jasper-book-stash

[jasper-book-stash]

NEVERMIND I JUST FOUND IT. It's Kitchen Princess by Miyuki Kobayashi and Natsumi Ando.

Alright, so, I remembered this manga I read years ago and only got volume one, and I'm hoping that someone might be able to help me identify it.

The basic premise is that it's a cooking-based shoujo manga where the female main character (whose name had something to do with rainbows, which was a secondary theme in the manga) was trying to identify a boy she met when they were children based on the spoon he left behind and got into the cooking school it was from. Once there, she narrows it down to two brothers, one blond/light brunet and one dark-haired, and the first volume ended with her "building a rainbow bridge" with both of them.

I read it around the mid-2010s but it was definitely older because I got it secondhand.

I do not remember anything else. Anyone know what this could be?

[jasper-book-stash]

Alright, so, I remembered this manga I read years ago and only got volume one, and I'm hoping that someone might be able to help me identify it.

The basic premise is that it's a cooking-based shoujo manga where the female main character (whose name had something to do with rainbows, which was a secondary theme in the manga) was trying to identify a boy she met when they were children based on the spoon he left behind and got into the cooking school it was from. Once there, she narrows it down to two brothers, one blond/light brunet and one dark-haired, and the first volume ended with her "building a rainbow bridge" with both of them.

I read it around the mid-2010s but it was definitely older because I got it secondhand.

I do not remember anything else. Anyone know what this could be?

[jasper-book-stash]

okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

[jasper-book-stash]

And another thing about Glamstrology! Despite pointing at the 10th house as one of the important placements, the advice for every instance that it comes up is just "look through this entire chapter and add what you want", which you could do without permission, so what even was the point of bringing it up?

[jasper-book-stash]

Y'all, Glamstrology by Michael Herkes is not it.

I think my main thing here is that there's a lot of emphasis put on the placement of Neptune without the author realizing that Neptune is one of those planets that doesn't really swap signs for years at a time, which is why most people will focus on the house that it's in rather than the sign, because the house moves a lot more. But that's not what the author is using it for. If anything, it's less useful than the other notable placements (the author stresses Sun, Venus, 1st house, 2nd house, and 10th house placements in the book) because everything Neptune is used for in here is already covered by Venus.

It's also just...deeply average when it comes to the text? It feels like a lot of generic mainstream pseudo-Wicca in the sections before you get to the fashion advice.

It's not bad, but I'm mostly going to be using it for reference for dressing fictional characters rather than committing to using it in my craft. It's just deeply average.

[jasper-book-stash]

And another thing about Glamstrology! Despite pointing at the 10th house as one of the important placements, the advice for every instance that it comes up is just "look through this entire chapter and add what you want", which you could do without permission, so what even was the point of bringing it up?

[jasper-book-stash]

Y'all, Glamstrology by Michael Herkes is not it.

I think my main thing here is that there's a lot of emphasis put on the placement of Neptune without the author realizing that Neptune is one of those planets that doesn't really swap signs for years at a time, which is why most people will focus on the house that it's in rather than the sign, because the house moves a lot more. But that's not what the author is using it for. If anything, it's less useful than the other notable placements (the author stresses Sun, Venus, 1st house, 2nd house, and 10th house placements in the book) because everything Neptune is used for in here is already covered by Venus.

It's also just...deeply average when it comes to the text? It feels like a lot of generic mainstream pseudo-Wicca in the sections before you get to the fashion advice.

It's not bad, but I'm mostly going to be using it for reference for dressing fictional characters rather than committing to using it in my craft. It's just deeply average.

[jasper-book-stash]

Jasper Reviews: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick

Full Title: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft

Author: Annabel Margaret

Overall Jasper Rating: 9 out of 10

This book is what The House Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock WISHES it could be. But before I get into that, let's talk about this book and its author.

Annabel Margaret is a witch that I knew about because I actually watch her videos on YouTube. One channel, The Green Witch, is focused on the same things that this book is focused on: plant-based seasonal witchcraft. Her other channel, Annabel Margaret, is less active but more focused on traveling and moving places. She has an incredibly calm and soothing voice, even when she gets excited about things. This is a book by a person who really does practice what they're writing about.

My guess at a target demographic is that this book is for a beginner witch who already believes in magic and knows they want to use plants in and connect with nature through their magic, who also loves working in the kitchen to make things. Most of the things in here can be made relatively easily based on the instructions, though you may have difficulties doing most of them if you are in a situation where your practice cannot be open or obvious.

Books I've read that are similar to this include The House Witch and The Green Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Grovedaughter Witchery and Pestlework by Bree NicGarran, and A Verdant Introduction by Anna Zollinger. This was better than both Arin Murphy-Hiscock's book, more focused on different spell prep types than Pestlework (while also having less premade mixes for each spell), and more magical than A Verdant Introduction (which was more medicinal). Overall it's quite similar to Grovedaughter Witchery but different enough that I feel comfortable recommending both rather than saying to get one over the other. I'd say to use Grovedaughter Witchery as an introduction to witchcraft and use this book as an introduction to spellwork.

With all of this said, let's get into the neutral, the bad, and the good.

The Neutral

This category is just broad strokes of information that is neither good nor bad, but worth noting for how the author approaches magic and writing about magic.

There are a lot of uses of the phrase "negativity" in the text without defining what that is, exactly. It assumes you already know what negativity is in a magical sense and want to get rid of it.

The author puts an emphasis on love spells requiring consent, and, interestingly, says the same thing for prosperity spells.

The author defines "herb" within the text as any plant used magically after explaining other ways that the word is used.

There is a strong focus on natural materials and crafting things from scratch.

"Respect" is the primary reason listed for snuffing out a flame rather than blowing it out, which...is an overall neutral thing, it's how the author works her magic.

Cleansing itself as a form of spell work isn't something I often see acknowledged in published books (that's more of a Tumblr nuance/discourse thing in my experience), but the author very much takes this approach. I think it's neat. We'll discuss this more later.

Now, the author adds gender alignments to the plant profiles in her book after a truly based take on such a thing, but I had the random ass thought of Why are we adding this as a category if all masculine herbs are air or fire and all feminine ones are earth or water? and I never recovered.

The Bad

If you know me or have seen literally any of my posts, you know that I love to bitch and complain. This is where I do that.

Spelling magic with a K is cringe and I will bite people on this hill. There are also a handful of editing errors and quite a bit of wasted space on the pages. And the back cover is peeling for some reason? It was doing that before I even started reading it.

While the chapter on intuition was fine overall, there was no mention that intuition is trained and prone to things like stereotyping and bias. And if you want to breathe out thoughts related to impulse and anxiety when using your intuition actively, using that same intuition to find stomach-sinking feelings is contradictory.

There is an entire chapter on intent which is...literally just energy work when you actually read it? I felt like this chapter could have been shorter, less meandery, or cut entirely because of how much you get told how to focus intention into materials elsewhere.

