#turtle diary

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Turtle Diary (1985)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onDec 15, 2024

[thesparrow1996]

Could I be a turtle? Could I, through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding?

Russel Hoban, Turtle Diary

[thehappyscavenger]

Books Read May 2023

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

I keep hearing great things about Riley who I think is way better known in the UK than in North America. I believe My Phantoms was more of a crossover hit. It’s about the narrator, a middle aged London woman, and her awkward semi-estranged relationship, especially with her mother. It reminded me a lot of My Name is Lucy Barton in that the trauma is kind of vague but there is this nostalgic sense of pain overlaying the whole thing. Really liked this.

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban

Loved this. It’s about two middle-aged strangers in London, a lonely book seller and a lonely children’s book author, who each come to the conclusion they need to free the turtles at the London aquarium. Short and sweet and sharp. Hoban isn’t a writer I’ve heard of before this but apparently he’s pretty well know in the U.K. Will def be reading more of him.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

A fictional biography of the artist X written by her widow, journalist C.M. Lucca. I had some mixed thought mostly positive feelings about this one. The background is an alternate history of the U.S. imagining a world in which the South willing segregated and the North became more liberal which I found fascinating. What didn’t work for me was Lacey re-purposing some real artists quotes to build up X, an iconoclastic artist. It was a bit weird to see quites I understood used like that. Still worth a read. Also my first book of 2023 that was published in 2023. 

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

LOVED THIS. A set of speculative fiction stories set in America. These are dark and often funny. I was kind of surprised I never heard of this before (I discovered this on a whats that book reddit post) and it was an NYT best seller. Totally up my alley. 

Search by Michelle Huneven

This is a fictionalized memoir supposedly written by a fictional memoirist and food critic as she joined her Universalist Unitarian’s search committee for a new minister. I thought this would be cuter than it was, about found family and oddballs but it’s something darker and more complex than that, about how groups are flawed, change is slow, and not everyone has pure intentions. Very interesting. I will be picking up more of Huneven for sure. 

An amazing month for reading choices! Possibly my best of 2023. 

[exhaled-spirals]

« Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn't think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can't believe they'd swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. [...] I think of the turtles swimming steadily against the current all the way to Ascension. I think of them swimming through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark. And I think of the sun over the water, the sun through the water, the eye holding the sun, being held by it with no thought and only the rhythm of the going, the steady wing-strokes of the flippers in the water. Then it doesn’t seen hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. »

— Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

[referent]

It was absolutely uncanny, gave me the creeps. That woman actually thought I’d been thinking of suicide. I had been thinking of it right enough, I often do, always have the idea of it huddled like a sick ape in a corner of my mind. But I’d never do it. At least I don’t think I’d do it, can’t imagine a state of mind in which I’d do it. Well, that’s not true either. I can imagine the state of mind, I’ve been in it often enough. No place for the self to sit down and catch its breath. Just being hurried, hurried out of existence. When I feel like that even such a thing as posting a letter or going to the launderette wears me out. The mind moves ahead of every action making me tired in advance of whatever I do. Even a thing as simple as changing trains in the Underground becomes terribly heavy. I think ahead to the sign on the platform at the next station, think of getting out of the train, going through the corridor, up the escalator, waiting on the platform. I think of how many trains will come before mine, think of getting on when it comes, think of the signs that will appear, think of getting out, going up the steps, out into the street. As the mind moves forward the self is pushed back, everything multiplies itself like mirrors receding laboriously to infinity, repeating endlessly even the earwax in the ears, the silence in the eyes.

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)

[austinkleon]

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

[dogpasta]

I really love my turtle

[harrypotterhousequotes]

GRYFFINDOR: “Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing.” –Russell Hoban (Turtle Diary)