Jenny's December/January/February adventures!

So... seeing as I was away for so long, I figured I may as well write a post about what I was up to! Leaving out having the worst cold and most persistent cold I've ever had (because who wants to read about that?), this is what I've been up to since I stopped posting in December.

I went to my husband's home town for new year. Christmas is not really that much of a thing in Japan. Although people do celebrate it, it's more a day for couples to go on dates and for people to eat KFC (I'm not joking). The day itself isn't even a holiday! New year, on the other hand, is a huge family event. It's basically the equivalent of Christmas (or at least how we celebrate Christmas in Britain!). The whole family gets together, drinks, eats lots of delicious food (with some traditional not so delicious things thrown in for fun), and watches a lot of TV together.

My husband comes from near Hiroshima (in fact his Grandmother was living in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb fell), so we also went into Hiroshima to go shopping and meet some of his friends. And to eat Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki! Mmmm. (If you haven't tried okonomiyaki, you should, it's gooood. I'm not sure if Hiroshima style okonomiyaki is that common outside of Japan as it is difficult to make, but Osaka style is also really good and much easier to make, so probably more widely available). We ended up with time to spare, so we walked around the peace memorial park for a while, which is always nice, if depressing when you think about the reason it's there..

This is a cenotaph for the victims of the bomb, and if you look through it you can see the atomic bomb dome. The bomb actually exploded pretty much directly above it, which is why it's still intact, as it was pushed down rather than out. I ended up being pretty disgusted this time as when we went up to the atomic bomb dome there were people there taking pictures of themselves smiling and doing stupid poses with it, which is SO NOT THE POINT. Urgh, people.

I also went back to the UK for a couple of weeks to visit family, as my mum had a small stroke (she is okay, but lost some motor function in her hand, and isn't speaking with the same ease that she did before. She's slowly getting better though!), and work told me that if I needed time off to go back I could. So I did. Mostly unpaid time off as Japan has pathetic amounts of annual leave, but still.

I didn't do anything super exciting while I was back... I mainly helped my mum to cook and shop and stuff, but I did go to Newcastle (technically Whitley Bay) to visit my sister, which was nice! Their house is pretty near the coast, so we went on a nice walk there. Yay!

And then this last weekend (technically after I started blogging again, but meh, whatever) I went skiing with my husband and some of our friends. I've never skied before, so ended up spending a LOT of time lying on the snow rather than skiing over it, but I took a lesson and by the end was sort of getting the hang of it. Yay! It was fun! I don't really have pictures from it as I was mostly too busy skiing falling over, but here's one that I took from the ski lift so you can see how pretty it was. It's not entirely straight as I was deseperately trying not to drop anything while I was taking it, haha.

Pretty!!! Maybe not so much if you're used to snow, but I've never lived anywhere that gets a decent amount of snow so I was running around yelling SNOWWW!!!!!! the whole weekend, hehe. (Running and yelling may have only happened in my head)

And that's it! Luckily, my lack of blogging hasn't also coincided with a lack of reading, so I still have plenty of books to review...

Jen reads... Beloved, World War Z, Smoke and Mirrors, The Sense of an Ending and Dark Places

Mini review time!

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book was horrific (in terms of the subject matter and some of the things that happen) but amazing. Read it if you haven't already. And try to go into it unspoiled, I already knew one of the major plot points in it before reading, and I wish that I hadn't!












World War Z by Max Brooks

 Zombies!!! Yayyy! I really really liked this. It was written really well, was interesting and dealt with the idea of zombies in as real world a way as possible, if that makes sense. I have a couple of problems with it though...

Why was the English guy in it obsessed with the queen? I mean, it's okay to have someone who actually likes the royal family in there, but at least balance it out with someone else!

The bits with Japanese people annoyed me. There were Japanese words which are just normal words, without any particular significance that were treated as if they were special lingo somehow, and I wish again that there had been a bit of a wider representation of other viewpoints in it. A bit too stereotypical if you ask me. Mind you, this is probably only because I understand Japanese, I'm sure it wouldn't be annoying for anybody else!

