I’m supposed to be reviewing.

So the whole thing feels like a dream. I read the stories in bed, before sleeping, so maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s because there’s a story about a talking painting and another about a girl who can touch nature. There’s also a story about villagers on either side of a pond fighting about cheesecakes and venison. There are bank clerks and forest wardens and countries (Czechoslovakia) that no longer exist and none of it seems real because it isn’t real anymore, after Nazis and Soviets and globalization destroyed it all. What was that Zweig book I read awhile ago: Messages from a Lost World? They gave the title to the wrong book, s’all I’m saying.

Maybe I should go to Prague, other parts of Bohemia. Maybe then this will all seem real. Well, not the talking stolen portrait part I hope.

The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil went on sale April 25, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a ghost story and a mystery and some stuff about mental health and kind of a hodge-podge that gets spooky with an unsatisfying resolution (but at least not, thankfully, it was all a dream or she’s secretly hallucinating, so yay on me for finally not inadvertently selecting via Netgalley such laziness). I just can’t get past how unsatisfying the dénouement was when the set-up — a depressed girl working nights at a medical specimen museum that is haunted by a ghost from when the building was an asylum — was so full of potential and then squandered.

I’m actually angry about it, like personally affronted. It could have been so wonderful. I am rage-filled on the internet!

Archival Quality by Ivy Noelle Weir went on sale March 6, 2018.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(or how I am using Netgalley to slowly accumulate the collected works of Stefan Zweig).

(Also, again I have selected on Netgalley that I would like to connect with the author and Netgalley has done nothing NOTHING! to make this happen and just because Zweig has been dead since 1942, that is no excuse. Netgalley, you put that option to connect to dead people, then I am expecting you to follow through.)

(Also, as per the last time I wrote about Stefan Zweig, I must mention the sheer beauty in futility of his death: likely killing himself in Brazil in 1942, in part as a rebuke, and in part as desperation, against the Nazis. It seems like a gorgeously fictitious way to die.)

Yay! More Zweig (which if you say in a very poor German accent, sounds a lot like swag, which is what getting another Stefan Zweig book to read is like: glorious, unearned, luxurious swag). Five short essays/stories on points in history where fate or people or I don’t really know — the collection starts with Zweig dribbling some Tolstoi spew to elucidate something about history and importance or people, I don’t know. It read like a twelve year old with a thesaurus trying to pad out an essay. I even went back after I read the rest of the book to try and make sense of it and nope. And I was like “Zweig — why are you doing this to me?” But thankfully, the spew is like two pages and then we get right into the meat and reading Zweig is like a blanket on a bed next to a fire and it’s just so easy to slip on in there and read about history that I forgive your Tolstoi-spew Zweig. I still don’t understand it, but I forgive it, because I got to spend yesterday evening reading Zweig in my bed and it was wondrous.

Triumph and Disaster by Stefan Zweig went on sale November 14, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Earlier this week, a kid asked me what Japan was like. Me, having spent less than two weeks in Japan over a decade ago, and so *clearly* an expert, replied “Wacky. Japan is wacky.” And there is a lot of wackiness about Japan, like how I spent my first twenty-four hours there pointing at things and saying “I rolled that up in Katamari” or how things — toilets, restaurants, buttons — just play music at you. But there’s a lot of other stuff about Japan, like the rusty water stains running down the sides of the stucco houses right up next to the shinkansen train tracks, or sitting out on the reclaimed land in Tokyo in April and just how brown and grey and barren everything looks. Spring Garden hits smack between the Cheery Pop Super Love Happy Land of Japan and the just slog of Salarymen and Emptiness and drinking beer depression. Taro is divorced and alone. Nishi moved here because the apartment block is next to a house from a book! Taro has three different ways he can walk from his apartment to the rail station. Nishi stabs herself so she can see a bathroom! They eat octopus and drink beer. They make a friend. The friend moves away. Taro fills his whole apartment with couches! Someone uses the house to film a movie.

And then, bafflingly, the last chapter is told from Taro’s sister’s perspective, so did Taro die or something? I kept expecting the book to end with him falling, literally, off the fence, and dying because why else would we switch from a third person point to a view to a first person point of view from a character that we’ve never met before?

So is he dead? Is this all like the alternative, death-God, interpretation of Totoro? I have no idea.

Thus I will finish and say Spring Garden is kinda like a novel or kinda like a string of incidents listed in chronilogical order which may actually be the definition of a novel, I don’t know. I guess it’s wacky in a non-wacky way, might be the best way to say what it is.

Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki went on sale November 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

So I sat there a while, trying to think of what I was trying to say, because You Can’t Just Kiss Anyone You Want is a bit like a domino run or a chain reaction and then I realized what I wanted to say was You Can’t Just Kiss Anyone You Want is a kind of like If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, but in Communist Poland, wherein if you try to give your classmate a kiss, a whole horrible list of events transpires, but in the end, your classmate writes you a cute note that you send her back because even totalitarian governments can’t stop you from feeling. Awww….

But don’t get too awwww…. Someone gets sexually assaulted. People disappear. No one trusts anyone else. Welcome to your Socialist paradise, comrades.

And, as I almost always feel with graphic novels, it went by so fast that it felt like skimming a deep pond that had so much more to offer beneath the surface.

You Can’t Just Kiss Anyone You Want by Marzena Sowa went on sale April 19, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Books can be weird. I can read Russian Absurd, which are absurd vignettes recovered from Kharms’ notebooks, written in the 1920s and 1930s, pieces as the introduction says that may not have been intended for public consumption, and they don’t seem dated and they don’t seem foreign and they don’t seem like something I should never have heard about until now. True, a lot of old women tend to fall out of windows, but I can picture myself as an old woman tumbling after defenestration, so that seems all right. And the man alternates between looking terrifyingly serious:

to a foppish Pushkin-esque dandy:

to simply terrifying:

He starved to death in 1942. That hurts my heart. And there’s so much out there, so much writing I may never get to know, hidden in notebooks in languages I don’t speak.

The sky is shimmering with lamps
And we are flying like the stars

I am glad your friends saved your notebooks Daniil Kharms. I am glad I got to read from them.

Russian Absurd by Daniil Kharms went on sale February 15, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

ETA: I have, as I always do with deceased authors, checked yes to Netgalley‘s Are you interested in connecting with this author (interviews, events, etc)? They have yet to conduct even one séance for me to talk to the dead.