January reading round-up and ramblings

I reviewed no books at all in January! Go me! I did read 8 books though, so yay for January!

I don't have that much to say about most of the books though, so mini reviews it is! Although at some point I will be writing a review of Tampa, so you can look forward (?) to that.



Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies by Hadley Freeman

Hadley Freeman writes for the Guardian, and I have been reading occasionally reading her columns for years. I especially enjoy Ask Hadley, which is supposedly a fashion advice column, but is in general quite amusing. My dad likes it, and I don't think he cares at all about fashion, so it's entertaining even if you don't care about the subject. I am sort of weirdly interested in fashion. You would not know this to see how I dress. Haha.

Anyway, I picked up this guide to being a woman (it's basically a collection of little essays about feminism and.. other stuff) because I know I like the way she writes, and it was fine. Nothing particularly mind blowing though. There were some amusing bits, but maybe not as many as I would have liked. If you know you like her, you'll probably enjoy it. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would recommend it necessarily, but you should definitely Ask Hadley a go!



Bird Box by Josh Malerman

The story takes place in a world where there is some kind of creature that makes people go mad and kill themselves and maybe other people when they see it. This means that everyone blindfolds themselves when they go outside to avoid glimpsing it. The book has two different strands, one set in the present day where the main character, Malorie, has two very small children to protect, and has worked up the courage after years of not seeing anyone else to leave her house and try to reach a safe haven that she heard about. The other strand is about the events that led her to this situation, from when strange things started happening up to the present day. I found the book hard to put down while I was reading it, and raced through it. From what I had heard about it though I was expecting it to be terrifying, but I wasn't really scared at any point. This is probably a good thing, because me being scared by things = not sleeping well for a month or so. It was extremely creepy though.

In spite of the lack of scares, I did enjoy it! I'm not sure it'll make my list of best books for this year, but I don't really have anything negative to say about it. If the concept sounds interesting to you then I think it'll be an enjoyable read.



The Cuckoo's Calling by "Robert Galbraith"

Mystery/crime novels are not really my favourite genre, but I had to read this because J K Rowling! As always, I loved the characters, and I think the book had some interesting things to say about fame and its consequences. I am definitely going to be reading the next one (and any others that are released) at some point. Yay! I still don't really get the whole Robert Galbraith thing though. I understand why she started using a pseudonym, and I understand why she would carry on using it, but I don't understand why she is still half pretending that he is a completely different person! Maybe she just enjoys it?



Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

Okay I tried writing a mini review for this one but it got too long so I'm going to expand it into a proper post. Next!









Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

It was Mary Roach. As always, she is very entertaining, and not at all afraid to jump in to whatever she's writing about. If you have read and enjoyed other books by her, or want to read some non-fiction about sex and the science behind it, then I think you'll probably enjoy it.

My favourite Mary Roach is still Stiff though. I think maybe part of me is still too British to enjoy this one as much as I could have, if that makes sense.



Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

I feel like I should have read this years ago. I read a LOT of discworld books when I was in my teens, and I have recently tried and liked Neil Gaiman, so I was pretty sure that I would like this, and I was right! I'm sure anybody who is interested in either of them knows what the book is about by now (and has probably read it already), but if you don't... go read a synopsis somewhere, because I can't think of a good way to summarise it.

If you like Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman and haven't read this then you really should. It was very entertaining, silly and made me want to read more Neil Gaiman and go back and revisit all of the discworld books.



Tampa by Alissa Nutting

I am writing a separate post about this. Overall, I liked it (not sure liked is the right word), but also ewww.









The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1) by Rick Riordan

I have been meaning to try the Percy Jackson books for a while (because sometimes you just want something quick, easy, entertaining, and sort of childish and innocent at the same time - or is that just me?), and I quite enjoyed the first one. I definitely needed to read something that was very light after reading Tampa, and it worked really well. It was a bit predictable, and there were some things that didn't make THAT much sense in it, but all in all it was good. I got a set with all of the books in, so I am probably going to read them when I need a break from War and Peace!

---------

Bye January! I mostly enjoyed you, although I could have done with having a few more work-free days (it's been almost a month now since I actually had a day when I didn't do any work at all. I'm REALLY HOPING that I'll be able to get enough done this week to take this weekend off. I know that some people work that much anyway, but I am definitely someone who needs to have regular time off otherwise I start to lose all motivation and go a bit crazy).

I think that the next few months will be revolving around War and Peace, which I am quite excited about as I am really enjoying it so far! Yay!

War and Peace Read-along: Here we go!

For the next three months I am going to be reading War and Peace. I'm not entirely sure what I'm getting myself in for, but hopefully it'll all be okay.

