Monthly Blog - April 2024

I had a fun start to April, then spent the rest of the month largely inside trying not to spend any money. I’m in saving-for-uni mode now, so no more trips to bookshops for a while.

As a last treat to myself before I went money-saving mode, I decided to have a little holiday in London and see where I used to live at uni. I saw some friends and had a great night out at our old local. I wish I’d been able to organise seeing more people, but I’m so painfully shy about messaging people online. Anyway, I had three nights and was glad to have most of those nights to spend quietly in my hotel room. The days were mostly exploring central London. I’d picked a Tuesday-Friday holiday, thinking I’d escape the crowds at weekends.

I forgot it was the Easter holidays.

I couldn’t get into the Natural History Museum or the Lego Store due to the colossal queues. A lot of the Maritime Museum was closed off for refurbishment too, so I went to the Docklands Museum. I’d only been there once before, so it was nice to revisit properly. I also went to the Moomin shop, which was a crowded nightmare. Covent Garden in general was fine, but I was glad to get back to my hotel and away from the crowds.

Another reason I wanted to go to London was to work on a poetry project about the London Underground. I got a fair few started, and a few nearly completed. Sometimes I’d just spend hours on the train, travelling to different stops and scribbling in my notebook. Obviously, it’s not just about trains. It’s vaguely autobiographical and comments on a variety of topics. If there are any publishers looking for a poetry collection, hit me up. I have several I’m working on. If any publishers are looking for a big ol’ fantasy novel, also hit me up.

When I got home, I found London had passed on some germs, despite me masking up, and I got a heavy cold. I’ve also started May the same way, thanks to my nephew passing on his germs. 

Also, due to watching and reading a lot of Dungeon Meshi, I started baking bread again. Sadly, the yeast I bought last time I had this urge, in 2020, is now two years out of date, so I had to get more. The only bread flour we had was whole wheat. I hate brown bread but couldn’t justify buying a new pack of bread flour. Making the bread was a bit of a disaster: I accidentally spilled too much water in the mixture and made a goopy mess. It took a lot of flour to get it usable, and the kneading process suffered for it. I also think I should’ve ignored the recipe and left it to prove even longer. It looked really nice, in the end. I plaited it and the effect looked beautiful. Even though it was brown bread, it still tasted okay, if a little dense. Sadly, I didn’t get a picture.

What I read

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu

This was a really cute manga and I was so shocked to actually find it in the wild. Piccadilly Waterstones is a dangerous place and I should not be allowed back. Don’t ask me how much I spent there. Anyway, horror icon Junji Ito isn’t fond of cats, but his fiancee wants to get a cat, so they compromise and get two cats. The horror style lends itself well to the slice-of-life comedy, and gives normal cat-owner life a melodramatic edge. 

The Girl That Can’t Get a Girlfriend – Mieri Hiranishi

This wasn’t as funny as I’d been expecting, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. It helped a lot, and I could relate, as someone who also started dating in their 20s, the feeling of having that final first relationship end and wondering if you’ve blown your only chance at love. I also like the message and theme of not tying your entire self-worth to being in a relationship and learning to find joy in other things. It’s not something I’ve personally felt, but it’s still good to see those feelings represented.

Deaf Republic – Ilya Kaminsky

The first and last poems in particular stand out. The collection was first published in 2019, and I’m sure Kaminsky, a Ukrainian poet, has seen just how horrifyingly relevant his words have become. 

Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Gorgiolands – Sarah Wimbush

Very atmospheric and grounded. It was nice getting immersed in Romani culture and the Angloromani language.

Dungeon Meshi – Ryoko Kui

I started watching the anime, then couldn’t wait for the next episode so I spent a whole weekend reading the manga. Holy shit, it’s fantastic. I’ve not experienced a fantasy this rich and fulfilling since Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. I know it’s the Big Fandom right now and everyone’s hyping it up, but it’s for a reason.

I mainly started because I liked the character Senshi, but I wasn’t expecting to like all the characters so much. I don’t think there’s one I actually dislike, besides the Winged Lion, but he’s the main antagonist so he’s meant to be pretty hateable. Even the characters I don’t care for, like a lot of the minor elves, I still think are interesting and have cool designs. I’ve also never seen such an interesting protagonist. Usually, even when they’re given a personality, I just never have any interest in them, but I love Laios so much. He’s also such a relatable autistic character in so many ways and now the third autistic character I’ve seen this year who grew up wishing/believing they were some sort of monster.