There's also a strong emphasis in one section on belief being completely and utterly required, which...reh. I don't agree with it. The author then talks more about how skepticism is good, but I feel like this could have been cut or shortened.

One of my notes is just "bitch, you good?" with a page number so I went to find it. Turns out, it was about spell impacts. After a bunch of the standard "you need consent" stuff about love spells, the author then talks about how prosperity spells also influence others' behavior and how it will always take away from someone else. The author even says:

While there are a number of ways to cast spells for love that do no harm, there are few ways to cast prosperity spells that do not ultimately deprive someone else. It is for this reason that we must give consideration to our aims and desires along with the impacts of our work. Only with care and caution should you attempt any spell that has the capacity to affect others.

And then it keeps going after that to talk about how most magic doesn't have ethical dilemmas like these, but it was still wild to see "prosperity magic is worse than love magic, actually" as a take. This is the kind of new drama I love to see introduced, because Witchblr's standard Discourse Wheel of the Year gets repetitive and boring after a while.

The Good

There's something to be gained from every book, and bits and pieces that I enjoyed. This section is about those.

The aesthetics of this book are top-notch. It is so fucking pretty while still being readable. I made this note several times across my sticky notes, so clearly I was thinking about this a lot.

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY. My little emergency management and response heart adores the emphasis overall on mundane safety. Between the safety warning in the sections on edible mixtures, the fire safety, the usage of Latin names to indicate specific plants, the precautions and contraindictions in every herb profile, knowing that it's not a medical text, essential oil safety and common sense, and separating magicals and medicinals and explaining the difference in dilutions and dosages and whatnot for each, this is what I would refer to as an incredibly safe book.

There is an ethics chapter that doesn't suck. There's an acknowledgement in the tools chapter that generalities aren't always true. Likewise, there's an acknowledgement that you might just not get along with some plants. These are good and healthy to include in a beginner book.

Among the author's various good takes, I want to quote the gender alignment section in the preamble leading up to the herbal compendium:

The term "gender," when applied to herbs in magickal workings, is not based upon our societal or scientific understanding of the word. Used as a classification, it is merely symbolic. It attempts to describe the attributes of the herb in a simple and clear term, but this sometimes fails when we attempt to apply the understanding of gender in the way it is often applied to people. I find it helpful to use terms such as alignment, disposition, or nature to better understand the role gender plays, as the term "gender" can be somewhat misleading in this circumstance. This is further complicated for those who speak gendered languages—the gender applied to the energy of herbs may not align with the gender attributed to the herb by the language.

Another very interesting take can be found regarding cleansing later in the book:

When working cleansing spells, I personally find it useful to use a combination of ingredients that contains both a cleansing herb and one of another intention—usually one that encourages or adds an energy, rather than one that removes energies. This serves to fill the void created by the purification, and I believe it to be particularly important for large-scale cleansings. You'll see this preference reflected throughout the recipes in the spells to come. You may also choose to return to the space after the cleansing has been performed and work positively charged spells to similarly fill the void.

Speaking of the spell compendium, let's talk about that, because that was one of my favorite parts of this book. There's common sense regarding spell disposal and the author is pro-banishing thanks to a haunting in the author's own life (which was documented on her YouTube channel while it was happening). I really appreciate the spell forms section (basically a prep guide for each form of spell used by the author) being so open to specifics being added later, it really helps that they're templates that can then be referred back to; I prefer this greatly to a specific spell and an essay's worth of substitutions. Even the spells in the spell compendium (which is broken down section-by-section, another thing I love) direct you to the base spell form earlier and provide examples of ingredients that the author enjoys using most.

Finally, while the bibliography is extensive (39 different books by nearly as many authors), the font is also very small so it only takes up two pages. The index, similarly, has small font so it doesn't add too much to the overall page count.

Overall, this is a straightforward, calm, and understanding approach to spell crafting and casting using plants. It's incredibly thorough for a beginning reader. It has an extremely patient tone, but I might be projecting based on watching the author's YouTube channel. This book is very specific about what it wants to be, and I believe it achieves that.

The Credits

The dividers I used in this post are made by me over on @jasper-graphics, even though this series of art deco ones apparently never saw the light of day.

The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft was written by Annabel Margaret "The Green Witch" and published by Page Street Publishing Co. The cover and book illustrations are also by Annabel Margaret, while the book design was courtesy of Kylie Alexander.

[jasper-book-stash]

Oh man, good luck with all of those calls and emails, I don't envy you for it. As for the review, uh, here it is! I wasn't very good at reviews back in 2021 (one could argue I'm still not good at them now), but I quite enjoyed it.

Jasper Reviews: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick

Full Title: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft

Author: Annabel Margaret

Overall Jasper Rating: 9 out of 10

This book is what The House Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock WISHES it could be. But before I get into that, let's talk about this book and its author.

Annabel Margaret is a witch that I knew about because I actually watch her videos on YouTube. One channel, The Green Witch, is focused on the same things that this book is focused on: plant-based seasonal witchcraft. Her other channel, Annabel Margaret, is less active but more focused on traveling and moving places. She has an incredibly calm and soothing voice, even when she gets excited about things. This is a book by a person who really does practice what they're writing about.

My guess at a target demographic is that this book is for a beginner witch who already believes in magic and knows they want to use plants in and connect with nature through their magic, who also loves working in the kitchen to make things. Most of the things in here can be made relatively easily based on the instructions, though you may have difficulties doing most of them if you are in a situation where your practice cannot be open or obvious.

Books I've read that are similar to this include The House Witch and The Green Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Grovedaughter Witchery and Pestlework by Bree NicGarran, and A Verdant Introduction by Anna Zollinger. This was better than both Arin Murphy-Hiscock's book, more focused on different spell prep types than Pestlework (while also having less premade mixes for each spell), and more magical than A Verdant Introduction (which was more medicinal). Overall it's quite similar to Grovedaughter Witchery but different enough that I feel comfortable recommending both rather than saying to get one over the other. I'd say to use Grovedaughter Witchery as an introduction to witchcraft and use this book as an introduction to spellwork.

With all of this said, let's get into the neutral, the bad, and the good.

The Neutral

This category is just broad strokes of information that is neither good nor bad, but worth noting for how the author approaches magic and writing about magic.

There are a lot of uses of the phrase "negativity" in the text without defining what that is, exactly. It assumes you already know what negativity is in a magical sense and want to get rid of it.

The author puts an emphasis on love spells requiring consent, and, interestingly, says the same thing for prosperity spells.

The author defines "herb" within the text as any plant used magically after explaining other ways that the word is used.

There is a strong focus on natural materials and crafting things from scratch.

"Respect" is the primary reason listed for snuffing out a flame rather than blowing it out, which...is an overall neutral thing, it's how the author works her magic.

Cleansing itself as a form of spell work isn't something I often see acknowledged in published books (that's more of a Tumblr nuance/discourse thing in my experience), but the author very much takes this approach. I think it's neat. We'll discuss this more later.

