I’m late for my August wrap-up because my blog is hosted on my home server, and I got a problem with the machine (the power supply unit just died 😱). It took some time to fix things up, but everything is back online now. I also started a new reading challenge!
The home server with friends! The lucky turtle I bought on a craft market in Seoul is here for good luck, with the fishing cat I got from a gashapon (I wanted the orange one that looks like my cat, but got this chubby tuxedo instead lol.).
Reading challenge!
I used to read detective novels mainly in Japanese, but lately I’m seeing more and more Korean authors of mystery novels every time I go to the bookshop, and so I’ve been reading a lot more in Korean too. As for Chinese, I reached a level where I can read mystery fiction comfortably! So now that I have three languages in which I can read genre fiction, I thought it would be fun to make a friendly competition between them. Which language will end up with the most books read at the end of the year.
Obviously, it would have been better to start this challenge in January, but I can’t wait to try it. I could host a competition each year anyway.
So here are the rules to make it fair:
- I always have three books (one in Korean, one in Japanese and one in Chinese) in progress at any given time.
- When I finish a book, I must “start” a new one of the same language the following day. It does not mean that I need to start reading it straight away, but I must log it as “currently reading”, and all these days will count toward its “reading time”.
- I’m not allowed to read two books in the same language at the same time.
I was wondering how to record my progress and made this quick table at the beginning of my journal (I happened to have an empty double page). I don’t really like how it looks, but it will do for the rest of 2025.
I’m thinking of doing a proper reading journal in 2026 with various spreads at the beginning. I’ll do a better version then, but the core idea will stay the same.
I know it might sound stupid for a lot of people (if you enjoy reading, just read books that you like and that’s it?), but me, I love challenges and stupid rules I set for myself. It keeps me motivated, I find it fun, and it’s just the way it works for me.
If a language falls behind because the book I’m reading in this language is boring or difficult, then so be it. I won’t try to focus on a language in particular, but just read what I want to read at the moment, either my favourite book of the three, or the one I’m m
I think that this challenge will help me organise my readings, because I tend to start multiple books at the same time and some of them end up being DNFed, not as much because I didn’t like them, but because I started other books and focused on them instead.
And at the end of each year, I’ll just count the number of books I read in each language.
I created a Notion page to track my progress in a more precise way than just a journal recording. To be honest, I have created several Notion pages over the years, and I’ve abandoned all of them. I can’t stick to it for some reason… so I really cannot guarantee that I will continue updating it, but for now it exists.
I really like the Timeline view in Notion, the infinite scroll makes it very clean. And the chart is also useful, no need to count the books myself!
I have a love-hate relationship with Notion lol. I love it because it looks so neat and it’s easy to use, but then you don’t have control over everything, and I can’t customise as I want to, so it’s frustrating sometimes.
That’s the board view, and I must admit it looks really great. It’s classified by language, and I can see at a glance how many books I read/am reading for each language. At the moment, they’re all at 2. There’s also a status that’s generated automatically, then the first number is the time I spent reading the book, or the time that elapsed since I started it or logged it.
The second number is the number of pages.
The Timeline view is my favourite, it’s similar to the one I made in my journal, but it looks much better!
The chart view will be the final score! At first I wanted to do a yearly competition with a reset each year, but now that I think of it, Notion will be a lifelong record, unless I create a new page each year. I still don’t know what I will do, I guess I’ll think of that in four months!
Books read in August
作家不在場的謀殺 by 望日 (HK)
It’s a collection of five short stories: 作家不在場的謀殺, 致命的誤會, 少女未來的未來. 永恆的愛 and 版權爭奪戰. The author also works as an editor, so they have a good insight of both worlds: the writing process made by the author and the publishing process. I always love stories about writing and publishing, so needless to say I enjoyed the short stories that deal with these topics: the first one 作家不在場的謀殺 and last one 版權爭奪戰. I personally think that these two are masterpieces, I really enjoyed them, they are so clever and the last one has a very good trick.
I also loved 少女未來的未來, a good police procedural with one of the police officer being a fan of detective novels.
The other two were not as impactful for me.
白鳥とコウモリ by 東野圭吾.
It’s really hard to rate this book, because I personally really enjoyed it, but I think it has several flaws that make me hesitant to recommend it.
I just really love Keigo Higashino, so I’m bound to love any novel written by him. So I loved this one, the plot, the story, the police investigation, all of these are great. But there are things that annoyed me greatly.
First and foremost, the book is much too long and much too repetitive. It drove me crazy. It’s 700 pages long, but you could easily take 300 pages off of it. It felt like watching a series in 10 episodes and end up thinking “it could have been a film”. It is extremely repetitive, each chapter feels like a recap of the previous one, the characters keep repeating the same things and the same facts are talked about again and again. The book was first serialised, so I guess the repetitions serve their purpose, but I do think the book should have been rewritten for the publication.
Secondly, the characters really lack personality, especially Kazuma (more or less the main protagonist). All the characters act as expected, I didn’t care for any of them.
And finally, even though the plot is very good, I do think that the motivation and actions of one character just do not make sense.
I loved the parts with the police investigation the most, the rest felt diluted, repetitive and predictable.
마늘밭의 파수꾼 by 도직
This one is the reverse than 白鳥とコウモリ, meaning that I think the book is good and I would easily recommend it, but I did not enjoy reading it. This book was not for me. It’s a mystery romance, and I think that if you like k-dramas that mix romance and mystery, you will love this novel, but to me, the “couple” parts were really frustrating to read.
It’s the kind of romance where problems arise because the characters do not talk to each other for reasons that I personally find unconvincing. I wouldn’t mind a romance where the obstacles come from external causes (religion, parents, society, etc.), but if it’s just because they’re not able to talk openly, then it feels like maybe they shouldn’t be together in the first place, so why should I care? In this novel in particular, the two main characters are supposed to know each other for a very long time, but they don’t seem close at all, there’s not complicity between them, their dialogues are so cliché, they keep apologising to each other and that’s about it. I didn’t manage to care about their relationship.
We’re mostly following the female protagonist, and I think we’re supposed to feel suspicious about the boyfriend who is acting like he’s hiding something. To me though, it was our female protagonist who was acting weird and hiding things. I kept thinking “but why didn’t you tell him? why don’t you ask him?”…
Anyway, I think it’s just me, I really don’t like this kind of romance.
The mystery part was excellent!
Reading journal
I’m also continuing my project of drawing book covers in my reading journal. It makes me want to practice pen drawing more, and as I said, I also think of doing a proper reading journal in 2026, with various spreads at the beginning and more decorations. I’m not very good at it, I’m always keeping some kind of journal, but I’m not good at crafting and making beautiful page designs, though I do watch a lot of videos about bullet journaling and co! I do like to draw though, so I’m thinking of doing a reading journal focused on drawing. My dream project would be to draw scenes, or sceneries from the books I read to go along the notes I take while reading.
In the meanwhile, here are some cover drawings from the books I read/am reading.
And now I’m just waiting for Autumn to finally bless us with cooler temperatures 🍂
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.
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