City of Illusions – Ursula K le Guin

This one took a while to get through. Though it might be my least favourite of the three stories in this omnibus, I’ll admit it’s probably the best one in terms of writing, story and imagination. It follows Falk, a man who is found in the forest with no memory of who he is. 

I know people say the Hainish books are set in the same universe but unrelated, but this isn’t strictly true here. It’s set several centuries after Planet of Exile; the main character is a descendent of the main couple of PoE; and it answers the questions you leave that story with. You find out why the colony lost contact with the other planets; what this war the colonists vaguely know about is; and whether or not they survive the winter. The overarching story is that the League of Worlds – the alliance of planets – is infiltrated and overtaken by the Shing, an alien race who can lie telepathically, something no other race can do. I don’t know if the war in the first book, Rocannon’s World, is related to this conflict, I’d have to go back and reread it, but it’s probable. The fourth book, The Left Hand of Darkness, is set even further in the future, and follows the successor of the League of Worlds – the Ekumen. The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed (the latter I haven’t read yet), are set before Rocannon’s World, back when the League was still fairly new. 

More Thomas the Tank Engine stories

Man, these trains are all absolute wankers and I don’t know why the Fat Controller keeps them around. For real though, I like how much personality all the trains have, even if their personalities are various shades of stubborn prick.

Percy gets done so dirty in these modern adaptations. Why is he reduced to Thomas’s nervous little sidekick? The naive one? He’s nothing like that in the books! Guy’s cheeky and likes playing light-hearted pranks on the bigger engines. It just feels like these TV writers are shoving him into this overly-familiar archetype because it’s safe and easy, rather than writing a unique, interesting character. Not that Percy’s particularly unique in the books. He fills the role of new, little engine that needs to learn not to be an arrogant little shit, once Thomas has that development in the early few books. But he also knows things about the mainland that the other engines just don’t.

I like that Rev. W. Awdry does the same thing as Beatrix Potter where he pretends to know his fictional characters personally and the books he writes exist in Thomas’s universe too. In ‘The Eight Famous Engines’ it’s the books that have caused the said engines to become famous, so much so that they have to go on tour to prove they’re not fictional. 

Having read over half this collection, I have to say a lot of these stories are repetitive. A train acts like an arrogant shit, gets in trouble, and gets punished for it. Then a later story in the book will have that train redeeming himself in some way. That being said, there seems to be some interesting worldbuilding in the background. There’s the implications that the Isle of Sodor is this refuge for steam engines who are being phased out on the mainland by Diesel engines. In ‘The Twin Engines’, the Sir Topam Hatt orders a new engine from Scotland and gets two by accident: twins Donald and Douglass. They don’t want one of them to be sent back to Scotland, seemingly for the obvious reason that they’re brothers and don’t want to be separated. Then when they fuck up and risk being sent back, it’s revealed that they will be scrapped and taken apart. This is seemingly backed up by Percy in a later book. Steam trains are slowly being wiped out, just like they were in real life. Obvously, the implications in this world where they’re sentient are horiffic.

A Streetcat Named Bob – James Bowen

Started the month reading about cats, and now I’m ending it reading about cats. This was a really heartwarming book, and fairly easy to get through. The writing wasn’t the best, but that doesn’t matter. I’m glad James was able to find Bob and write his story. I’m glad he was able to get help and find a reason to get help. And Bob is such a lovely cat. I know that he’s since passed, and James has been grieving, and I’m so sorry to hear that. 

He does that thing a lot of authors tended to do until recently: mention every person’s race only when they’re not white, with white assumed to be the default. I think it’s important to paint a picture of how multicultural London is, but did we really need to know the guys shouting abuse at you were Black? The Chinese phonetic accents were really unnecessary too. I’m not even blaming James for this, really. Dude wrote this book whilst homeless and recovering from heroin addiction. That’s not really a life where you can afford to sit and examine your biases. It should’ve been picked up in editing, though.