The fact that actually knowing stuff about 2 of the countries that were talked about made me wonder if the rest of it would be equally annoying to people either from, or who know a lot about other countries represented within the book, so I'm glad that I'm as ignorant about say, China and India as I actually am. Yay ignorance!! (Only when it comes to reading this book, otherwise I'm pretty ashamed of how little I know about the rest of the world).

Having said that, I still enjoyed it enough that I have since bought it as a present for people and would like to reread it at some point. I might just skim read the bits that annoyed me and focus on the other bits. My only problem really is that although all of the American viewpoints were balanced, the countries that I actually know stuff about didn't have any balance to them at all, and I would have preferred to have at least a couple of different views of what happened from those countries. Of course, that would have made the book absolutely massive, but I don't think anybody who has read and enjoyed this would mind that, would they?

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

My first Gaiman book. As with any short story collection, it was a bit of a mixed bag, but the stories that I liked I really really liked. Unfortunately, the story that I liked the most was actually in the introduction, so I was setting myself up for disappointment really! Still, it was my bedtime reading for a month or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. I'm looking forward to reading more Gaiman, although I know that some of his things can be a bit divisive so I'm not entirely sure where to go next.






The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The story of this is split into two parts, with the first part about the precocious childhood of Tony, the main character... and if you want to read this, you really shouldn't know what happens in the rest of the book, as it makes every revelation later on become a bit too obvious. So stop reading!

For those of you who chose to ignore me, the second part of the book takes the first part and completely flips it on its head. I really like unreliable narrators, and I did enjoy the book, but I just didn't find the revelations to be particularly surprising, as I  had already worked them all out. Had I gone in without knowing about the whole everything was not as it seems switcheroo, I think I would have enjoyed it much more. I did still like it though, and it was nice to read something so thoroughly British!



Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

After reading Gone Girl, I did what I expect a lot of people did and immediately bought all of the Gillian Flynn back catalogue (so... two books. I'm so wild!). I still haven't read the other book (Sharp Objects), as I think that reading everything at once might be a bit too dark, even for me.

Dark Places is about a girl, Libby Day, whose entire family was killed by her older brother who is in prison. She has a fund established in her name, and has pretty much been living off the proceeds of that, but her money is starting to run out, and when she does an event for a group of people obsessed with famous murder cases, she realises that what she thinks happened might not exactly be the whole story.

Libby is pretty unlikeable although oddly likeable at the same time? She's not particularly a nice or good person, but it's really easy to understand why she is how she is. I really liked it, and am looking forward to reading Sharp Objects! Although I may leave a bit of time as there's only so much darkness and unlikeable characters that I can take!


Yay, 5 books down... quite a few more to go. Hehe.

Jen reads... all the Patrick Ness

Okay, so not quite all of the Patrick Ness, but two books.


First up, More Than This

I knew that I wanted to read more Patrick Ness after reading the whole Chaos Walking trilogy early last year (in fact, I believe they were the first books that I posted about on here), and I finally got around to it.

I really liked the book The story focuses on Seth, who dies in the first chapter and then wakes up to find himself in some kind of afterlife. Or is it?! Dun dun dunnnn!

The book opens with a fairly horrific description of the main character, Seth, drowning. You can read it here if you want to... that description alone has pretty much embedded itself in my brain, urgh. In a good way though!

To be honest, I think that the main story should be read without knowing much about what is going to happen at all. I went in knowing pretty much nothing apart from Patrick Ness takes on the afterlife, and I'm really glad that I did. So I'm going to stop writing about it now. If anybody has read it and wants to discuss it with me I would be quite happy to!!

Next, The Crane Wife

The title for this is based on a Japanese fairy tale, but the story differs somewhat. It is the story of an American divorcee called George living in London, who one day wakes up to find a crane that has been shot with an arrow in his garden. After helping the crane, he happens to meet a mysterious woman called Kumiko, who seems like the answer to a lot of his problems.

Again, I really liked this. It seems from the description that Kumiko could be a typical manic pixie dream girl, but although she is to some extent, the whole magical aspect to the book makes that more acceptable and less annoying, somehow. Plus, to be honest, that trope has never really bothered me, as long as its done well, and in this instance it is!

