November has not been as fruitful as October in terms of reading, but it was not bad either! I finished 4 books.
Language competition winner: Japanese 🎉
I read three books in Japanese and finished one in Chinese. The Korean book I was reading was not doing it for me, so I DNF it and chose one by an author I love, but I have barely started it… 😩
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This is my Notion timeline for November:
Some Notion rambling
I like to think of dates as a period for the book instead of “started” and “finished” dates. When I finish a book and its period ends, the period for the next one in the same language automatically starts (the day after). So the “end” date is always the day when I finish a book, but the “start” date is not when I start it. It just means that the period has started, but I might not actually start reading right away.
There’s a problem in Notion that I would like to fix, but I don’t know how. I have a formula automatically generating the labels “currently reading” and “finished” based on the dates. Notion lets you enter a “start date” and an “end date”, but you can choose to have the option “end date” turned on AND not enter any end date. In this case, the “end date” will be the same as the “start date”. My formula says that if the start and end dates are the same (meaning I haven’t actively set a finished date because I haven’t finish the book), it returns the label: “currently reading”. And if there is an “end date” that is different from the “start date” then it means I have finished the book and it returns the label “finished”.
Now a problem arose with 8番出口 because I read this book in one day. So the formula keeps it as “currently reading”. There’s probably a way to change the formula, but I don’t know how, so I cheated to make it as though it took me two days to read the book. I don’t think there’s a lot of books I will finish in one day so I might never encounter this problem again.
State of the competition
And just like that Japanese is catching up!
These are the number of books finished and the ones I’m currently reading, the DNFs are not counted here. The last two books I read in Chinese were not crime fiction, so I read them slower I think. 上流儿童 in particular was so intense (in a good way) that I had to take breaks and read it slowly. My current read is a collection of romance short stories. It’s really good, but I tend to take long breaks between each short story. I guess that even with a great book, romance is just not my thing.
Books read in November
爆弾 by 呉勝浩 Go Katsuhiro (Jp)
This book was not at all what I was expecting. It’s about bombs in Tokyo, and I thought it would be more about the effect of terrorism on society, but the focus was totally different.
It’s a police procedural, most of the book is focused on police work. A man is arrested for a minor crime but it soon turns out that he knows about the bombs, and the police has limited time to locate the next ones.
The duels in the interrogation rooms are probably the highlight of the novel, but I really love how each police officer involved in the case is portrayed and how their personality and ambitions will affect the case.
I personally found the questions of the motives to be the most interesting and I wish the novel (which is very long) had spent even more time on it and on some characters. But I learnt thanks to a Mastodon friend that there’s actually a sequel to this novel, and maybe the sequel will go over motives and society problems a bit more?
Speaking of which, I was also disappointed that the novel almost never covers what happens outside of the police work: victims, social unrest, public outrage, media… The bombs and the urgency of the situation felt almost abstract for me at times, because we didn’t get to see the impact, victims were just a number.
So overall, I probably didn’t enjoyed this book as much as most people did, but it was a good read still.
首切り島の一夜 by 歌野晶午 Utano Shogo (Jp)
This book was so weird… It starts as a classic murder story, a group of former schoolmates are on a “school” trip on an island, one of them is found killed and the weather makes it impossible to leave the island. Then the police does arrive and starts investigating.
And this is maybe 10% of the book, maybe less? The rest is devoted to learning about each of the character’s life during those 40 years since high school. In a classic murder story, you would also learn about the characters’ past, but it would be seamlessly integrated in the murder story and would also reveal keys to a motive. Here it’s not the case at all. I’m going to spare you the experience of going through those 500 pages thinking you’re reading a murder story and that you might find clues to the mystery somewhere. In this novel, the murder does not serve any purpose, it could as well not have happened…
Each chapter is devoted to a character, their story has absolutely nothing to do with the main murder story, and they also have nothing to do with each other. The novel reads like a collection of short stories about 8 different characters.
To be fair, each chapter is excellent, it’s fascinating how the author gives life to these characters, they all have very different experiences and life. But at the same time, I disliked how deep you dive into a character’s life, and then it’s just other, and you jump to the next one and never come back. I found it exhausting, and I started losing interest. I can’t say I did not enjoy reading this at all, but it was still a big disappointment.
上流兒童 by 吳曉樂 Wu Xiaole (Tw)
My favourite read of the month! This novel was truly fascinating. We follow Yunxian as she tries to offer the best to her son and steps in the world of privileged mothers who treat their children’s education like a competition.
But Yunxian does not belong to this social sphere, and she has a hard time fitting in. I always find stories about education interesting, especially the social pressure on working moms in some societies. But this book is not just the depiction of a milieu, it also describes in detail the evolution of our protagonist, how she slowly lets the group dictates her values and choices.
It was absolutely scary to see how easy it is to adopt your circle’s values as your own, even if these values were not yours to begin with. And at the same time, the character of Yunxian is so well written that it is easy to understand her and the choices she made.
The book is not really focused on children and the pressure put on them, even though it is present in the novel and easy to imagine. The story is really more focused on Yunxian herself, and how she slowly loses sight of what really matters.
English translation by Michael Berry, The Privileged, is coming out in December. I highly recommend it!
8番出口 by 川村元気 Kawamura Genki (Jp)
Genki Kawamura has directed the movie of the same name and co-written the script. He is also the author of the novel. At first I thought it would be a novelisation, but it’s not, it’s really a novel in its own right, and it brings a lot of things that are not in the film. (I read the book first then watched the movie.)
First of all, it is first-person narrative, so we feel closer to the characters than when watching the film. We also learn things about their personality and background that were only hinted at in the film. So if you watched the film, there’s still value in reading the book, especially if you want to learn more about the characters.
This being said, the two are very close, they follow the same scenes and the same story. There are a couple more anomalies in the book that are so great, it’s a shame they were not in the film as well!
The book is also well designed, with creative layouts to give the reader an immersive experience, so much so that I actually read it in one sitting, it’s very short and impossible to put down.
I never played the original game, but I enjoyed both the movie and the book! I highly recommend one or the other (or both)!
That’s it for November, all in all it was a good reading month, I’m just disappointed that I have more or less completely put Korean aside.
I don’t know if I’ll have a lot of time in December, but probably not. I do want to finish the year with something positive, so I’ll try to push myself to finish several books. Ideally it will go like this: 1 Korean, 2 Japanese, 3 Chinese (and I might cheat with a manga lol). I planned it like this because I already know what books I’m going to read for each language, and judging by their length, this is the most likely outcome.
I’ll be updating about my Genshin journal and my progress in Chinese during the month!
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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