Now, the author adds gender alignments to the plant profiles in her book after a truly based take on such a thing, but I had the random ass thought of Why are we adding this as a category if all masculine herbs are air or fire and all feminine ones are earth or water? and I never recovered.

The Bad

If you know me or have seen literally any of my posts, you know that I love to bitch and complain. This is where I do that.

Spelling magic with a K is cringe and I will bite people on this hill. There are also a handful of editing errors and quite a bit of wasted space on the pages. And the back cover is peeling for some reason? It was doing that before I even started reading it.

While the chapter on intuition was fine overall, there was no mention that intuition is trained and prone to things like stereotyping and bias. And if you want to breathe out thoughts related to impulse and anxiety when using your intuition actively, using that same intuition to find stomach-sinking feelings is contradictory.

There is an entire chapter on intent which is...literally just energy work when you actually read it? I felt like this chapter could have been shorter, less meandery, or cut entirely because of how much you get told how to focus intention into materials elsewhere.

There's also a strong emphasis in one section on belief being completely and utterly required, which...reh. I don't agree with it. The author then talks more about how skepticism is good, but I feel like this could have been cut or shortened.

One of my notes is just "bitch, you good?" with a page number so I went to find it. Turns out, it was about spell impacts. After a bunch of the standard "you need consent" stuff about love spells, the author then talks about how prosperity spells also influence others' behavior and how it will always take away from someone else. The author even says:

While there are a number of ways to cast spells for love that do no harm, there are few ways to cast prosperity spells that do not ultimately deprive someone else. It is for this reason that we must give consideration to our aims and desires along with the impacts of our work. Only with care and caution should you attempt any spell that has the capacity to affect others.

And then it keeps going after that to talk about how most magic doesn't have ethical dilemmas like these, but it was still wild to see "prosperity magic is worse than love magic, actually" as a take. This is the kind of new drama I love to see introduced, because Witchblr's standard Discourse Wheel of the Year gets repetitive and boring after a while.

The Good

There's something to be gained from every book, and bits and pieces that I enjoyed. This section is about those.

The aesthetics of this book are top-notch. It is so fucking pretty while still being readable. I made this note several times across my sticky notes, so clearly I was thinking about this a lot.

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY. My little emergency management and response heart adores the emphasis overall on mundane safety. Between the safety warning in the sections on edible mixtures, the fire safety, the usage of Latin names to indicate specific plants, the precautions and contraindictions in every herb profile, knowing that it's not a medical text, essential oil safety and common sense, and separating magicals and medicinals and explaining the difference in dilutions and dosages and whatnot for each, this is what I would refer to as an incredibly safe book.

There is an ethics chapter that doesn't suck. There's an acknowledgement in the tools chapter that generalities aren't always true. Likewise, there's an acknowledgement that you might just not get along with some plants. These are good and healthy to include in a beginner book.

Among the author's various good takes, I want to quote the gender alignment section in the preamble leading up to the herbal compendium:

The term "gender," when applied to herbs in magickal workings, is not based upon our societal or scientific understanding of the word. Used as a classification, it is merely symbolic. It attempts to describe the attributes of the herb in a simple and clear term, but this sometimes fails when we attempt to apply the understanding of gender in the way it is often applied to people. I find it helpful to use terms such as alignment, disposition, or nature to better understand the role gender plays, as the term "gender" can be somewhat misleading in this circumstance. This is further complicated for those who speak gendered languages—the gender applied to the energy of herbs may not align with the gender attributed to the herb by the language.

Another very interesting take can be found regarding cleansing later in the book:

When working cleansing spells, I personally find it useful to use a combination of ingredients that contains both a cleansing herb and one of another intention—usually one that encourages or adds an energy, rather than one that removes energies. This serves to fill the void created by the purification, and I believe it to be particularly important for large-scale cleansings. You'll see this preference reflected throughout the recipes in the spells to come. You may also choose to return to the space after the cleansing has been performed and work positively charged spells to similarly fill the void.

Speaking of the spell compendium, let's talk about that, because that was one of my favorite parts of this book. There's common sense regarding spell disposal and the author is pro-banishing thanks to a haunting in the author's own life (which was documented on her YouTube channel while it was happening). I really appreciate the spell forms section (basically a prep guide for each form of spell used by the author) being so open to specifics being added later, it really helps that they're templates that can then be referred back to; I prefer this greatly to a specific spell and an essay's worth of substitutions. Even the spells in the spell compendium (which is broken down section-by-section, another thing I love) direct you to the base spell form earlier and provide examples of ingredients that the author enjoys using most.

Finally, while the bibliography is extensive (39 different books by nearly as many authors), the font is also very small so it only takes up two pages. The index, similarly, has small font so it doesn't add too much to the overall page count.

Overall, this is a straightforward, calm, and understanding approach to spell crafting and casting using plants. It's incredibly thorough for a beginning reader. It has an extremely patient tone, but I might be projecting based on watching the author's YouTube channel. This book is very specific about what it wants to be, and I believe it achieves that.

The Credits

The dividers I used in this post are made by me over on @jasper-graphics, even though this series of art deco ones apparently never saw the light of day.

The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft was written by Annabel Margaret "The Green Witch" and published by Page Street Publishing Co. The cover and book illustrations are also by Annabel Margaret, while the book design was courtesy of Kylie Alexander.

[jasper-book-stash]

I found it on Amazon, actually. I forgot when exactly I bought it, but I put up a review on another blog in October 2021, so...not sure what's going on there.

Jasper Reviews: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick

Full Title: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft

Author: Annabel Margaret

Overall Jasper Rating: 9 out of 10

This book is what The House Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock WISHES it could be. But before I get into that, let's talk about this book and its author.

Annabel Margaret is a witch that I knew about because I actually watch her videos on YouTube. One channel, The Green Witch, is focused on the same things that this book is focused on: plant-based seasonal witchcraft. Her other channel, Annabel Margaret, is less active but more focused on traveling and moving places. She has an incredibly calm and soothing voice, even when she gets excited about things. This is a book by a person who really does practice what they're writing about.

My guess at a target demographic is that this book is for a beginner witch who already believes in magic and knows they want to use plants in and connect with nature through their magic, who also loves working in the kitchen to make things. Most of the things in here can be made relatively easily based on the instructions, though you may have difficulties doing most of them if you are in a situation where your practice cannot be open or obvious.

Books I've read that are similar to this include The House Witch and The Green Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Grovedaughter Witchery and Pestlework by Bree NicGarran, and A Verdant Introduction by Anna Zollinger. This was better than both Arin Murphy-Hiscock's book, more focused on different spell prep types than Pestlework (while also having less premade mixes for each spell), and more magical than A Verdant Introduction (which was more medicinal). Overall it's quite similar to Grovedaughter Witchery but different enough that I feel comfortable recommending both rather than saying to get one over the other. I'd say to use Grovedaughter Witchery as an introduction to witchcraft and use this book as an introduction to spellwork.