I have never read any of the Russian classics before (or anything that was originally written in Russian, I don't think - I did at one point know how to say "I like little pies" in Russian, so there's that), and I don't think I've read anything in translation for ages, so it should be interesting!

I am a bit of a language geek (it comes with the being a translator territory I think!) so I am actually looking forward to seeing the differences in translation between the different editions that everyone is reading. It also means that rather than seeing the French in the first few chapters and going NOOOO, I was more like, ooooh I'm going to try to figure out what it means! I have heard there might be some German later, which I might actually be able to understand some of without looking at the footnotes. And if there is any Japanese in it (I seriously doubt it, but on the off-chance) then I'll be happy! Although actually thinking about it, any Japanese from that time period would actually be quite different from modern Japanese so I might just end up feeling sad at my inability to understand. Anyway, I'm pretty sure there isn't any Japanese, so I will stop rambling now!

The length of the book is obviously somewhat intimidating, but I have read A Suitable Boy and Infinite Jest, so I'm confident that the length shouldn't be an obstacle as long as I don't hate the book.

I already read a few chapters yesterday, and I am not only NOT hopelessly lost, but I am also actually enjoying it, which is a good sign! I also enjoyed the first few chapters of the Pickwick Papers though, so feel free to take my endorsement of the beginning with a pinch of salt. Looking back though, I can see how my experience with the Pickwick Papers turned from enjoyment to rage, and I can't really see the seeds of that here, so I'm being cautiously optimistic.

If you are not already involved in the read-along and you're interested in joining in, you can see the schedule and follow a link to the sign-up page here.

I am very bad at this blogging regularly business...

I came into January all full of enthusiasm for blogging and promising myself that I was going to get back into writing proper reviews, and putting something up at least once a week.

I should have known that I was doomed to failure when I only got round to putting up my first post of the year on the 9th of January. But this time, unlike every other time that I have had a blogging slump, I actually have a pretty good excuse! Yayy!

As some of you know, I work as a freelance translator*, and something that people say about working freelance is that it gets to be a bit of a feast or famine situation - either you are completely inundated with work, or you have absolutely nothing going on. I knew that I had a fairly large job coming in around the 13th, but it turned out to be larger than anyone anticipated, and I have had another job come in on top of that, so I have been busy busy busy! I've been working over the weekends since it came in, and by the time everything is handed in I will have worked for about 3 weeks without any proper days off (luckily I have been able to manage things so that I have gone out and done some fun things as well, otherwise I would actually be climbing the walls right now).

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I don't think I am going to get round to writing any proper reviews this month, but that's okay because so far I haven't read anything that has inspired me to write anything anyway. I will do a round up post for January though, so hopefully everything that I read will end up on here one way or another.

Reading in 2014 and goals for 2015

Happy new year everyone!

Yes, this is a little on the late side, but never mind. I have been away and not really with it since I got back (curse you jet lag!). I had a lovely time in England though, it was my first Christmas with my family for 6 years, which is far too long. Also, my husband was there and got to experience his first proper Christmas (Japan does Christmas wrong - it is not a time to go on dates and eat fried chicken! Silly Japan.) which he seemed to enjoy.

Yay!

Anyway, I thought I would do a little round up of my reading in 2014, and my reading plans in 2015, so here we go! (I would do the survey that everyone else is doing, but I can't be bothered)


Total number of books finished:

94 (the majority are not blogged, because I am lazy)

Number of books read (for fun!) in Japanese:

2. Absolutely pathetic. They were both manga as well so barely count really (as one of the reasons I want to read in Japanese is to improve my Japanese, and manga generally doesn't have enough words to make much of a difference at this stage).

Books that I particularly liked (in order of when I finished them):

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Saga volumes 1, 2, and 3 by Brian K Vaughan et al.
Hawkeye volumes 1, 2, and 3 by Matt Fraction et al.
Boxers by Gene Yuen Lang (must read saints at some point!)
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker
Landline by Rainbow Rowell (I discovered that I love Rainbow Rowell)
Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer


Overall thoughts:

I am very happy with my English reading, but I really wish I had taken the time to read more in Japanese. Oh well. I read a lot of Japanese when translating (obviously) so it's not like I'm not coming into contact with it or anything, but I definitely spent way less time reading in Japanese for fun in 2014 than I have any other year since I moved here.


Goals for 2015:

I don't want to be too strict with this, as I have the kind of personality where I rebel as soon as I feel that I have to do something, but I have a few vague things I want to do:

Read more in Japanese - I'm going to aim to read at least a book (novels, not manga, although reading more manga would also be good) a month, so 12 books in total. This is a rather pathetic goal, as when I used to get through way more than this every year, but I figure that if I aim low I have way more chance of actually managing it!

