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Learning Not to DrownLearning Not to Drown by Anna Shinoda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An account of a young soul trapped in a tiny world.

I might have built this book up a bit too much for myself in the beginning. I don’t really know why, but the first chapters made me imagine something really horrific happening, and it made me hesitant about taking it down from my bookshelf for a long time… Because of that for the first half of it I was swimming in this ‘is that it?’ confusion, and it made more sense only towards the very end. I think this book gave me an opportunity to remind myself how for a lot of people even things that seem little and insignificant to me can be real nightmares. That there are a lot of people who are trapped in very small worlds, with no one to get them out.
I actually liked that this book focused on not painting things in black and white, even though I personally tend to. Even though I felt like not a single person reacts or relates to things like I would in their place, I can relate to loving people who try to break your life in pieces and learning how to get yourself out.
I also think that the writing is quite good, though I probably would’ve preferred it if some scenes and issues were explore a bit more deeply. I think this is one of those books where it makes a lot of sense to read it once, and re-read it right after, from the new perspective.

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The impression I get from the therapy I’ve been going to these few months… Is like having a huge mess in your very long hair after you’ve slept on a giant piece of gum, and trying to untangle it by tugging on one hair at a time… And I guess I sort of imagined it be more like chopping it all off.

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No matter how many times I’ve told myself in the past to remember that ‘if you feel like your bag is uncharacteristically light, your wallet must be not in it,’ I still get caught by it…

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I lived my life entirely unaware of YA and its trends, but after this year of subscribing to boxes there’s now a whole list of YA book series I vehemently don’t want to have anything to do with, even without reading them myself, even though they appear on my instagram feed every single day. It is because they seem so popular that I had to open goodreads pages to see if I would want to read them too, and after reading reviews and seeing what they were about… all I got was ‘I don’t understand humans and I’m not sure I want to’ whiplash, which sent me looking for boxes that would focus on something else.

Unfortunately, they were not easy to find. Most of those that do exist don’t ship outside US. Or don’t even include bookish items, which does take out half the fun. The Bookish Box seemed like a great choice at first, because they have an adult option, but soon enough I found out that not only the adult books are unrelated to monthly themes of their boxes, they are more often than not contemporary fiction paperbacks (and all those I received were by female authors, and at least one of the books I received was actually YA disguised as an adult novel). I just couldn’t see the reason to create an adult option if the book included would be completely unrelated, and all of the items and t-shirts would still be focused on YA fandoms.

I’d also like to confess that I find it difficult to keep my negative opinions on the fandoms to myself. Almost every subscription box is having a ‘special box’ for the sequel of The Cruel Prince that is coming out, and they keep showing up in my feed talking about how much they loved it, and I feel like I need to clench my teeth to not write them ‘But I kind of thought it was disgusting and I don’t understand why are you acting like everyone should be hyped about it.’ (And this one was actually one of those I did read, because it was in a box last year.) On one hand, I know in my head that commenting on someone’s post to say ‘But I hate this thing you like’ is a stupid thing to do, but on the other… I kind of wish people who provide a ‘service’ like these boxes would consider opposing opinions as well. As in, as a subscriber, I would like to be able to kindly ask for them to stop only including items related to a small selection of fandoms (ACOTAR, Raven Cycle, Six of Crows, Shatter Me, etc.) and focus on something else. But as usual, I have to come to terms with the fact that my opinion will be a minority no one would care about. The clear answer would be to look for different people and services, but the selection is just not there… If you want to get pretty special editions of newly released books with goods – you’ll have to deal with people hyping out about and pushing to you a lot of fandoms you dislike. You want to have more freedom of genre selection – resign to choosing book-only subscriptions and likely older paperbacks.

Another subscription box just announced an adult fantasy option, and I for sure will try it out, but the first box is yet to arrive, so I can’t really say anything.

Also, sadly enough, 2 out of 4 of the boxes I subscribe to right now have announced their November themes and after reading the descriptions of the books to be included I was torn between skipping a month for both or giving it a shot even though both of them sounded like something I’d clearly hate to spend my time on…

In the end, I made a choice to save some money and skip… (Just to forget about my reasoning and order 2 new boxes to try out instead the next week.)

Honestly, it feels like a waste of money in more ways than one, because I clearly can’t read this fast to actually read all the books I receive and not add them to a quickly growing TBR pile, and also because I don’t even feel healthy enough to read anything but fluffy fanfiction most of the days anyway… Not to mention that YA subscription boxes more often than not focus on fandoms I have no real use for. I put away the books I don’t feel like reading, but also can’t get rid of them before I even try, and they just pile and pile… And then there’s also the fact that shipping costs as much as box itself.

But this state of my mind is also the exact reason I keep ordering them because it’s kind of like receiving a small present every time and it feels like I need that feeling to keep myself afloat every month. And the more I receive something I can’t really feel any positive emotions about, the more it makes me to look for more of boxes to order… (I know it sounds pathetic and not exactly effective, but beggars with chronic depression can’t exactly be chooser of what we use to keep ourself from the very rock bottom.)

So next month (or more like the beginning of December, considering the shipping time) I will receive 3 new boxes and will have to choose which ones I want to keep, and whether or not I want to cancel those I put on hold this month… And how to stop myself from wasting money on things I don’t need just because I’m getting brainwashed by pretty instagram pictures.

 

 

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I’m subscribed to about 4 different monthly bookish boxes (and always in the process of looking for more/exchanging for new ones).

I treat them sort of like a ‘blind date with a book’ system, and a way to get to know new releases while living in a non-English speaking country. Because usually, to buy a new English book, I would have to decide that I really want it, make an informed decision carefully, read all about it on goodreads or elsewhere, and be sure it’s worth spending that money, because ordering on Amazon from Japan is not always cheap and not always quick (they have a lot of books in stock to be delivered next day, but half of the time they ship them from UK.)

