I’m thinking of changing my posting schedule! Lately, I’ve been posting once a month to update on everything, but now I’m thinking it would be better to post two or three times a month and separate book updates, anki + genshin updates and stationery + reading journal. This would make the posts shorter, and it’s probably best to update more often anyway. This will also means more work for me, so I’ll try but I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up.
So today is books only, and I’m so happy to say that I am finally back into reading after the complete disaster that September has been.
Language competition winner: Chinese! (and it’s not even close)
I finished 5 books in Chinese, 1 in Japanese and 0 in Korean. I have a Mastodon account for reading updates, but I haven’t touched it lately… I’m back to it now! I’m posting my monthly readings each month, which I update as I go. That’s the one for October:
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And this is the timeline view from Notion for the month of October (purple is Chinese, green Japanese and blue Korean):
It’s crazy to think that I finished five books in Chinese this month. They were short to be fair, but still, it feels like a big achievement.
There are two things that made me read in Chinese much more than the other two languages. First my husband went to Taiwan for a conference and brought back four physical books for me. This was a huge boost to my motivation! I had made a list of 8 books (thinking some of them might not be available, which happened to be the case) that I took from the website Books from Taiwan, an initiative funded by the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan to promote Taiwanese literature to foreign publishers. Someone mentioned this site to me on Mastodon, and it has been very useful.
Here they are! I wanted my physical books to be a little special, so I mainly chose non crime fiction books like romance, literary fiction, SF, etc.
They are not all recent publications, but given that they are promoted on this website for translation, I assumed they were all very good.
Second reason is that Japanese and Korean were stuck with books that I did not enjoy at all. So on October 18th, when I finished my third Taiwanese book in a row, I decided to DNF my current Korean and Japanese books that were dragging on for forever and start anew. It went well for Japanese, because I absolutely loved and finished the new book I chose. Korean though… I picked 메스를 든 사냔꾼 by 최이도 because it’s so popular, and there’s a drama adaptation on Disney Plus. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me at all. The plot and the setting felt like watching a K-drama to me, and I personally prefer more realistic settings and characters. There’s nothing wrong with the book, just not the kind I like, even though serial killers and gruesome murders are usually my thing. So I put this one aside as well, and with this, I didn’t finish any Korean book this month.
These are the actual results since I started tracking my readings in Notion. It’s really crazy to think I’m reading in Chinese now. I also feel very confortable with this language, it went straight in front of Korean in terms of easiness which is crazy given the time I spent learning Korean compared to Chinese. So now I would say that reading in Japanese is the easiest, closely followed by Chinese, and Korean is still a struggle.
And I have a new system for my reading journal, but I’ll keep that for the stationery post.
Books read in October
紅色魔髮選角事件 (第二十三屆台灣推理作家協會徵文獎作品集).
大盜唐飛龍 by 又町, 二婆洗冤：安平王城案 by 花聆, 狼人誕生之處 by 赤蝟, 紅色魔髮選角事件 by 格多納, 破地獄 by 默颺.
This collection contains the winners of the Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award for short stories and novellas. No surprise from prize winners, but the stories that I read were all great. I had to skip one, 二婆洗冤：安平王城案, because it was a historical mystery and it was too difficult to read.
I particularly loved 狼人誕生之處 and 破地獄, and overall, I love this kind of collections where you get to meet different sub-genres and different authors.
關於殺人這件事……請勿對號入座 by 馬卡
Another collection of short stories, this time exploring why ordinary people suddenly commit murder. These short stories describe the situations that leads the characters to contemplate the possibility of murder and it was fascinating to see how states of mind can change and how strong emotions like jealousy or guilt can alter someone’s personality and fate. This is exactly what I find fascinating in murder stories, and I devoured this book.
I did like the last one a little bit less, but all the other ones were very compelling. I will definitely check out the author’s other books.
訪客 by 托比寶
This is the first physical book from Taiwan that I read. It’s a SF novel, but it also easily reads like a mystery or thriller, so even though I’m not usually a big SF reader, I found this book very entertaining. I also loved how it’s structured, the three chapters are independent cases but they are all linked to the main story.
The first chapter was really good, I found the plot excellent. The second chapter was less engaging, but it was still closely linked to the first story, so I liked it as well. The third one was certainly the weaker for me, but overall, I loved this book.
好好再見 不負遇見 by 黃山料
This is the second physical book from Taiwan, and it’s a very short novel about love and friendship. The protagonist is in love with his classmate, who in return sees him as his best friend. It’s the story of their friendship throughout high school and their first years at university.
I found that the whole story had a naive touch to it, with a lot of tenderness and sensibility, which is not usually what I enjoy reading. There are also several things I didn’t like all that much in the novel, but at the same time, it’s almost impossible not to love the story of these two characters. I would recommend, though it left me mostly depressed and melancholic.
神祕租客 by 七弦彈
After reading 好好再見 不負遇見, I decided that I needed a good crime story, as dark and macabre as I could find, to cheer me up.
This one starts with a case of body snatching for posthumous marriage. I didn’t need to read more, it was an instant buy. The story took unexpected turns and we ended up with a locked-room mystery and a nice twist too. I liked how it connected the two cases, I thought it was brillant. I loved the police detective and the investigation he leads, the characters were great, and the story extremely suspenseful.
Definitely one of my favourite mystery novels of the year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much info on the author…
方舟 by 夕木春央
The only Japanese novel of the month! The Korean translation of this one has been on the steady sellers list since it came out, I saw it everywhere, so I had to give it a try.
If you give me a group of people trapped somewhere with a murder to solve, there is not way I won’t love the book. 方舟 was really a good read all along, not the best novel I ever read, but entertaining enough. But then comes the end, and it was so so great! It’s not just the mind-blowing twist, the end turns a good novel into an excellent one, and I just loved the ending, it was so perfect!
(English translation by Jim Rion, The Ark, is going to be published in February 2026 by Pushkin Press, I highly recommend it!)
And that’s it for the books read in October! A lot of these books were very short, so I don’t expect to read as much in November, but I do hope that I’ll keep a good pace 😄
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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