Re-read books more often - I always used to re-read books that I liked over and over, partly because I had no money to buy new books when I was younger, but I would definitely like to go back and read some of the books I really liked in the past couple of years again. I was also tempted to bring my whole Margaret Atwood collection to Japan for re-reading purposes, but my suitcase was too full when I came back to even sneak in 1 book.

Try to cover every book that I read on here, even if it is only a sentence. Otherwise I forget what I read. (I am actually giving up on reviewing the books I read in the back half of 2014, so this counts for all books finished this year!)

Sort out our bookcases - they need to be earthquake proofed (bolted to the wall - at the moment if there was a massive earthquake they would fall over where I sleep, which obviously isn't ideal. Our bookcases are very low and it would take a LOT to make them fall over, so I'm not particularly worried, but still). I think we also need to have a bit of a book cull and generally reorganise them.

So ambitious! Hehe.

Dickens in December: I give up.

You may have noticed the lack of a Pickwick Papers update on Thursday. I was putting off formally giving up on it because I thought that I might sit down and catch up over the weekend, but I didn't, and I haven't got the slightest inclination to read any more of it. It's actually stopping me from reading other stuff, as I was feeling guilty about not reading it. So enough is enough, I quit!

You have defeated me once again, Dickens! Curse you!

Oh well! I read more than half, and I think that's a perfectly respectable amount to have read. 

I don't really understand what happened though, because I really enjoyed the first few chapters that I read. I don't know if it's because I was in a different state of mind when I was reading them, or whether it was just that the things that I was enjoying hadn't been repeated ad nauseum yet, but yeah, maybe that's just a sign of how inconsistent the book is. And how pointlessly long it is. And how desperately in need of an editor it is. I think this might be the first time that I have enjoyed a book so much at first and then ended up giving up on it. I quite often start not really liking something and warm up to it halfway through, but this is definitely a new experience for me! It's weird, I don't like it.

Still, I'm glad that I took part in the readalong! I think that this, combined with A Tale of Two Cities last year has firmly led me to the conclusion that I really don't particularly like Dickens. But if it has a plot, as Tale of Two Cities does, I can muddle through even though I dislike the way that he writes in general and find that I have to force myself to concentrate in order to figure out what is actually going on. So thank you to Bex for organising the readalong, and I'm very sorry that I wasn't able to see it through to the end.

I am glad that I didn't invest in a nice copy of the book now though! Hehe.

Is anybody still actually carrying on with the readalong?

Blog related note:

So you know, there may not be very many/any more posts from me this year. I am going to the UK for Christmas for the first time in 6 years, and need to actually start preparing for that (I'm SO EXCITED!), and I'm going to be over there until the end of the year. So if I don't post again, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas/whatever other seasonal thing you celebrate/end of December!

Dickens in December: The Pickwick Papers readalong, part 3

I did much better at reading the chapters in time this week, and my suspicions were correct: I do definitely enjoy this book more when I'm reading it at a more leisurely pace.

That being said, is it just me or was there a lot of fairly racist stuff in this week's chapters? I have no examples, because I'm not that organised, but there were a few bits where I noticed it. Sigh. Also, I had noticed this earlier but all of the female characters in this book seem to faint a lot! Was fainting actually that prevalent in that time (something to do with wearing corsets, perhaps?) or is it just Dickens being an arse?

I also feel like I'm supposed to like Sam, or empathise with him much more than with the other characters, but he is kind of leaving me cold. I don't mind when he's interacting with the main characters, but as soon as he goes off to see his father or does anything on his own he starts grating on me. How does everyone else feel about him?

Onto more positive points - I am definitely enjoying Winkle's ineptitude at everything. He is like me, although nobody would ever look at me and assume that I would be good at anything sporty, hehe. I really liked the ice skating chapter in general, although when Pickwick fell through the ice my first reaction was to think that he was going to almost die like in every other thing that I've ever read/seen where that happens.

I also like that most of the scrapes that people get into are as a result of them being extremely British and not actually talking about stuff for fear of embarrassment/embarrassing the other person.

When someone at some point started reciting (or whatever - yeah, I made no notes, sorry) A Christmas Carol, I really thought that we were going to get some prototype version of the later A Christmas Carol, which we didn't, but the goblin story was an awful lot like A Christmas Carol, right? I always think it's interesting to see stuff in earlier work that is then expanded on in later work. Makes me feel like some kind of literary detective! Although you know, the goblin story was quite boring. Why have goblins if you're not going to use them well? Silly Dickens.

