the dreaded TBR pile

I’ve noticed over the last little while that everyone I know – even the prolific readers – tend to have this horrible looming “to be read” pile of books. Sometimes the pile is real and physical; sometimes it is metaphorical, or is a list of books in their Kindle or other reading device. Sometimes it’s a GoodReads list – whatever.

The interesting thing to me about it is how subject to all the vagaries of anxiety disorder these lists become, and how distressed people get about their inability to make them shorter – often in a “hah hah only serious!!!” faux-joking way.

“How do I get myself to stop adding books to this?!!!” “How do I stop reading fanfic instead?!”

What strikes me about that is how much it seems to turn the whole operation into an obligation. Into a chore. This seems to me, to put it mildly, suboptimal.

You see, if there’s one thing I know for a fact about anxiety, whether of the full-blown clinical sort or even the milder everyday sort that doesn’t really ruin life but still causes difficulty, it’s that the more something turns into an obligation, into a job, into a chore, the more likely it is that you’re going to put it off.

Especially if it’s something that’s supposed to be fun.

Because hilariously at the same time, the same people being drowned by their supposedly-voluntary recreational to-read list often manage to read huge volumes when it’s For Work or For School or For The Book They’re Writing. When it’s actually, wholly and formally a chore, things are fine! When they can actually say “ugh okay I have to read this book”, they can read the book.

But when we’re talking about something that’s supposedly for recreation, the more you make it obligatory, the less fun it’s going to seem and the less motivated you’re going to be to pick it up. As far as I can tell, and I’ve looked at quite a few cases, this is a really common reason for a huge, long To Read list.

Does that describe you? Do you have a huge long To Read list that nags you, that you think of guiltily? Do things just seem to pile onto it? I have some suggestions.

As with all suggestions, if they don’t seem to apply to you, never mind them!

1. Ask yourself why this book is on your To Read List.

That’s not a rhetorical question (I’m bad at rhetorical questions and tend to think they don’t really exist), it’s a question that really deserves an answer.

You might be surprised at the honest answer. And at that point, I think it might be worthwhile to do a couple of different possible things.

See, for example: you may be treating the whole To Read List as one big thing, but I bet there are different reasons for things to be on there. I bet some of them are “I should be reading more of X kind of book”, for example (books by female authors, books by queer authors, books by authors of colour, books by working class authors, books by whatever, books that feature Y or Q kind of protagonist, books that . . . .), and I bet some of them are “this is a friend’s book”, and some of them are “book that got recommended to me” and . . .so on .

The thing is, these are all very different reasons to read a book, and not one of them I’ve mentioned yet is actually “this book looked like something I wanted to read for fun.”

Which sort of brings us to the next question I think is important –

2. Ask yourself what the function of reading is in your life right now, and also what resources you have to dedicate to reading right now.

Reading fulfills all kinds of roles. It’s a very effective way of finding and absorbing information! But it’s worth asking what kind of role and what kind of time and energy you have for reading right now.

Often huge TBR piles happen in the lives of people who at one time or another had the time, energy and inclination to read anything and everything, and do so fast, and so never bothered to think about this before . . . and then something in our lives changed.

As a teenager I never had a “TBR list” because nothing had time to stay on there for more than a couple days. Conversely at this point in my life I don’t have a TBR list (except for actual work or research purposes) because I damn well know that unless I pick it up, start reading and finish it (as I did with The Twisted Ones a couple weeks ago) it’s just not going to get read.

What happened in the interim? Depression, mostly, and a side-order of anxiety disorder. It ate a lot of my ability to parse printed words into meaning, and as a result unless I hit just the right mood at the right time and a text is easily accessible, reading for pleasure doesn’t really exist for me anymore. It definitely doesn’t keep place with writing fiction, and all things considered, I get more benefit out of writing fiction than I do out of reading it most of the time.

Few people are quite as dramatic a shift as me: most people are somewhere in the middle, usually closer to the “reading is still joyful” and that’s great (I’d actually hate to think more people have suffered the same loss of a once-joyful activity that I have, because it sucks). But people do tend to still have started out with the “I have little to no To Read pile because I just am reading all the time” and now are like, why is this piling up?

