The Stacks
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Happy Towel Day 2022!
Last year, for our inaugural Towel Day here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, it made sense to share the book series from whence came the Towel Day name.
But as much as I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to honour Adams this year I thought I’d shout out his lesser known Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.
From water does all life begin…
With the release of Denis Villeneuve’s new version of Frank Herbert’s Dune brought to the big screen, it seemed a terrible oversight to not have a post here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library about the original book itself, in many ways a key piece of our origin story…
Moonshots: Indigenous Comics, Indigenous Voices
On the occasion of the very first Canadian National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library wondered what we could do to mark this important moment in history.
On the one hand, there is a lot of heavy but important reading and learning to be done. But the thing is, the whole point of the Butterflies & Aliens Library is that books allow us to learn about our fellow humans and the worlds that we all live in.
So in that spirit and in the spirit of reconciliation, we thought we would start by sharing three graphic novels from our collection that we love, that also happen to contain an absolute wealth of stories from Indigenous voices: Moonshot, Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Star Trek Day 2021
Being the huge science fiction fans that we are here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, we couldn’t let this day go by without at least some small post of recognition! So in honour of Star Trek Day, we wanted to share a peek into Star Trek Stellar Cartography: The Starfleet Reference Library / Maps from the Star Trek Universe…
Small Press Saturday: Lanternfish Press
We have endured another week of drought and smoke, and this week I’ve been in the mood for more eclectic and weird reading fare.
I was scrolling through Twitter last week and came across a tweet with a photo of a horror book display in a book shop. Being a book nerd, I had to zoom in and take a closer look at the books displayed. One book in the corner caught my eye. It was The Night Library of Sternendach by Jessica Levai.
Who needs books when…
Content Warning: This post includes images of a book being physically altered, by which I mean getting cut up. Also #spoilers.
So this weekend my latest altered book project came together, the third in a series based on dystopic novels with themes relating to reading, censorship, and language.
This time the subject of my experimentation was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time…
Small Press Saturday: Tyche Books
Last weekend, we put out a call for small press recommendations and I am happy that this week features one of those recommendations for our weekly Small Press Saturday post. This weekend we are spotlighting an Alberta small press – say hello to Tyche Books!
Happy Towel Day!
One of the earliest books we bonded over here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library was Douglas Adams’ profoundly comic and comically profound trilogy in (at least) four parts, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and we have definitely known where our towels are ever since.
Small Press Saturday: JournalStone
Today we are heading south of the Canadian border so I can introduce you to JournalStone Publishing, founded in 2009 by Christopher C. Payne and based in Carbondale, Illinois. They are definitely a small press that embraces the dark and weird, specializing in horror, sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, and generally dark fiction.
Small Press Saturday: Laksa Media
We here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library love a good anthology, and some of my absolute favourites in recent years have come from Laksa Media, based out of Calgary, Alberta. Not only have the stories been remarkable, and wrapped in gorgeous covers, but this young small press lives its mission of changing the world through its publishing program, not only by donating a portion of its revenue to social causes, but raising awareness through the themes and content of their anthologies.
Canadian children’s books are a bit of everything!
Yay, it’s Friday! And even though it has been exciting to celebrate Canadian Children’s Book Week, it’s still Friday and we here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library are feeling it. So for our next-to-last post for the week, we present a bit of a random selection of children’s books by Canadians. But, really, isn’t that part of the beauty of Canadian children’s books? They do include a bit of everything!
Canada includes other realms too…
For our third instalment in celebration of Canadian Children’s Book Week 2021, I’ve pulled four children’s and YA novels by three different authors off my To Be Read pile. And I must confess, they’ve been on my TBR pile a fair while. But they continue to call to me because they all promise to transport me to other realms, passports to mental travels yet to come. Canada also includes fantasy worlds and alternate realities!