With all of this said, let's get into the neutral, the bad, and the good.

The Neutral

This category is just broad strokes of information that is neither good nor bad, but worth noting for how the author approaches magic and writing about magic.

There are a lot of uses of the phrase "negativity" in the text without defining what that is, exactly. It assumes you already know what negativity is in a magical sense and want to get rid of it.

The author puts an emphasis on love spells requiring consent, and, interestingly, says the same thing for prosperity spells.

The author defines "herb" within the text as any plant used magically after explaining other ways that the word is used.

There is a strong focus on natural materials and crafting things from scratch.

"Respect" is the primary reason listed for snuffing out a flame rather than blowing it out, which...is an overall neutral thing, it's how the author works her magic.

Cleansing itself as a form of spell work isn't something I often see acknowledged in published books (that's more of a Tumblr nuance/discourse thing in my experience), but the author very much takes this approach. I think it's neat. We'll discuss this more later.

Now, the author adds gender alignments to the plant profiles in her book after a truly based take on such a thing, but I had the random ass thought of Why are we adding this as a category if all masculine herbs are air or fire and all feminine ones are earth or water? and I never recovered.

The Bad

If you know me or have seen literally any of my posts, you know that I love to bitch and complain. This is where I do that.

Spelling magic with a K is cringe and I will bite people on this hill. There are also a handful of editing errors and quite a bit of wasted space on the pages. And the back cover is peeling for some reason? It was doing that before I even started reading it.

While the chapter on intuition was fine overall, there was no mention that intuition is trained and prone to things like stereotyping and bias. And if you want to breathe out thoughts related to impulse and anxiety when using your intuition actively, using that same intuition to find stomach-sinking feelings is contradictory.

There is an entire chapter on intent which is...literally just energy work when you actually read it? I felt like this chapter could have been shorter, less meandery, or cut entirely because of how much you get told how to focus intention into materials elsewhere.

There's also a strong emphasis in one section on belief being completely and utterly required, which...reh. I don't agree with it. The author then talks more about how skepticism is good, but I feel like this could have been cut or shortened.

One of my notes is just "bitch, you good?" with a page number so I went to find it. Turns out, it was about spell impacts. After a bunch of the standard "you need consent" stuff about love spells, the author then talks about how prosperity spells also influence others' behavior and how it will always take away from someone else. The author even says:

While there are a number of ways to cast spells for love that do no harm, there are few ways to cast prosperity spells that do not ultimately deprive someone else. It is for this reason that we must give consideration to our aims and desires along with the impacts of our work. Only with care and caution should you attempt any spell that has the capacity to affect others.

And then it keeps going after that to talk about how most magic doesn't have ethical dilemmas like these, but it was still wild to see "prosperity magic is worse than love magic, actually" as a take. This is the kind of new drama I love to see introduced, because Witchblr's standard Discourse Wheel of the Year gets repetitive and boring after a while.

The Good

There's something to be gained from every book, and bits and pieces that I enjoyed. This section is about those.

The aesthetics of this book are top-notch. It is so fucking pretty while still being readable. I made this note several times across my sticky notes, so clearly I was thinking about this a lot.

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY. My little emergency management and response heart adores the emphasis overall on mundane safety. Between the safety warning in the sections on edible mixtures, the fire safety, the usage of Latin names to indicate specific plants, the precautions and contraindictions in every herb profile, knowing that it's not a medical text, essential oil safety and common sense, and separating magicals and medicinals and explaining the difference in dilutions and dosages and whatnot for each, this is what I would refer to as an incredibly safe book.

There is an ethics chapter that doesn't suck. There's an acknowledgement in the tools chapter that generalities aren't always true. Likewise, there's an acknowledgement that you might just not get along with some plants. These are good and healthy to include in a beginner book.

Among the author's various good takes, I want to quote the gender alignment section in the preamble leading up to the herbal compendium:

The term "gender," when applied to herbs in magickal workings, is not based upon our societal or scientific understanding of the word. Used as a classification, it is merely symbolic. It attempts to describe the attributes of the herb in a simple and clear term, but this sometimes fails when we attempt to apply the understanding of gender in the way it is often applied to people. I find it helpful to use terms such as alignment, disposition, or nature to better understand the role gender plays, as the term "gender" can be somewhat misleading in this circumstance. This is further complicated for those who speak gendered languages—the gender applied to the energy of herbs may not align with the gender attributed to the herb by the language.

Another very interesting take can be found regarding cleansing later in the book:

When working cleansing spells, I personally find it useful to use a combination of ingredients that contains both a cleansing herb and one of another intention—usually one that encourages or adds an energy, rather than one that removes energies. This serves to fill the void created by the purification, and I believe it to be particularly important for large-scale cleansings. You'll see this preference reflected throughout the recipes in the spells to come. You may also choose to return to the space after the cleansing has been performed and work positively charged spells to similarly fill the void.

Speaking of the spell compendium, let's talk about that, because that was one of my favorite parts of this book. There's common sense regarding spell disposal and the author is pro-banishing thanks to a haunting in the author's own life (which was documented on her YouTube channel while it was happening). I really appreciate the spell forms section (basically a prep guide for each form of spell used by the author) being so open to specifics being added later, it really helps that they're templates that can then be referred back to; I prefer this greatly to a specific spell and an essay's worth of substitutions. Even the spells in the spell compendium (which is broken down section-by-section, another thing I love) direct you to the base spell form earlier and provide examples of ingredients that the author enjoys using most.

Finally, while the bibliography is extensive (39 different books by nearly as many authors), the font is also very small so it only takes up two pages. The index, similarly, has small font so it doesn't add too much to the overall page count.

Overall, this is a straightforward, calm, and understanding approach to spell crafting and casting using plants. It's incredibly thorough for a beginning reader. It has an extremely patient tone, but I might be projecting based on watching the author's YouTube channel. This book is very specific about what it wants to be, and I believe it achieves that.

The Credits

The dividers I used in this post are made by me over on @jasper-graphics, even though this series of art deco ones apparently never saw the light of day.

The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft was written by Annabel Margaret "The Green Witch" and published by Page Street Publishing Co. The cover and book illustrations are also by Annabel Margaret, while the book design was courtesy of Kylie Alexander.

[jasper-book-stash]

Jasper Reviews: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick

Full Title: The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft

Author: Annabel Margaret

Overall Jasper Rating: 9 out of 10

This book is what The House Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock WISHES it could be. But before I get into that, let's talk about this book and its author.

Annabel Margaret is a witch that I knew about because I actually watch her videos on YouTube. One channel, The Green Witch, is focused on the same things that this book is focused on: plant-based seasonal witchcraft. Her other channel, Annabel Margaret, is less active but more focused on traveling and moving places. She has an incredibly calm and soothing voice, even when she gets excited about things. This is a book by a person who really does practice what they're writing about.