I can suggest some reasons:

a) You have less time and more calls on it. Reading fiction is a fairly solitary activity, and it’s not one that you can do while doing other things very easily: even exercising is difficult to do while reading, compared to other things.

b) You have less energy and more calls on it. Why? Any number of reasons, including stress, health, a job, a kid, friends, friends’ health and stress, community commitments, activism, world politics stressing the hell out of you – who knows!

And you’re probably thinking WELL I KNOW I HAVE LESS TIME AND LESS ENERGY – but I invite you to stop and think about that for a moment.

Because if you imprinted on “how to read books/how to collect books/how to relate to books” at a time when you had a lot of time and energy to dedicate to books (or, perhaps less happily, when you were dedicating time and energy to books that meant that other things in your life slid and were neglected, which gods know I did more than once in my life), your subconscious assumption is probably “I need to pounce on every title and every thing that looks interesting, because I will soon desperately be in need of a book.”

You know how people who deal with food insecurity can end up food-hoarding in non-useful ways because it’s hard for them to believe that they will, next week, have the same access to food as they have right now? Book-hoarding can actually work the same way – and be just as useless, while building up this huge PILE of things-to-read that serve very little purpose but to make you anxious and unhappy about how much you’re not reading.

So this brings back the question: what is the function of reading in your life right now, and what do you have to dedicate to it right now?

When I would need A New Book Every Week (at least) because the other options were terrible, I was also able to interest myself in huge wide ranges of topics in books, and to coax myself into reading books that weren’t immediately gratifying, because I needed books: I needed something to read. I needed to fill that time and space in my head.

These days firstly I don’t get that reward just from reading, period, and also I have other things to fill that time and space in my head, and that means when it comes to purely recreational reading I can and indeed have to be very choosy. Most people won’t have to be as choosy as I do (see also: how limited I am), but this is still something to consider.

For instance a very common refrain I hear is “how do I stop reading fic” (that is, fanfic) or “how do I stop reading trashy romances” or “how do I stop reading these cozy mysteries and read the rest of these great books on my to-do list” or whatever.

Here’s a better question: why – if you’re honest with yourself, truly honest – is it that the fic, the romances, the mysteries, whatever, are so much more appealing to read and rewarding to read than those supposedly great books?

As a society we have a snobbery about books, about what counts as “real” literature and “proper” reading. One of the answers to that question above – or at least, one of the distressed responses – is often “but I want to stretch myself!!!” or “I want to challenge myself!!”

Let me offer a slightly gentle suggestion: actually, you want to be, or be seen as, the kind of person who wants to “stretch” or “challenge” themselves with reading, because we as a society consider those people to be “better” than everyone else. And that’s not an unworthy goal!

But here’s the thing: most people actually get bored if they’re not being challenged and will seek challenges out, one way or another. So if you’re not finding the time to read those “challenging” books, here’s another question:

What, in your life, is already challenging you?

You may discover, as you think about it, that between work, school, kids, friends, relationships, family, responsibilities, the stress of the world right now, whatever, you’re actually being challenged constantly. Maybe being challenged too much.

So no wonder when offered the choice between a nice cozy mystery with an easy solution, or a familiar soulmate AU fic, or even a familiar tropey horror novel, and the latest piece of award winning fiction that’s going to immerse you in the agonizing challenges of the world, your brain goes “you know what you can go jump in a lake, give me the fun stuff.”

So suggestion the third –

3. Be honest about your reading desires, your reading needs, and remember that this is a recreational reading list, not a sworn quest which if you fail you will be forever damned.

Maybe there’s still things on that list you really do think you would benefit from getting through. Maybe there’s stuff you actually need for work or life, it’s just on the same undifferentiated list. Maybe you’re just resentful as hell that your brain is crapping out on you.

I get it! But you’re still going to do better tackling it if you’re honest and genuine about this stuff.

So first, ask yourself whether this is really that important. For anyone who needs to hear it, I’m going to give you this official permission as a librarian:

It is okay to abandon your To Read Pile, totally give up on it, and just read the stuff that’s easy and engaging (or not read at all) for a while. HERE IS YOUR PERMISSION.

