travel size

portions of magic, madness and morality

Nov 26, 2024

My attention span has been out of sorts the last few weeks. Can you relate? I’ve only read 41 books this month2 and those have all been quite frothy and light. These were all I could get through during a month of travel, visiting family/friends and etc.

Reading recharges me so if the brain space isn’t available for an entire novel, I must subsist on short stories for quick bursts of comfort, escape and inspiration. If you are experiencing a similar attention span deficit I encourage you to click one3 of the below links and keep it as an open tab on one of your devices,4 ready to grab you when the mood strikes, however short lived it may be.

Whether you are waiting in line at TSA, hiding from your family or trapped in stand still traffic, escape and recharge with one of these bite sized literary snacks.

A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies

by Alix E. Harrow

There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches.

When a troubled teen boy continually seeks solace amid the stacks, a librarian must make a tough decision. Though its against official policy, she knows that some Books are meant for some Readers; to help, comfort, inspire, delight and yes, even rescue them.

I do my best to give people the books they need most. In grad school, they called it “ensuring readers have access to texts/materials that are engaging and emotionally rewarding,” and in my other kind of schooling, they called it “divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine,” but it comes to the same thing.

This is bittersweet, amusing and precious with some sharp, concise world building and a hopeful ending though is not without intense themes. It has, of course, that hallmark of Harrow’s work5 stories within stories. I loved the slight personification of the Books that added magic and whimsy, the book titles, the confrontation of leaders who have abandoned their sacred calling and the electric thrill of the unknown.

He smelled of a thousand secret worlds, of rabbit-holes and hidden doorways and platforms nine-and-three-quarters, of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia, of anyplace-but-here. He smelled of yearning. God save me from the yearners. The insatiable, the inconsolable, the ones who chafe and claw against the edges of the world.

No book can save them.

(That’s a lie. There are Books potent enough to save any mortal soul: books of witchery, augury, alchemy; books with wand-wood in their spines and moon-dust on their pages; books older than stones and wily as dragons. We give people the books they need most, except when we don’t.)

Look out for a cameo of the inspiration behind the name of this newsletter.

Extra Credit: There’s an audio version available at the link should that be the best way to consume this morsel.

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Stetson

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. John is a physician, and perhaps - (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind - ) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?

Published in 1892 and inspired by the author’s own experience with postpartum psychosis and its ‘rest cure treatment’, this story is formatted as journal entries by a woman whose husband decides the cure for her nerves will be a rented house for the summer. In the house she’s kept secluded in the attic room and told to rest, not to write, read or do much of anything at all. For her nerves of course. Her husband John is a physician after all, so he knows best.

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

As the summer trudges on, our narrator becomes more and more fixated on her erstwhile prison’s sickly yellow wallpaper as it chaotically warps and wraps around the room. She confesses her observations about the room, her state and her treatment as her relationship to the wallpaper morphs and changes. Her own statements begin to turn and shift in tone, direction and topic mirroring the wallpaper.

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I’m a sucker for a gothic and this delivers. Its got a creepy house that retains an imprint of its former occupants, a frustratingly condescending man and a protagonist whose madness(?) spreads with every page. I loved its foreboding introduction, all the caged imagery and violent word choices for seemingly innocuous things, the contradictory sentiments within its sentences, the methodical building of suspense and being inside the experience of this unreliable but still relatable narrator.

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

There were multiple hair raising passages and deliciously dark twists in its ten pages. The narrator is clever, showing off her intelligence often and making us all the more frustrated at the situation she’s forced into. At first I wished there were dates for the journal entries so I could note how much time was going by but after a bit I was glad of their absence. This is a deliberate choice so the reader can feel just as unmoored in a timeless dream space as our narrator.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

The ending is delectably spine tingling and open for interpretation. As long as it doesn’t read as a cop out by the author, which this does not, I’m very much on board for ambiguous endings. How incredible that it came out in the late 1800s! I’ll have to look for more from this author. She sounds fascinating. I still don’t even recall how I came across this story… one of my jaunts down the rabbit hole of curiosity I suppose.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

It reminded me of Mexican Gothic from the houses that haunt shelf a few times. Anyone else catch those parallels? This is one of my favorite genres and I’m planning a more in depth Gothic post soonishly, so if you’ve got any others like this to share please comment. Reading and noting up this one felt like homework in the best way, I loved it.

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

by Ursula K LeGuin

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy….Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.

This could be the most gut punching 4.5 pages you’ll ever read. It is piercing, powerful and should burrow into you. I don’t want to spoil it so just know that it is a fast but charged story about the citizens of Omelas, a city that knows only joy, peace, abundance and whatever good thing you can imagine. LeGuin’s voice describing this place is quite funny and not without some snark as she lists all that such a place must be. She invites us to imagine it along with her; to interact and participate in all that the city is.

But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

… I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate.

Religion yes, clergy no.

But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical.

So, with all of this splendor, comfort and happiness why then do some walk away from Omelas?

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

Read this one and come back to chat in the comments about it. I first read it earlier this year and haven’t been able to escape its gripping simplicity. I don’t believe I want to.