Unfortunately, even though there’s a ton of subscription book boxes out there, and there are many lists that talk about them to help you choose, I very soon found out that no matter how many there are, none of them (at least as far as I could see, having  searched online a few times) really match what I’d really want from a subscription book box.

My wishes are pretty simple:

  • Worldwide shipping.
  • Bookish goods.
  • Fantasy, sci-fi (maybe historical fiction, detectives, mysteries).
  • Preferably new releases, but not critical.
  • Not YA.

I don’t really remember how did I first found out about book subscription boxes, but then very soon they flooded my instagram and I couldn’t help but want to subscribe to more and more.

The thing is, most of subscription boxes, and certainly the most ‘loud’ ones, are all about YA. And to be honest, I don’t think I would read a single YA book if not for them.

Not that I was too biased, since I never really knew about them to form an opinion other than ‘it means they are for kids’. And I hardly ever read books for kids when I was one. Save for Harry Potter, but I don’t think that really counts. That is also why I didn’t really feel too cautious about YA when I ordered my first subscription box, because I simply decided that (after seeing on instagram that a lot of seemingly adult people were enjoying them) maybe I misunderstood the categorization, and people just called all new fantasy and sci-fi books YA (sort of like people in Japan call literary fiction ‘literature’ and most of genre fiction ‘light novels’).

It wasn’t before I received my first few boxes that I felt like I seriously needed to look into something that wasn’t so focused on YA. I can’t even say what exactly it is about YA… Well, to be honest I still kind of unclear on what makes YA so YA, but the books, even where I could like the story itself, seemed… too shallow, too thinly connected… more like an overly simplified summary of a book that could happen, but didn’t because someone either rushed it out or was told to make it more simple… And at first I thought that it was just those books and those authors, but after this year it seems to be the only thing that I can attribute to YA as a unifying factor. Along with tiny chapters and the feeling that it was made to resemble a movie more than a book, and to be read in few hours–take only slightly more time than it would take to watch a movie.

I can’t say that I regret subscribing to YA boxes entirely… With my current mental and emotional state, light reads that I can be done with in few hours are sometimes actually exactly what I need. And some of the books I received were exactly that. But sometimes… There is also this another thing that bothers me about YA – it’s the ‘trendy themes’ that too many of the books I receive seem to be focused on. I have mentioned some of them in reviews I’ve written: girls kept in captivity (or under someone else’s authority in other way) and humiliated by sadistic/narcissistic people; people falling in love with their former captors or with equally narcissistic jerks; palace intrigues and spies… The overall normalization, or more likely romanticization, of humiliation and lying that are featured in 90% of YA books I received (or researched after receiving a bookish item based on).

I honestly hate it and don’t even want to think about the underlying psychology of their popularity.

 

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got stuck in the bathroom
because I couldn’t find any strength to get out of the bathtub
(or deal with the fact that the air was colder than the water)

almost threw up when I finally did get out

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got tired of saying ‘shit’ 50 times a day, so I switched to ‘Scheisse’

I also shout ‘funya funya!’ in angry intonations when I really need to swear but don’t want to

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was cutting some hand shapes for a painting
and don’t even want to count how many times during these days I freaked out a little when some dark hand silhouette looked at me from some corner where I dropped it
or how many times I walked around the room saying “where is my hand?!” and “where did my hand go?!”
a theatre of one without the audience

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the literature that makes a point to tell people of evil (and other disgusting things) that exists can’t attract me…
because we already know that evil exists
what it needs to be telling is that evil can be dealt with, destroyed or overturned

and overall, I prefer to read about things I want more in my life, than about those I don’t really want to exist in it at all

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found this going around the Internet once
Reasons for admitting women into an asylum:

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I find a few other points also interesting.

Menstrual deranged?
Over action of the mind?
Tobacco and masturbation?
Bad whiskey?
Excitement as officer?
Time of life?

Might be a fun idea to count how many of them I currently match.

(Also, when I read ‘congestion of brain’ I always imagine something less ‘stroke’ and more ‘constipation inside the head’ for some reason… )

 

 

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I wanted to start this sentence with ‘people who know me will know’, and then realized that yeah, those might exists only in my head, so…

Let’s try again.

What I wanted to say is that while I’m generally very anti-drug and anti-addiction by my nature (this being that something that I would expect people who know me know), as in I couldn’t get into a habitual use of anything even if I tried, and I have no desire to try what so ever (and I had more than enough chances to in the past, with smoking and people prescribing me easy-to-hooked-on drugs), sometimes I genuinely get scared of getting addicted to painkillers, just from the way it feels when they finally start working on the days when I wake up with a head-splitting headache that almost has me in tears when I can’t get in under control for three hours… And then when the painkillers finally work and I want to start crying for an entirely different reason, it feels so good that it’s the only time in my life when I can sort of understand why would someone get addicted to it.

Though, probably worth mentioning, the medicine I take is the very mild one and proper from a normal local drug store, and I’ve never actually seen the ‘funny’ sort of painkillers they often show in American tv-dramas. It’s just gets a little scary when the few hours I get on the combination of painkillers and some sweet latte is the best I feel these days.

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that frustration when you have just comfortably barricaded yourself in your seat, with all the cushions just right, with the leg support, and laptop stand on your lap, and a nice chocolate cake nearby for a snack…
… aand you realise you forgot your tea and need to get up to get it
and then you realise you forgot your glasses somewhere too…
and then your workbook you need for writing is also not where you though you put it…
…and when you finally sit down for the nth time thinking you’re ready this time, you realise you better go to toilet too