I really want to underscore this: your worth and value and intelligence as a human is not indicated by your fucking booklist, pardon my swearing. This is a disgusting tendency in our culture, this idea that it is, and it’s actually a really toxic bit of what’s indeed actually often called “bookworm” culture, but let’s be honest, reading lots of books does not indicate you’re a better person. And taking a year off to read absolute faffy fluff and let your brain rest is also not an indication you’re a worse person. It’s allowed.

If you want, take a year and read absolutely nothing but fic or erotica or romance or mysteries or horror or space opera or nothing at all. I bless you upon this thread.

Because here’s the other thing: one of two things is likely to happen if you do this: one, you will find out that you’re actually tired and worn out and this is more restoring than being anxious about your to-read list, and hooray! What a great revelation.

The other is that you will actually get bored, and start wanting to read other stuff and hey presto, let’s pick up a book off the pile.

Second, if that genuinely doesn’t seem appealing, I’d recommend breaking your current pile or list up into some categories.

Acknowledge and own the list of “these are things that are probably going to be exhausting to read but I think are valuable”! TAG THEM. Label them. Then you can be honest about either needing to make a commitment to reading them like you would a work or school text, or needing to wait until you have the right time.

Label the list of “someone recommended this to me but I have no familiarity with it and am a bit wary”. Label the list of “my friend wrote this and I feel Obligated”. Label the list “this had a pretty cover but I’m intimidated.”

Be honest to a fault about why you’ve picked up this book.

Why? Because then maybe one day you’re feeling like “I want to do something socially rewarding” – well that’s a great time to pick up the Book-of-a-Friend. But maybe another day you’re feeling brave, or contrary – that’s the right time to pick up Book-that-Intimidates-Me.

If you genuinely feel like you spend too much time reading The Wrong Stuff, because maybe you read it automatically but then feel deeply unsatisfied or bored with it, have a little postit note or something that says “don’t go to AO3, go read [book title].”

But above all, remember it’s supposed to be fun.

Remember that you might be tired, genuinely just tired. Remember that it’s totally fine to just read what you want because the rest of life is difficult.

Remember that a To Read List just represents a list of titles you don’t want to forget – not a binding contract where if you die with these books unread you will be damned for all time.

Let this list stop being an object of anxiety.

(And go read that thing you want to read. Or maybe watch a TV show. It’s fine, I promise.)

a survivor’s guide to anhedonia+anxiety and getting anything done, ever.

So this particular twitter thread came up on my feed. And I tried a few times to figure out how to do a thread-response, but eventually gave up:  instead, I’m going to put my response here, and then link it.

I’m doing this because I recognize so much of myself in the description there, and the thing is that I’m pretty sure other people are going to come up with all the easy-quick things – all the things that can help if it’s a minor issue, a minor glitch, and what’s needed is a fresh way at looking at how you organize a life. And so on.

And those are great, and fit nicely in a twitter thread, but they also would have been close to useless to me at a point of trying to figure out a similar level of Brain Crap, because I’d . . . basically tried them all. Or variations of them all. And they hadn’t worked.

This is because the problem was, well. A lot more ground in, and I didn’t need a fresh look at organization, I needed a whole new way of looking at how this stuff even works.

So underneath the cut are the things that nobody told me (at least not when I started trying to figure it out), but which actually were crucial in figuring out how to deal with my version of the things the twitter-thread describes. Some of them come with some pretty solid and uncomfortable reshuffling of how one looks at, well, one’s entire life and what one wants to get done.

If they don’t apply to you (especially if you’re @LunosNocturne!) then all I can say is sorry for flinging a lot of words at you! Also, that’s great! So glad to hear it.

If they do, then maybe all the words will help.

Beneath the cut discusses depression (particularly anhedonia) and anxiety pretty frankly, so there’s a note for that.

while we’re at it, I’d like a pony.

[note: due to a high level of exhaustion, this post largely lacks Thorough Citations™; I know this blog also has a very small audience, so I’m not too worried and not going to go through the extensive extra work of tracking my links and citations down, but if you’d really like to see photos of people reading newspapers on the bus in the 50s, or read long historical rants about how the telephone will destroy civil conversation and society, I can dig them up]

I keep thinking about the conversation I’d actually like to have about smartphones, personal electronics, persistent and omnipresent connectivity, information overload, social networking, and how to figure out how to safely navigate the spaces opened up by these things, by the reality of connectedness we now share.

