Therianthrope & Otherkin Book Club

I've found a few more books for the therianthrope and otherkin booklist. I'm redesigning its web site, and I'm writing more reviews. I'm having a great time! I do have to take some time to decide whether things belong in the list or not. Some of them are non-fiction books that mention therianthropes by name, so there's no doubt that they belong in my bibliography. However, how appropriate can a book be if it's fantasy fiction? Let's take a look... this one is an interesting example of the conundrums that I'm facing with most of this book list. I've decided that it does belong in the list, if for no other reason than to discuss its terminology and disambiguate some matters.

Amago, Roland (artist) and Bambi Eloriaga (writer). Moonlight Meow Vol. 1. Seven Seas Entertainment, 2007.

Made by an artist/author pair in the Philippines, this is a comic book about the action-packed adventures of a secret society of physical shape-shifters. It's a fun and well-illustrated urban fantasy story.

As such, it doesn't have much to do with real life. (To spell it out: physical shapeshifting is just a fantasy. Real therians do not abide by the “twelve commandments” of the secret society featured in this book, rules which apply only to physical shape-shifters anyway. And if there's a secret society of therians, I haven't heard about it.) However, I'm listing Moonlight Meow here because it uses terminology from the therianthrope and furry communities online. (Note that although the comic panels and pages read right-to-left, manga style, it seems that it was originally written in English, not translated from another language.) “Therianthrope” is an ordinary English word, so it's no surprise to find it in a fantasy or sci-fi story, even when abbreviated to “therian.” What's noteworthy is that the book does use other words that are distinct to us, in correct context. They call their animal side a “theriotype,” and their elders are the “gray muzzles,” a word which (to the best of my knowledge) originated on the alt.horror.werewolves newsgroup a decade prior to this book. During the story, “furry fans,” “furry lifestylers,” and “furry conventions” are mentioned and correctly defined as well, but with a slight twist that comes from sharing their world with actual shape-shifters. (A human character even mentions that he is “a furry lifestyler whose former animal spirit was feline.”)

You can read the entire book online, through GoManga or Google Books. The writer, Bambi Eloriaga-Amago, has a blog for herself, and another blog, Furry Aficionada, with short cartoons about cats (“The Condo Cats”) illustrated by her husband Roland Amago. (They married a few months after this book was published, so the writer's name wasn't hyphenated yet.) As for Roland Amago, he has a DeviantArt gallery. They're working on a second volume in this series.

Near the beginning of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the protagonist Harry Haller made a strange remark. (One of many to follow, really.) The first thing he said when he entered was not “Good day,” but “Oh, this house smells good!” His hosts thought that was odd and a little rude. I made a guess about what he smelled that caught him so by surprise. The book said that the family was just picking up their dishes from the table, didn’t it? They had just cooked and eaten lunch, and that would have smelled nice… especially to a lean, scruffy wanderer who was searching for somewhere to stay. Who can blame a wolf of the steppes for using his nose to judge the safety of a place?

Later, Harry explained that it was an entirely different smell that had appealed to him. It was the scent of fastidiousness, a balanced normalcy that had grown unfamiliar and inaccessible to an itinerant and night-owl such as himself. I forget exactly what he said, but he was used to things being more of a mess, and keeping things clean and neat was more something that other people did. It was one of those things that he looked at as an outsider.

One thing remains curious to me here. Why is it weird and rude to remark on the smell of someone’s house? Anyone would take offense if they were told that their house smelled bad, but Harry was so struck by how nice it smelled that he just blurted it out. That sounds like a sincere and acceptable compliment.

(I read in a Victorian book of etiquette that the best compliments must be spontaneous, so they will come across as heartfelt, not calculated. I think that would result in some that sound very silly. Silly compliments can be touching too, so long as they're not fumbled completely.)

This subject was discussed in a chapter of Lynda Barry’s graphic novel autofictionbiography, One Hundred Demons. (That means it’s about Barry's youth, but she had to take some artistic license with the truth, and she’s presented it in the form of a comic book. The title refers to a Japanese tradition of competing in telling scary stories late into the night. She compares that story-telling to how a person is haunted by memories of their own troubles and enigmas, like that parade of ghosts.) As a child, Barry was fascinated by the smells of people’s houses. She made these observations: each house-smell is as unique as the family who lives there. It’s curious that nobody is able to tell what their own house smells like. However, most people take offense if you try to talk to them about it, as if it’s Too Much Information. She thought it was a very mysterious taboo, and it became more important when it came to interacting with a certain family on her block.

