Sunshine Challenge Prompt #5: Blue

[lebateleur]

Prompt 5: Blue
Blue is a tranquil color that is associated with a variety of things including: balance, discovery, peace, calm, openness, patience, honor, grace, trust, depression, recovery, prophecy, respect, empathy, flexibility, and water.

In which trace my fandom history through books with blue covers.

As a kid in the pre-Internet Before Times, I learned about books through teachers, friends, or encountering them in the wild, and I spent hours each week in Borders systematically browsing the shelves for titles or covers that caught my eye.



The title and cover for Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three definitely caught my eye. (Jody Lee's work for this edition of the Prydain Chronicles remains among my favorite cover illustrations of all time.) Anyway, I walked out of Borders with The Book of Three that day and inhaled it twice during a YMCA trip. I loved it. Decades later, I still remember where I was as I read individual scenes and chapters in this series--so vividly that I firmly associate individual volumes with specific months and weather and prefer to reread them under similar circumstances.

I was fascinated by Alexander's forward, in which he talked about the series' loose connections to Welsh mythology. I was vaguely aware of Wales as "that place with the red dragon flag" thanks to all the Highland Games I'd been to, but the Prydain Chronicles made it a real place to me. The spelling of the proper nouns looked beautiful and as far as I could tell from Lloyd's pronunciation guide, I thought they probably sounded beautiful too. I wanted to speak Welsh.

"Probably impossible," my parents told me, "but you can take a look at this Scots Gaelic textbooks your mother bought." They probably did it as something of a joke...except I poured over that book until the binding crumbled. And if I couldn't speak Scots Gaelic, I could certainly learned to read it well enough to decipher phrases and sometimes whole sentences in the liner notes to all the Gaelic music albums we had.

My high school had a foreign language requirement, and offered French, German, Spanish, and Latin. I enrolled in the latter, with the reasoning that if Gaelic wasn't an option I could at least learn the language of the empire that had conquered a fair portion of the Celtic language world (to the bemusement of my classmates, most of whom were Roman Catholics in the class at their parents' behest). We used the third edition Cambridge Latin textbooks.



I was good at it. I was really good at it--to the point that the instructor let me work through the second textbook independently while the class was still finishing the first. And really, Latin set the trajectory of much of the rest of my life, because it taught me grammar and how to think in a language vastly different from English, and without either of those skills I would not have been able to tackle Japanese, without which I would never have ended up in the anime and manga fandoms I inhabit. Japanese also opened doors to travel, live, and work abroad...

...which put me in Japan at the height of the Korean Wave. The quality of the English-language Korean textbooks available the time was grim, but thanks to hallyu, Japanese bookstores sold dozens of well-written textbooks for Japanese learners of Korean, with solid grammar and usage explanations.



So I picked those up, and taught myself enough Korean to read manhwa, which helped with listening and speaking, which helped with reading, which helped with listening and speaking in a virtuous cycle until I was proficient in Korean too. And that got me into a bunch of Korean music, TV, and movie fandoms.

Around the same time I discovered the Prydain Chronicles, I also found this book at Borders:



I knew Alvin Schwartz through the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark series, and so I bought Telling Fortunes too. It had a section on something called "tarot."

My Borders browsing had expanded by that time to include the adult New Age section, because that's where The Mabinogion lived and I was--thanks to The Book of Three--deeply interested in Welsh mythology. It was only a matter of time before I discovered that tarot decks were something I could--and did--buy.

Within a year, I was reading Cynthia Giles' The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore, which, touching as it did on history, occult, psychology, and physics, cemented my love of tarot and opened up a ton of new interests into the bargain.



Blue is a popular packaging color of many of the decks I own. I first heard about Lenormand through the online tarot community; the classic Lenormand deck being, of course, the Blue Owl (seen here peeking out from under Giles).

And so on. ☆


これで以上です。