I’ve never had the conversation about this stuff I want to have.

Now, I’ve had a lot of conversations about this stuff, don’t get me wrong. A lot of them. I got online just before the turn of the century, when I was just a bit younger than sixteen. And I went headfirst and headlong into the world of digital social interaction, connectivity, creativity and so on. I was just a bit too late (and my parents not quite tech savvy enough) to get into IRC, but I was on mailing-lists and groups; I was on message boards in their earliest incarnations (and what a mess those were), I had my own GeoCities site that was even part of web-rings, I had an account on Elfwood, in the early days of Elfwood. I was part of the so-called Harry Potter Wars (a small, lurker, teenage part, but I’m in there), and laughed on JournalFen about Potterdamerung (aka the day that Book Seven came out and there would be at least some very passionate people, no matter what, whose favoured pairings would be condemned to never-were and the internet would implode).

I had a stand-alone weblog. I remember when MySpace was the new social media site we Established Users sneered at. And so on.

So in the last twenty years I have had plenty of discussions about all of the things I talked about, but not a single one of them has been the discussion I want to have. Just the ones I don’t want to have and definitely don’t want to have again.

What are those ones, you ask, o imaginary interlocutor? I’m so glad you asked that! Let me explain.

No, is too much, let me sum up:

Buttercup is marrying – wait, no.

So since I last managed to get organized to say anything here, a lot has changed.

Job: Can Has!

I am now working at A Small College Up North, which I will give a fig-leaf of anonymity by referring to as Smol College, on the basis that all views and opinions and statements in this blog are of course my own and in no way should be assumed to reflect the views of any employer etc.

I am the Copyright Assistant, which much to my amusement involves at least as much time spent going “okay but no that is not a forbidden action under Canadian IP law and it is totally fine for the instructor/course designer/etc to do that with this content” as it does the other way around. (Yes, if something is posted under a CC-BY license an instructor is free by copyright law to just take the whole thing and use it as-is in their course. No they really are. All they have to do is credit the original creator. No really. Even if you think that’s Not Fair, that is still how it works.) (Also no, you can’t copyright mathematical equations.) (And it doesn’t matter how hard someone worked on something, if it doesn’t meet the qualifications for IP it just doesn’t. I have case-law from a few months ago to show you about it if you’d like!)

It should be interesting, anyway, and it’s the resume-byline I need.

MOVING IS TERRIBLE

Pursuant to Job, I have moved back to the region I grew up in, something I once swore I’d never do.

It’s still something I’m emphatically not embracing long-term, but needs-must and so on. I have been camping in my parents’ basement in the town 45 minutes away from Job but have secured a reasonable apartment just up the road from Smol College now. I take possession on July 15th but will probably not be moving into it until the last weekend in August, due to various other factors.

It means I’m currently exhausted all the time: the commute, while not that long by the standards of where I’ve lived for the past ten years, still involves an hour of highway driving twice a day, moving is psychologically overwhelming for me, and my cat is also stressed out and that stresses me out.

My Sibling is still living in the condo the family has in North Vancouver, and they’re taking advantage of the lower occupancy to do some renos to the bathroom and one of the closets, as Sibling can go stay with a partner over the couple nights that the bathroom would be unusable (something that’s a bit more difficult for me as I do not have a partner and have difficulty sleeping at other people’s homes, alas) so that’s nice.

There has also been a Great Vehicle Shuffle in the family, as our father bought himself a nice shiny new truck. I now possess the 2011 Edge he used to drive, and we traded the two Fiestas me and my sister had for a newer-but-still-used 2015 Focus.

Other Things

• I unlinked my twitter account from this blog on the basis that what with the world as it is and all I’m having difficulty not swearing a lot on twitter. XD
• That said I am contemplating linking (with appropriate content notes) the podcast on Tolkien’s The Silmarillion that I’m in the midst of releasing weekly (with a missed week this last week due to moving). Not sure yet!
• I do plan on trying to post here a lot more regularly, as there are things I have thoughts on. But I’ve said that before, so I guess we’ll see!

