Ho Hum. @niostang - Tumblr Blog

It’s been a weird few days. A tweet of mine, what I thought was a completely mild, innocuous tweet, took off and has so far been retweeted something like 1800 times. A screenshot of that tweet was featured in a tumblr post that so far has about 140k notes.

In the tweet I’m...

little-yogi

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Birdbun

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Godzilla has a distinctive roar.

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The National Galleries [x]

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Alexandra Khitrova

tubooks

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There has been a lot of controversy this week surrounding that now-infamous Slate article saying that adults should be embarrassed to read YA. Here at LEE & LOW, we couldn’t disagree more. We don’t think your enjoyment of a book should be limited by your age (or anything at all, really). YA novels are great. They can be entertaining, literary, thought-provoking, funny, sad, or all of the above at the same time.

There have been several excellent lists of YA recommendations floating around this week, so we thought we’d add our own. Here is a list (a diverse list, of course!) of YA novels that made us think, featuring some great books from LEE & LOW and some of our favorites from other publishers [Read more here.]

This looks like a really great list!

nprcodeswitch

Get at this list.

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Read quite a few of these when I was in the business of teaching middle school English. If this is the list of YA books for “thinking adults,” then it only adds more credence to Graham’s anti-YA screed.

We can and should do better.

medievalpoc

I never read The Giver until I was 30, and yet I somehow managed to get something out of it. I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando when I was 10, and yet I somehow managed to get something out of it. I could read both now and get something totally different out of them. I’m much less embarrassed by adults (like myself) who read YA than I am by adults who defensively separate themselves from “stuff for kids” because they don’t think Farewell to Manzanar is sophisticated enough.

It’s my opinion that liking something that’s inaccessible because it’s inaccessible (or impenetrably symbolic, or graphic, or jarring, or relentlessly cynical and yes I am looking at you Cormac McCarthy) is a much more immature sentiment than just liking something genuinely, regardless of people looking down their noses at you about it. The Graham article reads a bit like that kid in high school who used to carry around War and Peace breathlessly waiting for someone to notice how mature their literary tastes were. Just saying. A precocious adult? Far less cute.

I’m seriously baffled by this kind of shaming towards adults who have print or learning disabilities who might have a lot more access to good literature via YA than mainstream literature. But of course the people writing articles like these can never be bothered to think about that, even though we’re talking about millions of people.

I also think we can and should do better… than assuming that our individual experiences, preferences, and abilities are universal, and that people who don’t share them should be ashamed.

coelasquid

On the subject of the list, though, I don’t think any YA recommendation list is complete without In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier. It’s probably the most brutally sincere books they gave me to read in high school and it’s unfortunate that barely anyone outside of Manitoba seems to have read it because it’s about the experiences of young Metis women in Canadian society as told by an author who grew up in the shadow of alcoholism and the Children’s Aid Service herself, which is a perspective that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

Content warnings apply for a pretty graphic sexual assault scene, suicide, and child abuse, but I promise it doesn’t treat those matters lightly.

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A friend of mine took this picture at Phoenix Comic Con and it took me a moment to get it

ivyblossom

All other typos can go home. This one wins.

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Black Cats are Good Luck

Photos via Pinterest

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happy friday the 13th

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Duality [x]

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Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

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how the hell do you bend and braid a tree

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Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together. You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits. Frankentrees.

beautifuloutlier

As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.

theonlyviableoption-deactivated

On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.

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But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:

[source]

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Dying for some coffee

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even the princesses fangirl over peter

except aurora

that be faithful

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look at phillip though

can you blame her?

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Goddamn. Phillip could get the business.

queer-nihilist

So I went to Disney about a month ago and i got to meet aurora. she asked me and my mom if there were any “princes’” with us today. When I told her that I leaned more toward princesses she looked over at Cinderella sighed and replied with “yeah me too” and I think about that a lot.