My guess at a target demographic is that this book is for a beginner witch who already believes in magic and knows they want to use plants in and connect with nature through their magic, who also loves working in the kitchen to make things. Most of the things in here can be made relatively easily based on the instructions, though you may have difficulties doing most of them if you are in a situation where your practice cannot be open or obvious.

Books I've read that are similar to this include The House Witch and The Green Witch by Arin Murphy-Hiscock, Grovedaughter Witchery and Pestlework by Bree NicGarran, and A Verdant Introduction by Anna Zollinger. This was better than both Arin Murphy-Hiscock's book, more focused on different spell prep types than Pestlework (while also having less premade mixes for each spell), and more magical than A Verdant Introduction (which was more medicinal). Overall it's quite similar to Grovedaughter Witchery but different enough that I feel comfortable recommending both rather than saying to get one over the other. I'd say to use Grovedaughter Witchery as an introduction to witchcraft and use this book as an introduction to spellwork.

With all of this said, let's get into the neutral, the bad, and the good.

The Neutral

This category is just broad strokes of information that is neither good nor bad, but worth noting for how the author approaches magic and writing about magic.

There are a lot of uses of the phrase "negativity" in the text without defining what that is, exactly. It assumes you already know what negativity is in a magical sense and want to get rid of it.

The author puts an emphasis on love spells requiring consent, and, interestingly, says the same thing for prosperity spells.

The author defines "herb" within the text as any plant used magically after explaining other ways that the word is used.

There is a strong focus on natural materials and crafting things from scratch.

"Respect" is the primary reason listed for snuffing out a flame rather than blowing it out, which...is an overall neutral thing, it's how the author works her magic.

Cleansing itself as a form of spell work isn't something I often see acknowledged in published books (that's more of a Tumblr nuance/discourse thing in my experience), but the author very much takes this approach. I think it's neat. We'll discuss this more later.

Now, the author adds gender alignments to the plant profiles in her book after a truly based take on such a thing, but I had the random ass thought of Why are we adding this as a category if all masculine herbs are air or fire and all feminine ones are earth or water? and I never recovered.

The Bad

If you know me or have seen literally any of my posts, you know that I love to bitch and complain. This is where I do that.

Spelling magic with a K is cringe and I will bite people on this hill. There are also a handful of editing errors and quite a bit of wasted space on the pages. And the back cover is peeling for some reason? It was doing that before I even started reading it.

While the chapter on intuition was fine overall, there was no mention that intuition is trained and prone to things like stereotyping and bias. And if you want to breathe out thoughts related to impulse and anxiety when using your intuition actively, using that same intuition to find stomach-sinking feelings is contradictory.

There is an entire chapter on intent which is...literally just energy work when you actually read it? I felt like this chapter could have been shorter, less meandery, or cut entirely because of how much you get told how to focus intention into materials elsewhere.

There's also a strong emphasis in one section on belief being completely and utterly required, which...reh. I don't agree with it. The author then talks more about how skepticism is good, but I feel like this could have been cut or shortened.

One of my notes is just "bitch, you good?" with a page number so I went to find it. Turns out, it was about spell impacts. After a bunch of the standard "you need consent" stuff about love spells, the author then talks about how prosperity spells also influence others' behavior and how it will always take away from someone else. The author even says:

While there are a number of ways to cast spells for love that do no harm, there are few ways to cast prosperity spells that do not ultimately deprive someone else. It is for this reason that we must give consideration to our aims and desires along with the impacts of our work. Only with care and caution should you attempt any spell that has the capacity to affect others.

And then it keeps going after that to talk about how most magic doesn't have ethical dilemmas like these, but it was still wild to see "prosperity magic is worse than love magic, actually" as a take. This is the kind of new drama I love to see introduced, because Witchblr's standard Discourse Wheel of the Year gets repetitive and boring after a while.

The Good

There's something to be gained from every book, and bits and pieces that I enjoyed. This section is about those.

The aesthetics of this book are top-notch. It is so fucking pretty while still being readable. I made this note several times across my sticky notes, so clearly I was thinking about this a lot.

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY. My little emergency management and response heart adores the emphasis overall on mundane safety. Between the safety warning in the sections on edible mixtures, the fire safety, the usage of Latin names to indicate specific plants, the precautions and contraindictions in every herb profile, knowing that it's not a medical text, essential oil safety and common sense, and separating magicals and medicinals and explaining the difference in dilutions and dosages and whatnot for each, this is what I would refer to as an incredibly safe book.

There is an ethics chapter that doesn't suck. There's an acknowledgement in the tools chapter that generalities aren't always true. Likewise, there's an acknowledgement that you might just not get along with some plants. These are good and healthy to include in a beginner book.

Among the author's various good takes, I want to quote the gender alignment section in the preamble leading up to the herbal compendium:

The term "gender," when applied to herbs in magickal workings, is not based upon our societal or scientific understanding of the word. Used as a classification, it is merely symbolic. It attempts to describe the attributes of the herb in a simple and clear term, but this sometimes fails when we attempt to apply the understanding of gender in the way it is often applied to people. I find it helpful to use terms such as alignment, disposition, or nature to better understand the role gender plays, as the term "gender" can be somewhat misleading in this circumstance. This is further complicated for those who speak gendered languages—the gender applied to the energy of herbs may not align with the gender attributed to the herb by the language.

Another very interesting take can be found regarding cleansing later in the book:

When working cleansing spells, I personally find it useful to use a combination of ingredients that contains both a cleansing herb and one of another intention—usually one that encourages or adds an energy, rather than one that removes energies. This serves to fill the void created by the purification, and I believe it to be particularly important for large-scale cleansings. You'll see this preference reflected throughout the recipes in the spells to come. You may also choose to return to the space after the cleansing has been performed and work positively charged spells to similarly fill the void.

Speaking of the spell compendium, let's talk about that, because that was one of my favorite parts of this book. There's common sense regarding spell disposal and the author is pro-banishing thanks to a haunting in the author's own life (which was documented on her YouTube channel while it was happening). I really appreciate the spell forms section (basically a prep guide for each form of spell used by the author) being so open to specifics being added later, it really helps that they're templates that can then be referred back to; I prefer this greatly to a specific spell and an essay's worth of substitutions. Even the spells in the spell compendium (which is broken down section-by-section, another thing I love) direct you to the base spell form earlier and provide examples of ingredients that the author enjoys using most.

Finally, while the bibliography is extensive (39 different books by nearly as many authors), the font is also very small so it only takes up two pages. The index, similarly, has small font so it doesn't add too much to the overall page count.

Overall, this is a straightforward, calm, and understanding approach to spell crafting and casting using plants. It's incredibly thorough for a beginning reader. It has an extremely patient tone, but I might be projecting based on watching the author's YouTube channel. This book is very specific about what it wants to be, and I believe it achieves that.

The Credits

The dividers I used in this post are made by me over on @jasper-graphics, even though this series of art deco ones apparently never saw the light of day.

The Green Witch's Guide To Herbal Magick: A Handbook Of Green Hearthcraft And Plant-Based Spellcraft was written by Annabel Margaret "The Green Witch" and published by Page Street Publishing Co. The cover and book illustrations are also by Annabel Margaret, while the book design was courtesy of Kylie Alexander.