 

And that’s about it at the moment!

refracted senses of self (or: how kids think they work, vs how they actually work)

Thanks to the convergence of this twitter thread, the fact that elsewhere I’m recording a readthrough of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and of course my own perpetual interests in these things, I’ve been thinking about children’s lit – particularly stuff we now call “middle grade” – and its cultural history, and our cultural history (by which I mean, more or less, “Anglo/Anglo-Colonized European-descended cultures”) and how that impacts our ideas of what “should” or shouldn’t be in kid’s literature.

But most specifically, what struck me as I was reading Coraline aloud was how few children would actually react like Coraline does, and how that interacts with the ongoing observation that often, children love Coraline and adults find it upsetting, disturbing and terrifying.

The following is not so much an argumentative essay with a thesis, as much as a lot of me pondering about this and pulling out different threads and looking at them all together.

violence is violence; the trick is making violence stop

Yesterday was Pink Shirt Day, the day we all wear pink shirts to show we’re against bullying.

I have this split reaction to Pink Shirt Day that I think is common to a lot of people who grew up being bullied: on the one hand, it’s good to see it existing, and it’s good to see and hear the words of anti-bullying action being used, and all of that stuff. And I even know actual statistics about “bullying” and awareness and so on. With half of me, there is a genuine positive reaction, one that wants to dive right in and push and participate and hope it helps.

That part of me is genuine.

There’s another part, though, a very dry and darkly cynical part, which says: everyone’s against “bullying” when it means putting on a pink shirt and getting a photo-op, or making a reading list, and that doesn’t mean all that much when it comes to actually changing anything.

It especially doesn’t mean much when it comes to the sometimes quite difficult work and uncomfortable choices involved in actually making “bullying” stop.

I could make a very poignant post about bullying and growing up being bullied. I could talk about watching the news about the murder of Reena Virk [cn: murder of teen by teens] hit the news at a few years younger than Reena was and being startled mostly by how startled the adults were, both that she’d been killed and that the kids had tried to hide it (didn’t they remember being our age?), and about how I actually discovered that the best way to make bullying stop was in fact to hit back harder (and I did). I could talk about how much of my life has been shaped by spending so many formative years knowing that my peers were out to get me and that nobody who could do anything cared, and nobody that cared could do anything.

I’m not going to, because I don’t actually want to: I wouldn’t enjoy it, and gods know there are enough first-person narratives about this kind of thing that if people can’t find one already that makes them pay attention, another one won’t help. But I want to say that I could, because I want to foreground the fact that this is my context, when I approach the topic: one of having once been a target, and one of having what stopped me from being a target anymore be my own actions and the exact actions people told me not to take.

Instead, I think I’m going to do this:

I’m going to talk about the things I wish the adults around me had known when I was that teenage target, as well as the things I think it is absolutely crucial to know today.

posting as a parent on the internet: do remember your child is a person

Well that was certainly a few months, wasn’t it? While not my country, it turned out that between the effects on global everything in general and how may friends I have in the US, the drama of the US 2018 Midterms was enough to completely drain me for a good solid while there, and then of course we ran straight into the Winter Holiday Season.

However, as the days begin to lengthen again I’m also starting to gather my stuff back together, and since this article came across my twitter timeline and is right in an area where experience and training mean I have some thoughts and opinions, I figured this counts as a good way to wade back into posting and trying to do it more regularly.

So here’s an article from a mother whose child is uncomfortable with how that mother posts about that child on the internet.

And not to beat about the bush, while I don’t disagree with the eventual solution she hammers out as such, in a more general sense I think it’s a terrible take, and moreover that it’s a terrible take that attempts to defensively use something that’s true (that we have as a society unfair and warped expectations of mothers) but is not actually relevant to this issue as an excuse/justification for continuing to ignore and violate her daughter’s boundaries.

Existing While Mentally Ill: Don’t Talk About It

I’m currently job-hunting.

Job hunting is a kind of soul-crushing experience for everyone. It’s weeks, maybe months, maybe years of having to go out into the universe and pleadingly attempt to convince other people – most of whom you’ve never met – that you’re worth providing with the means to acquire the representational units that allow you to get the necessities of life.

