The month was ushered in by a Super Blue Moon, while on the 17th of September, Venus will be at its brightest. The 19th will have Neptune at opposition (meaning the planet will be brighter than any other time of the year and will be visible all night long via telescope). On the 22nd, Mercury will be at its highest point above the horizon in the morning. Look for the planet low in the eastern sky just before sunrise!
This year’s Autumnal Equinox will also fall on September 23rd, meaning there will be nearly equal amounts of day and night throughout the world. Finally, the last Super Moon of the year—the Harvest Moon—is set to rise in all its glory on the 29th. Meanwhile, Illuminarium at the Distillery District is offering an all-ages immersive event titled Space: A Journey to the Moon and Beyond!
In honour of these and other cosmic events, here are some lovely books all about the heavens above.
September is Ukrainian Heritage Month here in Ontario, so I wanted to share some recommendations from our Ukrainian collection. You loyal readers out there will hopefully be tempted to explore some of these intriguing reads. Included below are Ukrainian, Canadian-Ukrainian, and other authors with ties to the country. Given that they make up a significant proportion of our population, Ukrainian people have substantially contributed to our society (Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is Ukrainian-Canadian, for example). This contribution includes the development of a spectrum of rich artistic and cultural expression.
Andrei Kurkov
Andrei Kurkov was born in Russia and writes his fiction in Russian, but he moved to Kyiv when he was only two years old. His identity has been steeped in the experience of living there, and he’s become one of the most well-known Ukrainian writers the world over. With the advent of the war in Ukraine, he has become something of a representative for his people, even sharing a personal war diary with BBC Radio 4. Here he talks with the Guardian about getting used to air raid alerts sounding through his cellphone several times a day.
So the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom has been out for just over three months now, and at the time of writing this, I still haven’t beaten the thing. It’s a game of Gleeok1-sized proportions with so much to do and/or faff about with. I’m enjoying the heck out of it, and so is my fiancée, who doesn’t get that into games very often. I shouldn’t be surprised about that, though; we both got really into the game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild. And I’ve been playing Zelda games since Ocarina of Time3, only skipping Spirit Tracks for mainline releases4. So, while I don’t know if I count as a super fan of the series, I’m at least at least a long-time player.
But this post is only partly about the games. What I want to discuss here is other media surrounding the series, which means I’m starting with a collection of manga. These mangas take the admittedly fairly basic stories of the Zelda games and imbue them and their characters with more personality, expand the lore behind the game, and, perhaps most importantly, give silent protagonist Link a personality and voice. So naturally, I’m going to start out of order and talk about The Four Swords, wherein Link gets split into four versions of himself by the titular sword, each with a different personality. This manga makes the story of one of the most remote Zelda games, Four Swords Adventures, accessible to more players. This game required every player to have their own Game Boy Advance and a link cable to connect it to the Gamecube, making the cost of entry pretty high, but it was an absolute blast if you had a group that met the requirements. It’s co-op but with a competitive aspect of who could collect the most force gems5. This aspect is explored in the manga, where Link’s clones aren’t necessarily always helpful in the quest to rescue Princess Zelda from the Sorcerer Vaati6. The villain alone makes this one worth checking out, as Vaati has only appeared in three Zelda games, and two of them required friends to play with7 while the other has only recently been released from Game Boy Advance prison to the Switch online expansion pass. Sadly, we can’t help you play the game, but we do have a good selection of games for newer consoles than the GBA.