The first book that is entirely on the subject of otherkin and therianthropes, by its own terminology, has now been officially published! Yippee! It's A Field Guide to Otherkin, by Lupa. See the author's post about it for more information.





So much for the "There are no books about otherkin" concept, which wasn't entirely true even before Lupa's book was published. I'm really glad that the first such book was made by Lupa and not by someone else, since she's put a lot of time and work and thought into making it be something fair that describes a very diverse lot of people.

I'm looking forward to reading it, since it does fit into this book-list project of mine. Lupa has said that my bibliography was very helpful to her in researching her book, but I must say that this has been reciprocal, since she suggested a great deal of books of which I was previously unaware.

Our selected book for February-March was Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Now it's April. Do you have anything to say about The Jungle Book before we move on? Did you end up reading it all? Did you think that it had much of anything to do with therianthropy?

Is there a book on the list that you would like to read together next for April to May? You make the selections for the poll this time. Suggest anything at all from the book list.

In other news: you may remember that a while ago, I mirrored my Otherkin and Therianthrope Book List onto LibraryThing.com, making an Otherkin and Therianthrope Book List on LibraryThing. It's interactive, so you can sort and search for books according to title, author, tags, and so on. Each book has a page of social information about it.

Recently, cryptodragon gifted me with a paid lifetime account on LibraryThing.com, so now I have access to a few more features. (Thanks, Crypto!) One of the features is that I can list as many books as I like. (The free accounts are limited to listing 200 books at most.) Accordingly, I've made the book list there much longer. I've added a lot of books that people had suggested, but I was unsure about their appropriateness for the list. I also added some possibly-appropriate books that I stumbled across in browsing LibraryThing. LibraryThing is very handy for finding books of interest to you because it can examine the books that you've liked, compare it to similar books that other people have liked, and then it suggests some books you've never heard of that end up being the very thing you'd like.

lupabitch created a book discussion group on LibraryThing.com on the subject of Otherkin and Therianthropy. She remarked to me that she was tired of waiting for me to create one there. She's set it up so that it links to the Otherkin and Therianthrope Book List as its website. Thanks, Lupa!

One advantage of group discussions on LibraryThing is that it's easy to link to a book: you just put the title in brackets, and the site figures out which book you mean. Then on a book's social information page, the page tells that the book has been talked about. The group automatically lists a combination of books that are most common among the group members. Creating a LibraryThing account is free, so please join on in.

Judging from the poll, it looks like we've agreed to read Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894). Of the nine people who voted in the poll, that's what eight of us voted for. It's been over a week, so we can assume that voting has ended in that poll, since a week was all I expected to give it; that's enough chance for anyone.


Front cover illustration, one of many editions listed on
the Jungle Book Collection.


As mentioned before: The Jungle Book's copyright has expired and it has entered the public domain, so you can legally download a free copy of it from the Gutenberg Project. If you're picking up a copy from a library or bookstore, take note that The Jungle Book has been published in many editions, and they're not all the same. Some of them have marvelous and worthwhile illustrations added, but make sure you're reading one that says it's "Complete and Unabridged!" Some editions are combined with its sequel, The Second Jungle Book, as The Jungle Books together (as in the image above), which is fine. Other editions are reduced and abridged, such as the ones retitled as Mowgli or All the Mowgli Stories, which has removed the parts that don't have Mowgli in them. It's been translated into all kinds of different languages, although English was its first. There's at least one annotated version, which adds some context that may answer some questions that tend to come up.

Personally, I'll be comparing between a few copies of The Jungle Book: I'll read the text file on my Palm whenever and wherever I find the time for leisure reading, and I'm picking up an ordinary unabridged copy from the library (which I'll use for citing page numbers), as well as the annotated edition (which would have less standard pagination). Hopefully I'll find the time for it... these next couple months look like they're just going to get busier.

I encourage you to read the WikiPedia (online encyclopedia) entry about The Jungle Book, since it tells a lot about the significance of the books: their history and origins, and the effects they've had on culture throughout the world. Those are the bones of what makes a "classic" book: something of enough substance that it not only stands the test of time, but also becomes a part of a culture.

