#the day history and english teachers spend a morsel of their time researching actual history is the day i die

[luniise-kel]

i think english teachers should also learn history like idk i think knowing the historical meaning behind the words used in literature is important and the kind of values held during that period could inform the theme of the story idk maybe itll help with people thinking romeo and juliet is a romance story (its such a clear story about how society treats people and pedophilia but bc its old, ppl think all people back then did pedophilia bc short life span)

[aboxthecolourofheartache]

Ten Books to Know Me:

@chubsthehamster put out a "participate if you want to" call, and I fucking love books, so why not! 1. Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke - Read this first in high school and it rewired my brain. Dense, intricate, a November day of a book, it is about the inequities of class, race, gender, and also about the dry stone wall down the lane and its intimacy with the ivy that's grown over it for the last century. There are magicians and academic confrontations.

2. Food in England, by Dorothy Hartley - Read this a year out of undergrad. This is the book that convinced me that I could actually do something worthwhile with my interest in history. It was also fundamental in kicking a few chunks out of my ivory tower, but that's probably a personal take-away rather than anything essential to the book. Learn a few hundred small practicalities that may or may not be applicable to modern life; you decide.

3. Sabriel, by Garth Nix - The first book that spoke to baby's latent goth tendencies. The worldbuilding still lives in the back of my head. Made me interested in WWI history. Read it in middle school, I think? It was such a breath of fresh air, and I admired the protagonist and her self-discipline and self-reliance so much. Probably the first book that made me really worry whether the characters would survive until the end, and boy howdy was that formative. Zombies, quests to save fathers, learning that the legacy you thought was a burden is actually your calling.

4. Ombria in Shadow, by Patricia A. McKillip - Read in undergrad, I think? I reread it a couple times a year. It's a go-to story for when I need something comforting and decadent. I love the gauzy quality of the worldbuilding, the understated approach to very real-world dangers. A royal bastard, a former royal mistress, and a sorceress' apprentice race to protect a child king and save the and the living soul of a city.

5. The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, et al. - This story got me through my late teens and early twenties. Exactly the right flavor of tragedy to grab my brain and shake it like a maraca; fundamentally changed how I look at stories and narratives. Person-shaped cosmic mechanism denies personhood, falls face first into the hole he's been digging for himself for a billion years, hitting every consequence on the way down, and finds a morsel of peace at the end.

6. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異), by Pu Songling (蒲松齡) - I read this first while doing research for a fanfic and came away hungry for every bit of "classic" Chinese literature in English translation I could find. I've always had a fondness for supernatural anecdotes (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, by WB Yeats, etc), but this is on the list because it was the initial experience in an ongoing foray into classic and modern East and Southeast Asian literature.

7. Underland, by Robert Macfarlane - Read this a couple years ago. Everything you ever and never wanted to know about caves and being under the earth. The texture of Macfarlane's prose is unlike anything else, and he spends 500 pages leading you in and out of the dark.

8. Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett - This is my compromise instead of just listing every Terry Pratchett book. I read this when I was 12, and I mean it in earnest when I say it shaped how I think to this day. Pratchett's work is a load-bearing beam in my brain. Another grey book, but also lilac.

9. A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn - Okay look, LOOK, I know what you're thinking, but I read this when I was a teenager living in an extremely conservative pocket of a very liberal state. It made me think, which I was good at avoiding because school came easy to me and I usually didn't have to engage my brain at all to have the right answers. I wish with all my heart that I could write to the teacher who assigned it, because it was the very first time anyone had ever made me read history outside a history textbook. I resented that man so much at the time, but I owe him my current career.

10. Stiff, by Mary Roach - Read this as a teen and finally got answers about death I hadn't gotten in a lifetime of religious education. I think I actually snuck it into Mass, because I have a distinct memory of cramming it between the cushion and arm of a pew. Sparked an interest in death and human remains that lead me closer to where I am today.

Please consider yourself tagged if you'd like to participate! And tag me back so I can add more books to my tbr list, please! <3