The birds want what you want

[bloodygranuaile]

 

In one of my Readercon fugue states last year I picked up Taisia Kitaiskaia’s Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles, largely because it was very pretty--all red and black and white, with glossy pages and swirly, Russian-flavored illustrations--and also, anything Baba Yaga-related is likely to be a good time. It was unabashedly one of those books that I bought instead of checking out from the library because I figured that even if I didn’t read it more than once, it would look lovely on the shelf, and therefore be worth keeping around. 

Though the book was published and purchased in pre-COVID times, it jumped out at me as I was scanning my TBR shelf as a possibly psychologically suitable read, since everything is weird now and weird advice seems like it’d be more soothing to read about than actual advice. In this I was broadly correct. The questions given to Baba Yaga are standard advice column fare, too brief to even contain any really wacky stories that you can freak out about, but posing short and often vaguely philosophical questions like “Why am I so shallow?” and “How can I open up?” The first third or so of the book is, unsurprisingly, questions about romance, and I appreciated that the answers were wacky and, not infrequently, mean enough to be entertaining. The other thirds are about being a good person and deciding what paths to choose in life, respectively, and though Baba Yaga’s answers were weird and often mean, they were nonetheless sort of atmospherically satisfying. When I could glean sense from them the advice seemed reasonably sound, if not always very concrete. The answers are full of typos and archaic language, giving them an appropriately “communing with a bog witch” type of vibe, and overall it was just kind of a weird experience to read, but the kind of weird experience that makes more sense these days than attempts to impose actual sense on life. Certainly worth keeping around to look nice, and occasionally thumb through when I’m feeling odd.