#lbls

But about Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's memoir--it's perfect, it's divine, and my only gripe is that it's too short at 255 pages. Kaishian, a mycologist, talks about her struggles to fit in as queer, neurodivergent child with unique special interests and how she found refuge in the swamps and forests near her home. (My ignorance is gonna show here, because I had no idea there were swamps in New York until I read this book). Growing up and immersing herself in the sciences, she learned about the queerness of many creatures (fungi included), and how scientific research has traditionally held very hetero- and cisnormative views that negatively affected outcomes and contrasts glaringly with overwhelming evidence of queerness in nature. I got to learn about sit spots--a form of meditation that seems much more accessible in my view than many others because I'm lousy at relaxing. Loved the sections about cicadas and their uncanny understanding of time, empathetic crows, and magnetized eels. Also all of the sociological and ecological revelations...it really is quite a lot from such a short read. It's also not overly scientific even though it is science-based, so that was easy enough for me to stomach with my humanities background.

I might as well just have a separate category for "books I needed as a child but they came 30ish years too late"; Ciera Burch's Olivia Gray Will Not Fade Away would make the top 10 list. Also pictured is my Eko Core 500, whose app asked to run software updates when I paired it with the instrument this afternoon, so it turns out that's a thing. (And not something any of my other stethoscopes ask of me, lol). So, Olivia has just started the seventh grade, and much of the time, she feels herself disappearing, both literally and figuratively, in this middle-grade speculative novel. Her brother has all but abandoned her to hang out with his first boyfriend, and her friends are all carrying on about their crushes--something that makes no sense at all to Olivia. She feels alienated from her friend group, and struggles to relate to what they want to talk about. Thankfully, the new school librarian, Amelia, sees Olivia. She gives her a book about asexuality and aromanticism to read, but reading it only leads to frustration for Olivia, who would rather just fit in with her friends than embrace an aberrant identity. Burch writes with tenderness and authenticity that brought me right back to middle school after all these years, because she really understands how fragile friendships are during that time. The novel has fantastical elements, but it's definitely grounded enough that it won't lose a reader who prefers realistic fiction.

Covid lockdown is over, it's time for fourteen-year-old A to go back to school, and he's eager to explain to his parents and everyone he knows that he's always been a boy in Kyle Lukoff's inspirational fantasy, A World Worth Saving (shown here with MDF's starry night capridium titanium scope). Despite the fact that his parents are self-professed progressive liberals, they don't take it so well when he comes out to them. When the rabbi at their synagogue is accepting and wants to celebrate A's identity, his parents decide it's time to stop attending services, and they find a different sort of religious congregation in a group called SOSAD (Save our Sons and Daughters). What they don't realize is that this support group intent on "curing" trans children is actually run by a demon who feeds off the angst, sorrow, and anguish of the families attending the meetings. A, along with other kids he meets at SOSAD meetings, wind up on an unlikely adventure that is both fantastical and unfortunately realistic in our current climate, but it's hopeful. In my view, it's dark for a middle-grade novel, but this is very much the world adults have created for trans youth, so they're living it already.

50! After the last few reads, I needed something relatively light. With Jake Maia Arlow's coming of age + a bit of romance novel, Leaving the Station is my Ultrascope, which is definitely more about aesthetics than function, ngl. I also have a subpar teaching scope from the same company, but if you're in the market for one of those, I'd recommend getting a Littmann teaching scope used instead. The glitter is super cute but the sound is meh, especially now that I've heard better. But about the book! It's advertised as a romance novel, but strictly, it's not one. It has the vibe of a road trip book, but it's set mostly on a cross-country train ride. There are also flashbacks to the protagonist, Zoe's first semester of college, where she becomes enamored with botany and a guy she meets, but not so much the college experience. The long train trip is her way of escaping, though she's headed back home to Seattle to face her parents, who were dead set on her becoming a doctor. There, she meets Oakley, who is also trying to figure herself out and dreads facing her own family in rural Washington. Just really great lesbian and nonbinary rep, with some discussion of religious trauma and internalized transphobia, but still a light and fun read.

