iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

About to take a trip around the world thanks to an afternoon’s browse at a Denver Public Library. 📚💙 #booksky

Five books from an afternoon’s browse at the library:
Three Novels by Yuri Herrera (Mexico)
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali (Turkey)
The Island by Antigone Kefala (Romania, refugee camps in Greece, New Zealand, Australia)
The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata (Japan)
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Ireland)

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Finally I just watched the 1995 production; it’s my ultimate comfort show. Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth forever! 🥰Although I am executed to see the newest version—I’ll follow Olivia Colman pretty much anywhere.

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I also listened to the new Audible performance, as I’m using up the last of those credits. At 4.5 hours, it’s more like a radio show than a reading, with excellent performances and top-notch production. The language has been modernized though; not my favorite but very accessible for new audiences.

I immersed myself in the Pride and Prejudice world for a bit. This annotated edition is fantastic: if you like history, certainly, but it explains cultural/social/class nuances that reveal so much of Austen’s depth. Left page is text, right page is annotations and illustrations. Excellent. 💙📚🖋️

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Tell me your pips is back

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Ha and I’m over here thinking why didn’t I read these earlier! And when can I read them again? And what else am I missing?? What a problem to have 💙

Library appreciation post! Probably half this pile is from the Staff Recommendations shelf. I never leave without checking as they always have something on my list, or by an author I love, or just something irresistible (hence the large pile). So I gotta focus: book, blanket, cat. 💙📚🖋️

A stack of a dozen library books on a table being snuggled by a tuxedo cat named Poppy.

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I totally agree! And that got me running to see if it’s on Edmonton’s list (it’s not)

It is. Should be required reading and I’m from NS and I didn’t even know

Time War and Chronicle of a Death: I want to reread immediately. Evenings and Weekends didn’t live up to the hype for me. There were some lovely moments but if they’d all just talk! The Berry Pickers: I wanted to go much deeper. But then I read some truly great books so the good ones paled a bit.

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August reads. Standouts: First Virginia Woolf! First modernist novel. I want a whole class on this. Foster and The Summer Book: beautiful adult/child relationships. I want to read everything the above ever wrote. (Well not all the Moomins.) Three graphic novels, all heavy hitters… 🧵 💙📚🖋️

- This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar 🇨🇦
- The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters 🇨🇦
- The Summer Book by Tove Jansson 🇫🇮
- Foster by Claire Keegan 🇮🇪
- Ducks by Kate Beaton 🇨🇦
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Fun House by Alison Bechdel (of the Bechdel test! Graphic novel)
- The Apartment in Bab El-Louk by Donia Maher with illustrators Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady 🇪🇬
- Evenings & Weekends by Oisin McKenna 🇮🇪

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It’s on my list too. The final scene is perfect.

Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

I like Stanley Tucci. I like the way he tells a story. I like his voice. I like how he writes scrips for his memories. He mentions his 1996 movie Big Night, so I watched it. Ebert said “It is about food not as a subject but as a language…by which one can speak to gods”. Good stuff. 💙📚🖋️ #booksky

The cover for the audiobook Taste by Stanley Tucci. A great one to listen to, although it contains recipes that I want to make and the book version probably has pictures. All well; worth it for how the man reads a story.

A scene from Big Night, starring Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub (so good), with Marc Anthony on the right in a supporting role. They’re working away in a small restaurant kitchen full of food. The last five minutes of this movie are PERFECT (not pictured).

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Creepy and brilliant: a story of obsession and “immortality” that’s maybe just desire stuck on repeat. There were a couple of chilling moments that felt very Stephen King (hell, the whole premise does). And it’s only 100 pages. #booksky 💙📚🖋️

The cover of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares lies in a wooden table. On the cover is a photo of the silent film star Louise Brooks.

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Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Thank you! I wish I could sit in the back of your class! 💙

Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Daaaamn. I NEED to read this again. My daughter read it in high school. Such a fantastic choice! 💙 And sounds like a lot of fun—I wish I had read it then (is that weird?) and we could have had some interesting discussions.

Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

…but about discovering how an entire community is complicit. The deeper you go, the more widely the responsibility spreads. I wish I had read the book with my handy dandy notebook at hand, making little notes about the complicit. I’ll pick up a paper copy and read this again, for sure.

Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Well damn. I listened to this book and I’m sorry I did; my brain just isn’t set up to listen this well. Actually I’m not sure there is a « this sort of book », is there? It’s a murder mystery that isn’t a mystery: the book is not at all about discovering who committed the crime… 🧵 #booksky 📚💙🖋️

The audio version of Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. I think the cover has an exposed human heart, but I’m not totally sure. 😬

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Wild—I just spontaneously picked up a copy of this one. Had heard of it but know virtually nothing

Also Darf is a tiny publisher in London that focuses on books from the Middle East and North Africa. I discovered them while doing The StoryGraph Reads the World Challenge 🌍 #20indiebookchallenge

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You, then, are living in an apartment in the busy center of the city, but are a recluse, and a grumpy one at that. Can’t even bond with cats, but there is a parrot who’s all right. Make sure you read the dedication 💀

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I’m not sure what I just read, tbh, but I’m glad I read it. Rear Window in reverse, kinda? It’s described as a noir poem, and it’s very short—one sitting. There are two different illustrators, which is put to brilliant use. Most is written in second person. 🧵 💙📚🖋️

The book The Apartment in Bab El-Louk by Donia Maher. There are two illustrators: Ganzeer and Ahmad Nady. The book cover is entirely filled with the illustration of the front doors to an apartment building. Old wooden French doors, turquoise, with panels of diamond-shaped glass topped with circles like suns.

