Spring reading challenge: exploring Seicho Matsumoto’s work

A display of books, face up, on a wooden table. There are six books lying flat, they are all by Seicho Matsumoto. On the left, there is a pile of four books, half out of the picture, their title is not visible.

My plan is to read them in chronological order:

点と線 1958 – 262 pages
ゼロの焦点 1959 – 481 pages
黒い画集 1959 – 737 pages
砂の器 1961 – 968 pages
時間の習俗 1962 – 384 pages
内海の輪 1969 – 278 pages

I wish I could set myself a fixed reading plan like “one book a week”, but given the disparity in book length, I doubt it will be possible. I really like reading challenges though, and given that Spring is just around the corner (March 19th* – June 20th), I’ll make reading Matsumoto a Spring challenge. My goal is to finish all the books I bought before the end of June, I think that it is perfectly doable, and I also really like reading the same author extensively during a set period of time.

I’ll be doing some updates here and on Mastodon, and of course, I will be posting book reviews when I finish a book. I am still in the process of catching up with older reviews that are queueing up in my draft folder, but I think I will be able to entirely catch up in March.

* 2024 is a leap year, so Spring starts earlier this year! Won’t change much for my reading challenge though 😜.

About

I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.

Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.

Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.

Inhae's blog