Aka give you a job so you can earn money.

And mostly you’re going to get ignored. You’re going to apply to postings that say “sorry we’re too busy to let everyone know when they’re rejected, so send your application into the void and wait.” (Except in nicer language.) Sometimes, you will get an apologetic form-letter – obviously sent to everyone – that lets you know that someone else got picked, but you are “encouraged” to apply for more jobs at this institution (whenever they materialise).

It’s a kind of grinding gauntlet and nobody enjoys it.

People around me generally know that I’m job-hunting. And the other day I got a very well-meaning Concerned note from someone I know.

Your LinkedIn connects to your Twitter and blog, they said.

Yeah, I know, I said.

Well, they said. On both of those platforms, you talk about, well. Mental illness and disability issues a lot.

Yeah, I said. I know. I consider my awareness of these issues a selling point.

Well yes, they said. But you talk about you having chronic depression and your experience with neurodivergence and that’s really the kind of thing you shouldn’t mention around possible employers until after you get the job. You don’t have any protection until after you get the job, after all. That’s the kind of thing that means you don’t get hired.

Nobody wants to hire someone with a chronic mental illness.

 

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this wisdom, by any means. I’ve even given it out, in some circumstances, and I’ve hated it every single time I’ve given it out.

I’ve also told people not to let on that they’re queer, in many cases, for the same reasons. And of course we’ve all seen the articles on making your name more “white” (or more male) to get a job.

The fact is, that concerned person is possibly even dead right: it’s not like I haven’t also lived through direct, applied, targeted stigma in similar areas because of being open about my mental illness, or my neuroatypicality.

Or the fact that I’m a queer woman.

But I tried living closeted as a queer woman for a few years when I was much younger and it was, in fact, absolute miserable poison. And I also know that my ability to live openly on that score inasmuch as I am able to do so is in no small part thanks to the amazing number of incredibly brave, often long-suffering queer people – men, women, both and genderless – who came before me.

They also saved me from thinking I was alone, that I was sick, that I was tainted, that I was wrong, that I was evil, and any number of other things that I would very, very easily have thought of myself had I not been able to see them, when I was figuring out that part of myself.

So when I draw that across to issues of mental illness and neurotype, I am doing it directly and deliberately. And I’m also doing it because I’ve lived it. I continue to live it.

I am very open about living with depression, with disordered anxiety, with neurodivergence. I am perfectly willing to say in casual conversation “I was dealing with a depressive downswing at the time”, or “that’s when I was first medicated” or any number of other things.

And I can’t tell you how often someone nearby, part of the conversation or sometimes even just listening to it, suddenly wants to talk. Needs to talk. How often, when we’re done, or sometimes when we’re halfway through, says I’ve never been able to talk about this before or nobody around me in my life really gets it or I thought I was just broken.

How often they say, I thought I was alone.

Often there’s qualifiers: often someone says my spouse is really supportive, they try hard, I just – where the “I just” means “I still feel like a freak, I still feel alone and Wrong and isolated.”

My family helps a lot, it’s just –

It’s not like anyone’s horrible about it, just that –

Just that. Just.

Just actually, don’t talk about it until after you have the job, because nobody wants to knowingly hire a ~*mentally ill*~ person, that’s a black mark. Just don’t actually mention anything on a date, because that’s ~*private*~, a secret, a piece of dirty laundry that you’d never just out and tell someone before they even know you’re worth knowing anyway.

Just don’t actually force people to know this secret about you, because well of course we’re not saying it’s something to be ashamed of or anything, but it’s just you don’t want people to see your bad side before they know you have so much to offer!

 

It’s quite possible, maybe even probable, that making it easy to find where I talk about mental illness, about my mental illness, under my own name and in some depth, is sometimes very much like putting a sticker on myself that says “do not hire, will not be worth it, will only be a problem.”

Fifteen years ago, being open about being queer would have been the same way, even here in Openminded Vancouver. Thirty years ago, definitely.

And sometimes, you just can’t afford that sticker. Believe me I understand that, and I will vehemently defend people who make the choices they need to in order to get where they need to go in a society that is incredibly messed up about this stuff.