This book is not in comic book style; some pages are regular paragraphs will illustrations while on this page, the words take the shape of a cat. The image shows the cat page in front of my own pernicious cat, who is loafed at the end of a bed.

Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Ha I only recently discovered myself, when @forgotten-niceties.bsky.social mentioned on one of my posts that Kate Beaton is basically one of the internet’s greatest gifts (and thank you kaori!). Hurry for spreading such wonderful stuff! 😍

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How did I not know about Hark! A Vagrant? I’m even from Nova Scotia, dammit. This one in particular is in the middle of a personal Venn diagram: my favorite literature meets my favorite bit of history 💙 #anneofgreengables #anneofcleves #puffedsleeves

harkavagrant.com

Hark, a vagrant: 348

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I don’t know how I lived this long without knowing about Hark! A Vagrant. But the wonderful bit is it’s all in front of me 💙

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Beaton takes great efforts to try to present a fair and balanced view of the complex issues: environmental of course, but also who that impacts (all of us, eventually, but First Nations first), the unnaturally male social order, the isolation, the ugliness of the work, and what all that does to us.

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A dip into the memoir Ducks by Kate Beaton turned into an evening of nothing else—read in one sitting. My goodness this is powerful. Graphic novels, right? A young woman from Nova Scotia, a recent university graduate, needs work. She heads to the oil sands of Northern Alberta. 🧵 #booksky 💙📚🖋️

The book Ducks by Kate Beaton sits on a wooden table. This is a graphic novel, and the cover shows a young woman standing on the stairs up to a gigantic work vehicle; the kind with tires taller than a person. The landscape is dire: there is a cliff in the background that looks like it was bitten out of the earth.

Good pay comes with a high price. The book addresses the pain of having to leave home (in her case, Nova Scotia) to find good work, but also there are families torn by 12-on, 2-off work schedules where woman must raise children alone (but with good pay).

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Kat @kat-m.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

First of all, beautiful knitted items you’ve got there. Especially love the folded hem on that hat. 💙 And ah yes I suppose it is! I’ve done what you’re describing, and it makes a lovely hem. This stepping down with small needles closest to the turn is new to me though—hope it does keep it tidy.

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Still knitting away on The Super Basic Tee by ohwhataknit Interesting way to approach a hemmed finish: the pattern has you step down needle size as you approach the turning row, and the step the sizes back up again. Can you see it? This is intended to reduce flaring. Has anyone tried it? 🧶

A close up of a segment of knitting, still on the needles. Off-white yarn (knitting for olive merino) all in stockinette save one row of purls. That’s the turning row that will be the bottom of them hem. On either side of the purl row, for about eight rows, the stitches are smaller than the main body of the sweater.

I thought I had all the needles I’d even need, but this project had me back in the store for 2.00mm and 2.5mm. 😳

Absolutely—thank you! I mean come on: “That he had a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon has already been said.” 😁

But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water. 💀

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Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high…Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue—

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My first Virginia Woolf and daaamn I don’t know when I last enjoyed swooning over sentences this much. It’s a library copy or I would be highlighting the hell out of it. Here’s one bit: No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes… #booksky 💙📚🖋️

The book Orlando by Virginia Woolf lies on a wooden table. This copy is from the Denver Public Library and has a beautiful cover: it’s a very close up image of painted pink water lilies.

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The movie switches between Gaelic and English so most of us will need subtitles.

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I’m still haunted by the lovely Foster by Claire Keegan, so I gave the film a go; The Quiet Girl captured the book’s quiet, child-focused spirit. I was hoping for a less ambiguous ending, but it actually had me thinking the opposite to the book, so I’ll go on thinking what I want. 😁 #booksky 💙📚🖋️

The book Foster by Claire Keegan, which shows a bright white welcoming farmhouse nestled into a hillside by the sea.

The main character, a young girl who goes unnamed in the book. This shot is from early in the film: she’s not used to much tenderness or care.

The child arrives at the home of distant relatives she does not know.

The child walking with Mr Kinsella, after they’ve spent most of the summer together and have forged a lovely relationship.

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Same same. I held my breath there at the end as it took my whole brain. I got the audiobook so I’ll start a listen shortly.

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Agreed. I want to read everything she’s written.

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“I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.” Such simple language with quiet complexities: Foster delivers such emotional weight in the pauses and spaces! Best read in one sitting, so you stay fully immersed in the little narrator’s transformation. 💙📚🖋️

Oh my: this little book is close to perfection. From the jacket: “A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. [There] she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom.” 🧵

A hardcover copy from Denver Public Library of Foster, by Claire Keegan. The cover is a landscape almost all in blue, like in nightfall, of a hill by the sea; a welcoming white farmhouse sits ahead.

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Daaaamn. And now that you mention it, the whole scenario (19 & 50s/married) seems to run toward infuriating. Hmmm…maybe I’ll push this one down the list a bit—I’m still riding high from Foster. Thank you!

Finished. So much in so few simple words—complete perfection. I love it more than Small Things, I think. Did you know there’s a film? Called The Quiet Girl? It has good reviews so I might give it a go. Although I can’t imagine it would improve on the book, honestly.

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😍 It sounds so perfectly lovely—thank you!

Orlando for joy? I’ll do that one then. I knew I’d need to shore up a bit for The Vegetarian but I’ll pack some delight first.

Ooo excellent and thank you! A bit of dark and funny would be a nice change up. Added both to the TBR—appreciate this so much!

Adore that book and have started picking up used copies when I see them to gift to friends. I really should read everything by her.

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Well I was initially thinking one from the pile but I’m open to suggestions 😁 Typically read classic and modern lit—a lot of heavy books lately and no small dose of dystopia so something hopeful wouldn’t be unwelcome.

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