One of my goals for April was to clean up and re-order my bookshelves, and I did not complete this goal… I did move around some textbooks and got rid of old magazines, but I still need to order my books. I want to order them in alphabetical order (by author) and add a tag with the each author’s name written in English.
Illustration: Han River, Yeouido.
Books
2021 reading challenge
I am keeping up with my reading challenge so far 🙂
『猟奇の果』 was the novel I liked the least, I start feeling that all the books of the series feel very similar, with some scenes and patterns coming back in every story. The mechanism that holds the story together in 『猟奇の果』 was also not really what I want to read in detective novels, so overall, this was rather a disappointment.
I also found this book a little bit more difficult than the previous ones.
2 books from my TBR pile
I finally got around to reading 『告白』 by Kanae Minato (湊かなえ)!
This is my fourth book by this author and by far my favourite. I did not love all the books I read by Minato, but this one was truly excellent, one of the best books I have read in Japanese so far.
I feel a bit ashamed to have waited so long to read this book, when I had it on my bookshelf for two or three years.
And I read a book I had on my TBR pile for a while: 『満願』 by Honobu Yonezawa (米澤穂信).
This is the second book I read by this author, and the two books gave me the same feeling: I liked them, but did not love them either, and I found them a little bit more difficult to read than most mystery novels.
2 books from my book haul
I have finished one book from my latest book haul: 『聖母』 by Rikako Akiyoshi (秋吉理香子).
This was a really good thriller: a fast pace, enough suspense, a sense of danger and the constant feeling that there is more to it… and there is! It was also easy to read and relatively short, so this was a good relaxing read. Just what I needed before starting a much longer one:
I started reading 『名もなき毒』 by Miyuki Miyabe (宮部みゆき).
『名もなき毒』 is very slow for a mystery novel. There is a short and catchy introductory chapter, but then the novel goes on with the protagonist’s (Saburo Sugimura) daily life, and it takes forever to reconnect with the event described in the introductory chapter.
Nevertheless, I find 『名もなき毒』 extremely addictive. I don’t know why exactly, but I cannot put it down, even though nothing much happens most of the time. It is easy to identify with Sugimura, I love the author’s style, I find the book easy to read… I have only read one third of the book, but I know for sure that I will continue the series and read other books by Miyuki Miyabe.
Plans for May
I really must continue to work on my bookshelves and finish writing the page “Japanese authors” where I want to list all the authors I have read in Japanese so far. It is still a work in progress, but hopefully I can update it in May.
As for books, I want to finish 『名もなき毒』 and of course, read the 5th Kogoro Akechi. It is a novel, 『魔術師』, the same length as 『猟奇の果』 (just under 300 pages).
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read detective novels in these languages. I post about my reading progress and language study here. Best way to get in touch is on Mastodon 🙂
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