[jasper-book-stash]

June 2025 Reading Wrap-Up

June continues the whole pattern of "it just keeps coming and it keeps on coming". Despite this, I managed to read twelve books this month, including The Orphic Hymns. It felt a little strange trying to give that one a 1 to 10 rating because of how many layers of translation and interpretation went into it, so it's absent from the list below.

1/10 - Why Did They Publish This?

None applicable.

2/10 - Trash

None applicable.

3/10 - Meh

Runes: An Introduction | Kim Farnell

So...this isn't the worst book ever. But it's also not good at all. It's just...deeply mediocre, but then there are also a bunch of standard-issue problems in it (no fucking sources cited, misuse of "smudging" and "shaman", et cetera) that I'm honestly just kind of bored. I'm keeping it as a reference for runes as needed, but I don't recommend it. Also the texture of the paper and cover both were bad and cheap and I hated them.

Random fucking guess at the target demographic: Someone who has heard of magic but knows nothing about it and has never once opened another book on witchcraft but really likes very specific and particular instructions.

4 to 6/10 - Mid-Tier

Fortune Telling With Playing Cards | Jonathan Dee

This was a deeply mediocre book. The first portion, the introduction, was just me going "cite your sources, where are you hearing this" and the middle portion was just "okay so this is a standard guidebook to the cards and trying to cement meanings" and then the rest was just "why are you making this tarot, are you okay sir". It will remain on my shelves as a reference book, but it wasn't really enjoyable. 4 out of 10.

Random fucking guess at the target demographic: Someone who has dabbled in tarot but got bored and wants to just take that and copy-paste their experiences with tarot over to playing cards.

7 to 8/10 - Good With Caveats

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly | Anthony Bourdain

The caveat here is that I did zone out and skim through some parts, but other than that, I quite enjoyed this book. I'm not exactly a stranger to the realities of restauranting, but I'm not familiar with it either, so this was a very helpful read. Ultimately I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, but I could be convinced to bump it fully to 10/10 if someone mentioned wanting to open a restaurant within hearing distance of me. Also, there was no bumble-assing with recipes to break the flow of the memoir.

Five-Star Stranger | Kat Tang

This was an incredibly compelling and quite short (230 pages) read, but there were plenty of parts that I glazed over on my way through. Particularly the handful of sex scenes. And when I made it to the last chapter, all I said was "That's how it ends?" It certainly was one way to end the story, but not quite the ending I had been looking for. Despite that, very good book. 7/10, will be keeping.

Mythic Plants: Potions And Poisons From The Gardens Of The Gods | Ellen Zachos

So, I've been dealing with this book for two straight days, and I've put together my thoughts. Overall, it is a good resource for the Greek mythology of particular plants if you don't have Internet and can't just check theoi.com for the same information. But a gardening book this is not. Behold the Amazon listing:

Observe the final paragraph:

Some of those plants were real and still exist today; some of them are mythological, with powers we can only imagine. This book will focus on how the Ancient Greeks used plants in their lives and loves and conquests - focusing particularly on ones we can cultivate today. Includes tips throughout for bringing these ancient plants into your garden.

It does not. At least, not in the way it's supposed to and the way you would assume it does based on the blurb. At most, it gives you the Latin name of the plants and occasionally (I would say in less than half of the entries) mentions things like hardness zone and usually just tells you to go to your "local garden center" to pick some up. Likewise, there are no recipes for the potions/poisons mentioned in the title of the book. It's just a book on plant mythology, nothing more than that.

In the introduction before we get into the plants, the author mistakenly lists Persephone instead of Demeter as the goddess of harvests and on the Olympian family tree. You'd think that she would have picked that up, especially with the focus on the Hymn to Demeter in later entries in the book.

And it was a fucking flashbang to open a book published in 2025 and find THREE references to Harry Potter on pages 9, 11, and 43. Two of them were in the mandrake section and the last was in the dittany section.

There's also the misuse of the word "shaman" as usual in here, but that's kind of a given because everyone fucking misuses it. Finally, I miss the in-text citations that I was spoiled with in other books. Especially with some of the stranger claims.

I do, however, appreciate the strong focus on safety and the author clearly knows her shit about plants. Based on what I've seen on the author's website, this feels like someone stretching into mythology for their compendiums of plants rather than someone starting from mythology and narrowing down to plants.

Overall, I will give this book a 7 out of 10. Very interesting read, but less interesting when you've already got a lot of it researched. I will be keeping this for reference when my Internet sucks too bad to use theoi.com.

Botanical Curses And Poisons: The Shadow-Lives Of Plants | Fez Inkwright

So, I usually love Fez Inkwright's works, and I enjoyed this one too, but there were a few things that made my hackles raise. For one thing, the author leans heavily on Murray's debunked "witch cult hypothesis" during the intro chapters, and I'm skeptical of using Robert fucking Graves as a source (for good reason). There are several instances of using "shaman" when not referring to actual shamanism, along with multiple instances of using "American Indian" despite also using Indigenous and Native American properly.

The organization also just...sucks ass. Out of everything, that's the most annoying part. You'd think that the plants in the "Plants A to Z" section would be listed in alphabetical order, yes? Well, sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not. Some are sorted based on overall grouping (such as the section about fungi), some are alphabetical based on the first word of their chosen common name, and some are based on the second or third word and the first is added after a comma. I'm just glad that the Latin names are also frequently used.

Despite these problems, I will still give it a 7 out of 10. A fun read, though I'm now more skeptical of the origins of some of the folklore. Some are more science-focused and some are more folklore-focused, but pretty much every entry has both.

9/10 - Very Very Good

Divine Dirt: The Art Of Using Dirt In Magic, Ritual & Spellcraft | Charity L Bedell

So, despite a few parts in this book where my eyebrows decided to adventure around my forehead, I fucking adored this book for being so damn specific. The author does not teach you how to do magic, the author just teaches you how to use DIRT for your own magic. Just be aware that there are some sections you will be rolling your eyes at.

Random fucking guess at the target demographic: Someone who is already practicing some form of witchcraft but really wants to get into dirt as a magical tool and loves exploring the nuance of an easily-overlooked thing.

Weather Magic: Witchery, Science, Lore | Debra L Burris

This book tricked me into taking Storm Spotter Training again. There is so much science stuff in this book, which is very good. The exercises, crafts, and divination recommendations are extremely thematic, and it doesn't feel like you could just swap them around. Having said that, we experienced some chakra appropriation fuckery in the rainbow chapter and I started wondering why the hell some of these chapters were separated as they were (for example, it went from the rain chapter to snow to thunderstorm to lightning, and hail was a subchapter within the thunderstorm chapter), but I still came out of it with the same spinning head that regular weather training does to me.