Sometimes I pretend I'm artsy, and that my old Galaxy phone has a respectable camera. I wanted to show what a dark, despairing book Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland is at times, but also hopeful despite its bleakness. With the book is a favorite scope, MDF's Procardial Titanium cardiology scope in starry night/capridium. This one was a slow burn for me. It opens with Vern, a pregnant teenager who has escaped the cult that raised her, fleeing an amoral pursuer who will do whatever it takes to flush her out. When nothing immediately happened in what felt like the start of a depressing AF dystopian novel, I found myself reading it all too slowly. But then Vern (and the twins she gives birth to) make it to civilization. I had no idea what I was in for--science fiction, fantasy, history, politics, body horror. I was far too invested to get cute about reading horror, finishing over two hundred pages in an evening because I needed to know the ending. Oh, and if you love fungi like I do, trust me, you need to read this one.

The title refers to the act of concealing your identity in order to fit in, blending into the woodwork, essentially. It's written from the POV of two characters who are well-acquainted with hiding--Abigail, a 17-year-old student and the only "out" trans girl in her small town in South Dakota, and Erica, a 35-year-old high school English teacher who hasn't told anyone she's trans. Until she decides to confide in the one other trans person she knows--a student in one of her classes. Erica and Abigail form an unlikely friendship that raises many questions (to a degree, rightfully so) in their staunchly conservative community. I went in prepared to criticize the author for asking a minor to do a ton of emotional labor for a grown woman, but was pleasantly surprised by how their relationship was handled. The book covers a lot of ground--looking at what it means to come out at a young age in a country that wants to deny the existence of trans children, recognizing your identity later in life, and attempting to go "stealth" (pass as cisgender). It's set during the 2016 presidential election, and politics play a central role in the story. But more than anything else, it's a story about "found" family, and yes, it's very sentimental and yes, I did find myself crying about fictional characters, but it's not trite or overdone. It's just right and I'd recommend it to anyone.

I can only go so long without showing off my starry night capridium scope from MDF. 27-year-old Norma is seeing a new therapist for her writer's block and is certain her girlfriend is the cause. It might be because she likes to cook (Norma does not), she has a lot of friends (Norma's an introvert), or because a generic pithy quote on an Instagram post was a sign that they weren't meant to be. Whatever the case, this new therapist needs to have the answers, because Norma has tried every type of therapy under the sun to keep what she calls "oblivion" at bay. Please Stop Trying to Leave Me opens during puzzling and sometimes funny therapy sessions that begin to make much more sense later, as well as enough stream-of-consciousness to place the novel within the "experimental" category. Even if you aren't ordinarily a reader of experimental fiction, though, this book will keep you hanging on. I would place it in the "self-help" category, but not along the lines of the sort of self-help fiction that hits you over the head and makes you resent the writer's condescension (Matt Haig's The Midnight Library immediately comes to mind). This is what I imagine self-help ought to be--a book that allows us to explore humanity's flaws, offers some hope and grace, but recognizes that we're also adults who don't need our hands held and can process the information in our own ways. And it's beautiful--even more beautiful than the cover.

This is my Littmann teaching scope with Nana Visitor's Open a Channel: A Woman's Trek, released just last month. Nana Visitor played Major Kira Nerys, the Bajoran second-in-command on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. For this memoir/investigative journalism piece/coffee table book, Visitor interviewed hundreds of actors, writers, producers, and celebrity fans and offered her own insight into the treatment and portrayal of women in the franchise as well as Hollywood in general in the last sixty years. Nichelle Nichols famously had to be persuaded by none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. to continue her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek series, discouraged by how the writers had limited her character. Thankfully, she stayed on, as countless women would be inspired by her performance. This fell short of being a perfect read for me because there were some actors I really wanted to hear from--Michelle Yeoh, Dawnn Lewis, and Jennifer Lien, to name a few, but Visitor was unable to interview them and had to rely on secondary sources. In the case of Jennifer Lien, her press appearances happened so seldom that Visitor could really only talk about her character from Voyager, Kes. A warning: there is a section in which Visitor discusses, in graphic detail, the incident when she was kidnapped and raped when leaving the set. It leads to a discussion of what it means to be a woman in a man's world and I understood why she included it, but it was a difficult read to say the least. Star Trek fans who want to read the book but would rather be spared reading about violence might want to skip the section about Visitor/Kira Nerys.