Trismegistus

It's been (oops) a little under 11 months since I've posted one of these. To celebrate hopefully getting back into the habit, let's go with something a bit unusual: ( For Strange Women's Botanical Oracle. )

The cardstock is very thin and flexible, which, while not the prevailing preference for indie decks certainly is my preference because it makes it that much easier to shuffle and bridge. The printing is very carefully done, and they gilt edges are nice as well.

I think it's precisely because the cards are both beautifully drawn and arbitrary in terms of their illustrations, and because the meanings are so bare bones, that this deck works for me, at least for quick draws for simple, tactical questions. I don't think that I would ever want another oracle deck, but I like having this one.

^*As for the indie house itself? I love For Strange Women's scents, but they last for approximately five minutes after application...unless I use them with the bespoke fixative base, in which case they last for two minutes. So I can't recommend FSW as far as its primary product is concerned.


これで以上です。

It's been awhile since I've posted anything for Tarot Tuesday and I promised last What Am I Reading Wednesday to review this deck, so let's talk about ( Secrets of Tarot. )

TL;DR: I wouldn't recommend this set to anyone trying to learn to read the cards, unless they intend to jettison the guidebook in favor of other learning resources. But the deck alone was worth what I paid for it: I like the art and the physical deck is easy to shuffle and read with.

これで以上です。

Tarot Tuesday? Sure, why not.

Contrary to my original statement, not everything actually arrived in the mail on October 27; I'd received an email the day before with the tracking number for another deck, Uusi's Materia Prima: An Expression of Matter, that I'd kickstarted waaay back in 2019 and that was repeatedly delayed thanks to the pandemic.

The creators were really good about posting status updates throughout, even sharing several videos of the trek from their UP studio to the post office in a snowstorm to mail the decks out.

Oh no, I thought. They're going to all this effort when the postal service is clearly not going to touch the things until well after the election.

And yup, because there the decks sat, two-day priority shipping be damned, for the next three weeks until USPS got around to delivering them, after which they arrived in a matter of days.

( It was worth the wait. )

これで以上です。

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. )

And so on. ☆


これで以上です。

What I Just Finished Reading

The Mercies – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
This extremely well-written book packs an emotional punch. Set in Norway in the 17th century, it’s based on historical events in an isolated fishing village where almost every male inhabitant is drowned in a freak storm. Told from the perspective of Maren—a village woman who’s skeptical of church authorities and willing to do what must be done, including taking on men’s work, to survive—and Ursa, the trophy bride of a fundamentalist Scotsman dispatched by King Christian IV to root out sorcery in the region, it depicts with chilling realism the individual psychologies and political and interpersonal dynamics that enable atrocities like the Scandinavian witch hunts. Unfortunately, it also ( cut for spoilers. ) That disappointment aside, this is an excellent book that is well worth reading.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom – Rachel Pollack
The chapters on the Minor Arcana are still some of the best to be found in any Tarot volume, and the book is worth reading on the strength of that alone. Pollack’s “work” layout is far more useful than the standard Celtic Cross, although I could have done without the intuitive sample readings she provides that ignore the very card meanings just she spent the preceding 117 pages laying out. Those issues aside, readers willing to wade through the frequent typos will find a lot to absorb in this book.

Deadpool vol. 1 – Daniel Way et al.
This was thoroughly enjoyable and one of the better Marvel collections in its completeness and cohesiveness. Way’s wisecracking, spastic Deadpool is everything I want from the character, and the visual and prose sections that conclude the volume are a useful (and surprisingly tolerable) summary of Deadpool runs through the ages.

蟲師 5 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 5 – Urushihara Yuki)
The artwork is beautiful and atmospheric as always, but I still can’t help but wish for a plot to tie together all the standalone stories.

おまけのこ – 畠中 恵 (Omake no Ko – Hatakenaka Megumi)
In the eponymous final chapter, a yanari (i.e., a house sprite whose speech humans perceive as the sounds of a house settling) is enchanted by a pearl, which he mistakes for the moon, that the protagonist’s wholesale business has sourced for a customer’s wedding gift. The yanari witnesses an unknown person bludgeon the customer to try to steal the pearl and manages to escape with it. He’s blown away on the wind, saved from drowning by a river god, and hunted by a crow, among other adventures, before he’s finally reunited with the household. Meanwhile, Ichitaro and the humans embark on their own adventures to determine who among those present at the wholesaler that day is the mysterious assailant. It’s a lighthearted and whimsical chapter, and a delightful conclusion to the book.


What I Am Currently Reading

Herbal – Deni Brown
This week I read the chapter on herbal aromatics and tackled half of the entries in herbal balsams, gums, and resins.

The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner – Terry Pratchett
As with Kurt Vonnegut, I imagine publishers will continue to put out collections of everything they can find by Pratchett, no matter how short, incomplete, or unpolished. That said, this book was 49 cents on Amazon, which is a pretty good price to read an author’s output as he was just starting to develop his craft.

神様 – 川上 弘美 (Kamisama – Kawakami Hiromi)
Kawakami’s Hebi ni Fumu is an eternal favorite of mine for its deeply weird storytelling. Kawakami continues in that vein in this volume of short stories. I think many of them were originally published in Japan Marie Claire, which may account for the fact that they’re still weird, but less ominous than her other work. So far, I’ve read the chapters in which the narrator goes on a day trip to a river park with a bear, a day laborer adopts the mysterious creatures that inhabit the pear trees in the orchard where he works, a woman takes walks with the ghost of her grandfather who died in a car accident, and a man and his friend are taken beneath the lake of a Buddhist temple to give love advice to a warren of kappa. So far, all the stories are good; the ghost and orchard stories are personal favorites.


What I'm Reading Next

No new books this week, although I've got my eye on a few.

これで以上です。

Several months ago I kickstarted a deck called the Raincoast Tarot. It was a very understated campaign: no stretch goals, no communication with backers. Not even a little white book for the cards.

Which is fine by me because the creator focused on the cards themselves, and in a word, ( they are stunning. )



( The minors may be even more beautiful than the majors. )

TL;DR--this deck is amazing and I bet US Games et al. will be scrambling to snap it up.

これで以上です。