Random fucking guess at the target demographic: Someone who is already practicing some form of witchcraft but wants to practice a form of magic with a strong scientific backing. Or if you want to take Storm Spotter Training but are nervous about it. It is THOROUGH.

A Sign Of Affection, volumes 2, 3, and 4 | Suu Morishita [Young Adult]

After reading further, I feel comfortable putting this as a YA series in my listings. So! Like I said for last month's wrap-up, I greatly enjoyed this, and it's interesting to see just how much the characters interact with our main protagonist Yuki and how the writers portray her deafness. It's very true to life. I will be continuing this series, though I'll be putting it on hold for a bit because another shoujo series I was reading just got two more volumes in Missouri Evergreen.

10/10 - Unironically Recommend To Everyone

None applicable.

[jasper-book-stash]

Woven Roots: Recovering the Healing Plant Traditions of Jews and Their Neighbors in Eastern Europe

A comprehensive guide to the medicinal plants and folk healers of Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement—mapping ancestral folkways, herbal traditions, and shared legacies of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors Includes a materia medica of healing plants and their traditional applications A companion guide to Ashkenazi Herbalism, Woven Roots explores the rich history of plant-based medicine and folk healing traditions of Eastern Europe from 1600 through the present. Authors Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel map the interwoven histories of the peoples of the Pale of Settlement, revealing untold stories of cooperation, shared knowledge, and mutual aid. The book shares how the people in this region—so often associated with conflict—often thrived in deep and reciprocal relationships with the land and each other. Tending and relying on the natural world, caring for their communities, and transmitting medicinal legacies from generation to generation, the healers of the Pale served as profound points of connection, interdependence, and life-sustaining knowledge. The authors offer illuminating—and surprising—original research on:

The pivotal but historically overlooked contributions of women folk healers

Deep, ancestrally rooted traditions of care for land and nature among Ashkenazi Jews

The rich cultural exchanges among Jews, Muslims, and Christians that allowed life in the Pale to flourish

Newly discovered recipes

Enduring legacies of mutual aid and community interdependence

How long-lost links between Eastern and Western folk knowledge can shed new light on your heritage and ancestral connections

Traditional magical practices of the Ashkenazim

This book includes an illustrated materia medica with plant names in Yiddish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and more. Informed by years of field and academic research, Woven Roots recovers the legacies of Jewish healers beyond myth, offering insights into the healing wisdom and interethnic cultural exchanges among marginalized groups in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

BUY YOUR COPY

[jasper-book-stash]

My book on aromanticism and asexuality comes out in a month! Shout-out to my publishers for just... giving me free rein to ramble about:

How amatonormativity hurts absolutely everyone

Why there are so many nonbinary and gender non-conforming aspecs

Why asexual awareness is essential in pushing back against incel culture (because men and boys deserve to know that manhood is not defined by sexual desire or prowess)

Why coming out as aspec can be so incredibly complicated, espeically for aspecs of colour

Advice from aspecs on how to navigate sex and relationships as an ace and/or aro person

A really wonderful bunch of stories from aspecs on what their non-normative relationships and families look like, from queerplatonic partners to poly aspecs to best friends raising kids together

How refusing amatonormativity can help us fight the loneliness epidemic, by encouraging people not to retreat into two-person units and instead invest in multiple close relationships of every kind

What steps we need to take to challenge aspec discrimination in medicine and the law

Why all you aspec people out there are an indispensible, revolutionary force that helps us all explore and create new models of love, relationship and family

So uh please do check it out if you think it might be up your street (or just because it'd really, really annoy a certain children's author who's decided aphobia is the new big thing)

[jasper-book-stash]

May 2025 Reading Wrap-Up

I spent most of this month chipping through one book between various problems going on. And then several books through various, worse problems going on.

1/10 - Why Did They Publish This?

None applicable.

2/10 - Trash

None applicable.

3/10 - Meh

None applicable.

4 to 6/10 - Mid-Tier

Joy At Work: Organizing Your Professional Life | Marie Kondo, Scott Sonenshein

So, this book sucked and didn't suck to a far lesser extent than it sucked.

For the most part, in the Marie Kondo portions (except when talking about specific other people) Marie will use a lot of "we/us" and "me/I", while Scott will use a lot of "you" (direct you, not general you) and "he/she" in the narration instead.

Another thing that got me about this book is that it's...privileged, I guess is the word. The example people and the authors are all well-off enough that they can just quit their jobs and work solely because they want to work in whatever field, rather than having to keep an eye out for making sure they can cover all of their bills.

It also has a pretty heavy focus early on about making more money for the company being a motivator for tidying up around your work space, which also puts me off.

Most of this book was the Scott asshole. Ultimately, I think it comes down to this: The ex-Silicon Valley tech bro who's now a professor should not have been involved in the writing of this book. He was grindset-focused rather than paying attention to Marie Kondo's own lessons in the book.

Overall, 4 out of 10. There are some helpful things in here, but it's not worth it overall. Read Marie Kondo's other books on tidying instead.

7 to 8/10 - Good With Caveats

The Dharma Of Star Wars | Matthew Bortolin

So firstly I want to say that this book is actually meant for fans of Star Wars who are interested in a Buddhist analysis of episodes one through six, and that it was published in 2005 (well before most modern Star Wars stuff, obviously). My passing knowledge of Star Wars via the LEGO adaptation of it and pop culture understanding via Tumblr memes and shitposts managed to get me through it, but this was still a hefty little book that I struggled to get through. Regardless, I have come away from it with a better understanding of Buddhism, so...I guess I win anyways. Ultimately I would rank this as a 7 out of 10.

Devout: An Anthology Of Angels | Freydis Moon, Dorian Yosef Weber, Angela Sun, Ian Haramaki, Tyler Battaglia, Daniel Marie James, Morgan Dante, Cas Trudeau, Aurelio Loren, Rae Novotny, Rafael Nicolas, Emily Hoffman, Quinton Li

DISCLAIMER: Watch this video about Freydis Moon, consider it required watching because of all of the brownfacing.

If you like angels in a really horny way and don't mind a lot of heavy themes, this is the anthology for you. Each work has its associated content warnings at the top of the chapter so you can skip ones that don't interest you. It's mostly stories, but there are also poems and a few pieces of art. Overall, I give this an 8 out of 10.

9/10 - Very Very Good

Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, volume 3 | Katsura Ise, Takuma Yokata

Yes, I'm continuing this series, and yes, I still love it. Honestly I'm living for the drama.

A Sign Of Affection, volume 1 | Suu Morishita

This is a series that I started because I saw it recommended in a BookTube "what I read this month/quarter/year" whatever video and it seemed interesting. Deaf characters aren't something I often see portrayed in manga, and the narrative respected the female main character and didn't shortcut past any of the realistic problems she would have.

10/10 - Unironically Recommend To Everyone

None applicable.

[jasper-book-stash]

I saw this book entitled "Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask" by Mary Siisip Genuisz and i thought oh I HAVE to read that. The author is Anishinaabe and the book is all about Anishinaabe teachings of the ways of the plants.