When I saw that the trial had a whole chapter of its own I groaned a bit, but I actually really enjoyed the trial. It was all completely ridiculous, of course, but that is definitely not a bad thing.

Anyway, although I am enjoying some parts of the book, I am finding the whole thing is getting a bit stale. It is also far too long. If it was cut down so that only the actually interesting and amusing bits were in there, it would be much better! I am generally against abridging books, but I think I would enjoy an abridged version of this much more. This is also where actually have a plot would save the book somewhat, as at least I would (probably) want to know what happens next. As it is, I end up hoping that the next anecdote will be interesting each time I pick up the book, and I'm disappointed more often than not.


Some quotes that I enjoyed/that confused me:

‘What, Sammy!’ exclaimed the father. ‘What, old Nobs!’ ejaculated the son. And they shook hands heartily.

- I think I need to start using "What, old Nobs!" as a greeting.

"‘Fine time for them as is well wropped up, as the Polar Bear said to himself, ven he was practising his skating,’ replied Mr. Weller." 

- What is Sam going on about here? Or any of the time when he's talking?

"The chief features in the still life of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and bell-handles; the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man."

- I have no idea what a muffin youth is, but I want to be one. Or a baked-potato (wo)man. Mmm, baked potatoes.

"Veil, young brockiley sprout, wot then?"

- Young brockiley sprout, hehe.

Comics I read in November

Okay, so I'm not a huge comic/graphic novel reader (although I have read a sizeable amount of manga), but I do buy them occasionally and would love to read more! If I ever get some kind of tablet device then I would really like to look into exploring comixology or maybe signing up for marvel unlimited... but for the time being, printed comics, yay!

Hawkeye Volume 3: LA Woman written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Annie Wu and Javier Pulido

I talked about the first volume in Matt Fraction's Hawkeye run (ah, I feel like whenever I talk about comics I'm getting all of the terminology wrong, help!), here, and I also read the second one, which I didn't blog about (because I am a bad blogger) but did enjoy. This volume is much more straightforward than the first two volumes, which tended to have non-linear stories. It follows Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye as she goes to L.A. Obviously this means almost no Clint Barton (boo!) but I like Kate, so yay! I guess the next volume released will cover what Clint was up to while Kate was in L.A., so I'm looking forward to that.

The first bit of it is taken not from the normal Hawkeye comics but from Hawkeye Annual #1 (I guess? Comics confuse me), and it's slightly jarring after the other things because it has a completely different colouring style, although it's apparently the same colour artist. Normally these Hawkeye comics have a very limited colour palette (which I like), but the first one uses more standard colours (I guess?). I didn't dislike it at all, but it felt like I was reading something else. It's weird how much having different colouring changes the feel of the comic! And I so wouldn't have been able to put my finger on what felt so different had it not been for the additional stuff at the back of the second volume where the person who does the colouring talks about how he purposefully uses a limited palette.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in Hawkeye I really recommend this (but do start at the beginning of this run, not at volume 3!)

Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal written by G. Willow Wilson and illustrated by Adrian Alphona

This is definitely a much more straightforward comic than Hawkeye. There has been a lot of buzz around this, mainly focused on the fact that the main character, Kamala Khan, is a Muslim Pakistani girl, which is pretty unusual for a superhero. I think the comic does a really good job of making Kamala's life seem completely normal for her (if that makes sense? I think sometimes things can go too much in the direction of WOW LOOK HOW DIVERSE WE'RE BEING! rather than actually seeming real), and I really liked her as a character. 

The story itself is pretty straightforward, Kamala ends up getting the power to alter her body so she can change her body at will, and one of the joys of this is that she could use it in the way that most teenage girls would and make her ideal body or something (...okay, maybe not just teenage girls because that is exactly what I would do if I had that power before even considering doing anything else, if I'm honest), and at the beginning she does struggle with that a bit, but then she just uses her ability to be awesome and try to fight crime, which is a wonderfully positive message.

I say this as a complete comics newbie, but so far it seems like this would be a good comic to jump in with, as so far there has been nothing that relies on you having a massive amount of comic knowledge to understand. I managed with my knowledge which is mostly just based on marvel films, hehe.

Honestly, it's pretty rare when I read something that I don't have some small complaints or criticisms about (my husband said that my constant criticism of everything is a sign that I'm turning Japanese, but I think that I've always been like that, and most of my Japanese friends are about a million times less nitpicky than I am), but I really couldn't find anything wrong with Ms. Marvel. I want the next volume to come out now!