1. Last November, I was looking through the upcoming films listed on my local indie theater’s website when I spotted a black cartoon cat on one of the graphics. Curious, I clicked on it, read the synopsis, and decided this sounded like an interesting movie. I invited a friend to come with me, and a couple of weeks later she and I met up for pizza and a movie. That black cartoon cat movie was named Flow, and little did I know it then, but it would quickly become one of my favorite movies of all time. Flow is an independent animated movie created by Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis and a team of artists using open source animation software. It is about a little black cat who, at the beginning, is a fearful loner that is happy with solitude. When a massive flood destroys the cat’s home, it joins a capybara on a boat in search of a new home. Along the way, they are joined by a dog, a lemur, and a large bird. Through perilous adventures, they learn to live with one another and create a sort of family by the end. Cat’s journey is gentle but profound, and its progress is noted in three similar scenes where it looks at its reflection in a pool of water- at the beginning, Cat is alone and is happy to be alone; later, Cat is alone and doesn’t want to be; at the end, Cat is no longer alone– it is with its family. Flow is a heartfelt, earnest, and gorgeous little movie. There is a good reason that it won, among other awards, the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Disney’s animated offerings have been tepid of late, so it’s especially heartening to see independent animation studios receive accolades for the years of passion and care they put into their work. Flow recently came out on BluRay from The Criterion Collection with a range of extra features, an essay, and collectible stickers. You can bet I ordered a copy and watched it almost as soon as it arrived. I’m so glad I looked for indie movies at just the right time last year, because Flow has come to mean so very much to me. Look for it if you haven’t seen it. It’s well worth your time.
2. I’m back to trying to listen to an album each night from my list of 225 or so albums through popular musical history from the 1950s into the 2000s. I’ll come right out and say it. Rock ‘n roll is not for me. I understand why it’s been such a popular genre for so long, but like a slice of plain white store-brand bread, it does nothing for me. I enjoyed the many jazz albums I listened to at the beginning of this project, but it’s been a bit of a slog lately. I think The Beatles Hard Day’s Night was my favorite of the lot, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to it just to listen again. One album I will go back to is Osi and the Jupiter’s Nordlige Rúnaskog. Osi and the Jupiter are a neo-folk band from Ohio. Their music reminds me of bands like Wardruna and Heilung, who fall into a genre one might call Viking folk, and feature many traditional instrumentals and certain kinds of throat singing (which, while not being ‘viking’ in origin, are still compelling) that lend the music a rich, organic sound that can be hard to find in pop music, which– at least to my ear– generally sounds very synthetic. Autumn is the perfect time of year for bands like these, so in between my assigned albums, I will be listening to more of Osi and the Jupiter, among others. 3. The idea of the personal curriculum has taken social media by storm this year, and for once I’m fine with buying into such a trend. I have a collection of medieval texts or books about English medieval history that have been gathering dust on my shelves while I choose other books from my To Read list instead. But the personal curriculum trend has given me the push I needed to start engaging with these books I bought and fully intended to read. I began with Medieval Women Writers, an anthology of essays about and texts by medieval women writers such as Christine de Pizan, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard von Bingen. The essays about these women provided context into the women’s lives and work before presenting a selection of the women’s writings. It was so interesting to see what these women thought about their world and their place within it. I read a chapter each day until I was done, after which I moved on to The Treasure of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, and have been reading about thirty pages per day. It’s somewhat like Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier in that it serves as a guide for proper courtly behavior for women of higher classes, but it also expands out to deal with how women of all social classes should run their households, deal with people, and raise their children. It’s not the most exciting book I’ve ever read, but it does provide a window into the minds of women of the late medieval period. Or at least a window into one particular woman’s mind. What I’ve Been Reading: The Salvage by Anbara Salam- In late 1962, Marta Khoudry is an underwater archaeologist sent to a Scottish island to investigate the wreck of a ship that belonged to a local hero who also died upon that ship. As a woman and a person of Syrian-descent in Scotland, she has a lot of social issues to overcome, but what’s worse for her are the ghosts of her past– one of which may be more than just a metaphor, for the longer she stays on the island the more she begins to believe she is being haunted. When a collection of valuable artifacts disappears from the wreck, Marta believes that her career- and her life- will be ruined. With the help of a local woman, Marta embarks on a personal quest to recover the artifacts as the brutal winter of 1962-63 buries them all under ice and snow. This was a slower-paced novel than I thought it would be, and focused more on Marta’s internal struggles and the racism and sexism she encounters than the hauntings she and others experience in the story. For the most part, I found the story to be well-written but it did meander for a little while in the middle. The ending is ambiguous, which I expected given the ending of Hazardous Spirits, the other novel of Salam’s I’ve read. Overall, though, I thought it was a solid story, and if you’re looking for an eerie novel to sit with for a while, give The Salvage a try. The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo - Though they live under British occupation, the Chinese people of Malaya maintain their traditions and superstitions. This fact has always been part of Li Lan’s life, but she’s never truly thought about the consequences of it. The daughter of a once-wealthy family, her household is coming to the end of its funds. When her father brings up the idea of becoming a ghost bride to a recently dead son of the powerful Lim family, Li Lan laughs it off at first. But when her dreams are haunted by the soul of the dead son, and she becomes entwined with the Lim family, Li Lan discovers that the old superstitions have a very real effect on the lives of everyone there. As she works to uncover the depths of the mysteries she is entangled within, Li Lan travels to places more fantastical and more dangerous than she ever imagined. The Ghost Bride was Yangsze Choo’s debut novel. It does not read like a debut. Choo’s writing is elegant and assured, and her characters’ voices are clearly defined and memorable. The story weaves Chinese lore, Malayan colonial history, and plenty of Choo’s own inventions to create a compelling story about a young woman’s coming of age as she is forced to confront the unhappy side of her family’s history. This book kept coming onto my radar over the years, but I didn’t pick it up until someone on my bookish Discord server recommended it as an alternative to R.F. Kuang’s latest novel, Katabasis, which I did not like. I’m glad I finally picked this up, as I fell in love with Li Lan’s story and was anxious to find out what her final choice would be. I was not disappointed by that ending. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Sunday, 5 October 2025
Three Things #7
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