Going from the idiotic, Eurocentric, doomerist colonialism apologia of that "Cambridge companion to the anthropocene" book, to the clarity and reasonableness of THIS book, is giving me whiplash just about.

I read like 130 pages without even realizing, I couldn't stop! What a treasure trove of knowledge of the ways of the plants!

Most of them are not my plants, since it is a different ecosystem entirely (which gives me a really strikingly lonely feeling? I didn't know I had developed such a kinship with my plants!) but the knowledge of symbiosis as permeating all things including humans—similar to what Weeds, Guardians of the Soil called "Nature's Togetherness Law"—is exactly what we need more of, exactly what we need to teach and promote to others, exactly what we need to heal our planet.

She has a lot of really interesting information on how knowledge is created and passed down in cultures that use oral tradition. The stories and teachings she includes are a mix of those directly passed down by her teacher through a very old heritage of knowledge holders, stories with a newer origin, and a couple that have an unknown origin and (I think?) may not even be "authentically" Native American at all, but that she found to be truthful or useful in some way. She likes many "introduced" plants and is fascinated by their stories and how they came here. (She even says that Kudzu would not be invasive if we understood its virtues and used it the way the Chinese always have, which is exactly what I've been saying!!!)

She seems a bit on the chaotic end of the spectrum in regards to tradition, even though she takes tradition very seriously—she says the way the knowledge of medicinal and otherwise useful plants has been built, is that a medicine person's responsibility is not simply to pass along teachings, but to test and elaborate upon the existing ones. It is a lot similar to the scientific method, I would call it a scientific method. Her way of seeing it really made me understand the aliveness of tradition and how there is opportunity, even necessity, for new traditions based upon new ecological relationships and new cultural connections to the land.

I was gut punched on page 15 when she says that we have to be careful to take care of the Earth and all its creatures, because if human civilization destroys the biosphere the rocks and winds will be left all alone to grieve for us.

What a striking contrast to the sad, cruel ideas in the Cambridge companion of the Anthropocene, where humans are some kind of disease upon the Earth that oppresses and "colonizes" everything else...!...The Earth would GRIEVE for us!

We are not separate from every other thing. We have to learn this. If I can pass along these ideas to y'all through my silly little posts, I will have lived well.

[jasper-book-stash]

My Unicorn Library

A list of the resources I own for unicorn folklore, mythology, and magic. Divided into different sections for easy access. If you have any I missed, please let me know! Under the cut I explain more about the books and why they are good/not great/trash.

The Great:

The Natural History of Unicorns – Chris Lavers

The Book of the Mythical Unicorn – Vakasha Brenman and Alfonso Colasuonno

The Unicorn Tapestries – Margaret B. Freeman

Unicorn Magic – Tess Whitehurst

Unicornis – Michael Green

The Helpful:

A Complete Guide to Heraldry – Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

Llewellyn’s Little Book of Unicorns – Angela Wix

The Unicorn: A Mythological Observation – Robert Brown

Unicorn Magick – Lisa Papez (Youtube video)

How to Believe in Unicorns – Celestial Café Podcast (Youtube video)

Unicorn Sight – Elizabeth Barette (Spell on Llewellyn’s site)

The Fun: (Just light, fun books for unicorn lovers)

For Unicorn Lovers Only – Penelope Gwynne

The Unicorn Handbook – Carolyn Turgeon

Unicorn Your Life – Mary Flannery

Unicornucopa – Caitlyn Doyle (this one even has some cute spells!)

The Little Book of Unicorns – Orange Hippo! (this one even has some cute spells!)

The Meh:

Unicorn Rising – Calista

Unicorns – Skye Alexander

The Trash:

Anything by Diana Cooper

Anything by Flavia Kate Peters

the Treasure of the Unicorn – Ted Andrews

Unicorn Magic – Kitty Bishop

The Great:

The Natural History of Unicorns – Chris Lavers: Great source for the myth and history of the unicorn. Including dissecting the New Age view of the unicorn.

The Book of the Mythical Unicorn – Vakasha Brenman and Alfonso Colasuonno: So much history and all neatly organized by region. Some woo, but mostly legends and folklore.

The Unicorn Tapestries – Margaret B. Freeman: Focuses on the Unicorn Tapestries, but the book is huge and filled with interesting info about the folklore and beliefs around the unicorn.

Unicorn Magic – Tess Whitehurst: I doubted very much where I should put this one, in great or in helpful. But in the end, if you want to include unicorns into your magical practice, this is the book I would recommend. Not all of it is great. Whitehurst does have some New Age beliefs and like in most Llewellyn books there is some appropriation (chakra’s), but I have found the exercises to be invaluable. This book was what kickstarted my practice.

Unicornis – Michael Green: A “discovered fieldguide” dedicated to the unicorn. Gorgeous art and storytelling. Comparable to the Faery books of Brian Froud.

The Helpful

A Complete Guide to Heraldry – Arthur Charles Fox-Davies: Good source on the historical views of the unicorn, not only in the context of heraldry. Fascinating to read.

Llewellyn’s Little Book of Unicorns – Angela Wix: It is not easy finding books on unicorns from a witchcraft perspective. This book was fun to read and had some interesting correspondences, exercises, and spellwork in it. It’s not great, and as always there are chakra’s in the book (because Llewellyn) but it did help me a lot as an inspiration.

The Unicorn: A Mythological Observation – Robert Brown: A book from 1881! Interesting read, but very much influenced by the times and in places no longer accurate.

Unicorn Magick – Lisa Papez (Youtube video): Lisa talks about her favourite tools and books when it comes to practicing unicorn magic

How to Believe in Unicorns – Celestial Café Podcast (Youtube video): Two witches who practice unicorn magic discuss their views, where they differ and where they are the same. Very interesting!

The Meh:

Unicorn Rising – Calista: Okay, the book itself is not trash. It’s just not really about unicorns. It’s a pretty descent self help book, with interesting meditations, but if you’re looking for unicorn magic of inspiration this book isn’t useful for you.

Unicorns – Skye Alexander: Look, the book is… okay. It’s just not really deep, and won’t tell your anything you didn’t already know. It’s biased, like most Skye Alexander books, and I’m just not a fan.

The Trash:

Diana Cooper: Books are full on New Age drivel, like equating unicorns to angels, and stating that they come from the ninth, most pure of course, dimension. Lots of Christlight and other “Christ” references. It is a headache to read and honestly has nothing to do with unicorns. Just one demonstration:

Flavia Kate Peters: Holy appropriation, Batman! Again, heavily New Age and equating unicorns to angels. Calls herself a “Faery Shaman”.

The Treasure of the Unicorn: If I have to read “the unicorn horn is a phallic symbol” one more time I am going to scream. It was torture to finish this book. Some interesting points like Storytelling as Ritual, but to be honest, it wasn’t worth it.

Unicorn Magic – Kitty Bishop: This person trained under Flavia Kate Peters and it shows. Same New Age beliefs repeated and very little expanded upon.