I started reading The Jungle Book this morning. I could have sworn that I'd read a good part of it back in elementary school, but apparently I'd just read some excerpts from it in other collections or readers. That's one of the other things about classics, whether they're books or movies: you can think that you've read/watched the story itself, but it turns out you'd just picked up some information about it because it's a part of the culture. Since you've seen and heard bits of them since forever, you can know a good part of Citizen Kane or It's A Wonderful Life before actually seeing them from start to finish, and that's quite a different and surprising experience. The Jungle Book is being entirely new to me, and it's different from how I expected it.

I can see how it became a classic: it's unique in its type of story, and the writing-skill itself is unusually fine. The language used in The Jungle Book is more formal and dignified than the playful rhythm of wordplay that Kipling used in Just-So Stories, something like the difference in voice between Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (When I first read The Lord of the Rings, I was initially a bit perplexed by that difference, since it almost felt like they weren't written by the same person. The difference is enhanced even farther with The Silmarillion, which is so biblical in its language that I decided to read it some other time when I felt like climbing such an imposing mountain.) In The Jungle Book, Kipling shows a knack for selecting just which things to describe in detail, and which to leave for the reader to work out for himself/herself: enough information to establish and to inspire, where a surplus of information would give the impression of spoon-feeding a story to a callow reader. This selectiveness is something that happens both with careful editing, and with epic works where a writer has imagined so much material that they can only afford to write down the important parts, without flowery diversions.

(I think that's why Tolkien's writing-voice changed so much with each book: the project got bigger and bigger, and he had to be pickier and pickier about what parts went down on paper, because it was too huge to ever tell it all. Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series is also written with that useful handicap, since it takes place in a setting that she's been building since her youth; she can't take the time to explain everything to you because it would take too long, so she treats as a native to that world who is already familiar with its society and workings, and you have to figure the rest out for yourself. I spent ages rereading her King of the Cats before I even began to understand what was going on in the Nyima society, what and why they were doing the curious things that they were. Sorting out that puzzle was as mentally challenging as solving any other mystery from a set of intriguing clues.)

I'm not saying that The Jungle Book is a minimalist work, no, not at all; but as with Michael Ende's novel The Neverending Story (Die Unendliche Geschichte [1979]), some of the most intriguing parts are those which are implied, so it gives the impression of an immense and intricate world where only the most necessary surfaces are scratched. Furthermore, leaving unsaid details open for the readers to speculate and argue over tends to encourage a sense of actively participating in the re-creation of a story. Each person has to figure the story out for himself/herself, and that's part of what makes it exciting and interesting. Perhaps that's a thing of preference, though... how about you?

According to our poll last month, the winning book for December-January is Yasmine Galenorn's "Totem Magic: Dance of the Shapeshifter," spiritual non-fiction about animal totemism. I've put a hold on a copy to read; how about you? Have you all secured your copies yet?

A brief Google search brings up Yasmine Galenorn's own website, http://www.galenorn.com which is likely to be authentically hers rather than a spoof because her profile on Llewellyn.com links to it as well. (I guess I was expecting her site to look different in some way, based on the impressions I had from reading that book.) There isn't much said on her website about this particular book, but it does tell you some more about her interests and other writings.

It's time to choose the next book we'll read for the months of December and January. Together we'll discuss the thought-provoking good bits and try to figure out what went wrong with the bad bits, if any. I've narrowed it down to a few easy-to-find potentials:

...Earth Angels, by Doreen Virtue, which is a non-fiction New Age book which talks about other concepts similar to otherkin. I'm not happy with some of the kinds of advice and generalizations it makes. However, it is interesting to hear about people who identify as angelic but who've never heard of “otherkin.”

...The Veil's Edge, by Willow Polson, which is spiritual non-fiction with a positive and well-written chapter about otherkin and is greatly about magic that relates to Faerie. I really liked this one.

...From Elsewhere: Being ET in America is non-fiction about the decades-old subculture of people who believe they were extraterrestrials in past lives. The author's stance is that those people aren't as nutty as you'd expect; actually, they're surprisingly normal and healthy, and all of the individuals who he interviewed said that recognizing themselves as ET was an important turn-around in their lives.

...Totem Magic: The Dance of the Shapeshifter, by Yasmine Galenorn, which is spiritual non-fiction about animal totemism. It's a bit different from other books on animal totemism, since it describes identifying with the animal totems so closely that it has a lot in common with therianthropy. Although animal totemism and therianthropy are two different things, it's interesting to see what overlap exists.

[Poll #873031]

What do you think of Wild Animus so far?