The thing is, I’m lucky enough that if I really have to, there are things I can do to get a job. (And it is luck: luck in my family, luck in my friends, luck in other skills and abilities I’ve had the precious opportunities to require). Other people might not be. I am.

There’s tracks I can abandon, alternatives I can pursue.

I don’t want to: if I didn’t want to work in this field, I wouldn’t’ve worked so hard to train for it, to get the MLIS in all its expense in time, energy, money and – yes! – mental health.

If I didn’t think I could be good at it I wouldn’t be here.

But if I have to, I can look elsewhere, and I can survive. Whereas I don’t survive very well being ashamed of myself at all. I don’t survive very well in closets. Any kind of closet.

So yes: I talk about mental illness. I talk about my mental illness. I talk about my experiences as a member of this population, as someone on the Autism spectrum, as someone with chronic depressive disorder, with anxiety disorders, with disabilities that impact my life.

And actually this makes me a better librarian. It makes me better at the services I want to provide. It makes me understand the needs and the challenges of underserved parts of the population of library users better than I might otherwise do, starting with “because I’m part of it” and then moving onto “well if people can misunderstand what my kind of person needs so much, they must get other kinds of people wrong all the time too” and inspiring me to find out what those populations say they need, ask for, say is a problem, say about how those problems can be ameliorated.

I am better at understanding how I can help other people because I had to throw out so much “wisdom” about how to help myself and figure it out.

It’s entirely possible that’s not how that sticker will look for other people.

But that’s the way it goes. And I’ll deal with that. I’ve dealt with everything else.

My brain’s been trying to kill me since I was twelve. I’ll be fine.

Reacting to Text: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog

[see the first post in this series for preamble on what “reacting to text” is]

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook – What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz

Blurb:

How does trauma affect a child’s mind–and how can that mind recover? In the classic The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry explains what happens to the brains of children exposed to extreme stress and shares their lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing, can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

There are very few books I recommend for people wanting to understand human brains and why humans do what we do than this one. I’m pretty sure that people in my MLIS courses got tired of hearing about it, and certainly strongly suspect one or two professors did. I consider it an excellent tool for conveying absolutely crucial knowledge about the nature of neurological development in children and also what happens when that development is messed up, truncated, damaged or otherwise interfered with – and what we can do about it, how we can start changing how we think.

I am deeply appreciative of the work that Perry has done in this field, of the existence of the ChildTrauma Academy and its programs, and I strongly think that if we can get it to take hold properly in a conscientious and intelligent way (that isn’t oversimplified or bonsaied into something barely resembling itself) that the Neurosequential Model of Education will, if not save the world (since hyperbole while sometimes satisfying is rarely useful) at least make the endless work we have as human beings to suck a little bit less a lot more fruitful.

Reacting to Text: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

[see the first post in this series for preamble on what “reacting to text” is]

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

Blurb:

Maurice, an amazing cat who has survived four years on the toughest streets in the whole of the Discworld, reckons that rats are dumb. Clever, OK, but dumb. Maurice, however, is smart. Smart enough to recognize that there’s a new kind of rat around – rats who have been eating wizards’ rubbish and can now talk. Smart enough to get a pretty amazing idea when he spots a stupid-looking kid playing the flute…

Now Maurice has his very own ‘plague of rats’ – and his own Pied Piper. And his money-bags are getting fuller and fuller. Until the group reach the farflung village of Bad Blintz…

This is going to be one of those ones that are more like me talking for quite a while about Feelings and Thoughts about this book. I have quite a lot of them, and since I recently re-read it for the purpose of recording myself reading it for someone, I’m going to muse on them.

If you know the work of the late Sir Terry Pratchett you know that he started out basically writing a world that was a straight-forward send-up of the tropes and stereotypes of the fantasy genre at the time he started (around the 1980s), and then accidentally ended up writing a lot of very substantial works that deal with the heavy questions of human philosophy and existence with deeply real and substantial characters who happen to be superficially in a satirical comedic world that also itself has a lot more substance than it first looks like.

The Amazing Maurice (hereafter TAM for short) not only fits neatly into this description, it in some ways distills and epitomizes it, and does it while also being a book about talking rats for kids.