It not only follows George, but also focuses on his adult daughter from a previous marriage, Amanda. Amanda is definitely too mouthy for her own good, and seems to end up with her foot in her mouth a lot of the time, but I really liked her for it.

I don't think that the story is likely to blow you away, but for me it had just the right mixture of realism (George and Amanda's father/daughter relationship is really believable) and magic thrown together, and I really enjoyed it. The story is definitely aimed at adults, unlike the other Patrick Ness books that I've read, but it still has a sort of nice air of innocence to it. In fact, I think it was probably much less grim than his other books, hehe. It was a really nice way to spend a train journey that took 3 hours longer than it should have done (curse you, normally extremely reliable Japanese transport system!).  If you've already read Patrick Ness and liked him, I don't think that you will be disappointed by this!

Jen reads... Persepolis and Maus

Since realizing that there was an online community of book lovers (no, I do not know why this had never occurred to me until a couple of years ago, I’m an idiot, apparently), I have been hearing really good things about Persepolis and Maus, so I decided it was probably about time to jump into the world of graphic novels again. The last time that I read any was when I was still at university and read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (sick and twisted, but I like it!), Squee (um, same again) and Bear (same again (although not quite as bad)… my best friend named her kitten after Looshkin and it also grew up to be crazy, hehe).

So although I’m not new to graphic novels in any way, I had never really read anything serious. I really enjoyed both though, if enjoyed is the right word!

First a disclaimer... I read both of these around October last year, so I'm not going to go into specifics for either of them. Suffice to say that I found both of them memorable enough that I could write this much about them several months after I read them.

First, Maus by Art Spiegelman.

I’m sure that you all know what this book is about, but it basically follows the true story of the author’s father, who is a holocaust survivor. The book doesn't only tell the story of what happened to the father during the holocaust, but also the story of how the author actually put the book together in the first place, which is also fascinating. It is split into two books, but I read them pretty close together so I’m going to talk about them at the same time.

Although I had heard a lot about this, it sort of defied my expectations, as I was expecting that the main character would be extremely sympathetic, and he really wasn't. Of course, all of the terrible things that happened to him, his family and everyone else he knew make you feel sorry for him, but he just isn't all that likeable, which is a really interesting way to go for this kind of book, and made me like it all the more.

I also liked the way that the different nationalities/races were depicted. In the book, the Jews are depicted as mice (hence the name of the book), the Nazis (and other Germans, if I remember correctly) as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs. This makes it easy to get across how shocking it is that some of the Jewish people helped the Nazis, without having to explain it in words. It’s a nice simple idea and it works really well. Not all of the cats are evil, and not all of the mice are good, and it really gets this point across without having to over explain it in dialogue.

I don’t really have a huge amount otherwise to say about it, but it is really truly excellent, it made me cry (always a good sign), and it really brought home to me how awful the whole experience must have been. Not that I didn't already know that, but the fact that whole communities of people were completely destroyed for no reason at all is really heartbreaking, and I had never really thought about it in that way before. Even if you do survive something like that, what do you really have left at the end of it if everyone you knew and your whole way of life is gone?

Next, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

Persepolis tells the story of a girl growing up in Iran during the war between Iraq and Iran, and then her life in Vienna during her high school years. It is split into two books, the first one focusing on her childhood in Iran, and the second one focusing on what happened to her after leaving.

I REALLY liked it. I honestly knew next to nothing about Iran before reading it (apart from that my husband went there a few years ago and really liked it), so I enjoyed getting to know more about history and a culture that I had no idea about. As the first one is written from a child’s perspective, it is very easy to like Marjane. It’s very obvious that the author can remember exactly what it is like to be a child, and I can imagine myself reacting to things in the same way. So it’s easy to identify with Marjane, and she seems to be a likeable child in general. Things get slightly more problematic in the second book, when she is older and probably old enough to know better and not do some of the things that she does. Nevertheless, having lived away from all of my family and support, and tried to fit in in a culture that I don’t fully understand, I found it quite easy to relate to, and definitely did not dislike the second book as much as some other people online seem to.  

All in all I would definitely recommend it, although I think that it might be best to read both books together, and not separately like I did. I ended up with some time in between reading the first and second books, so built up the second one to be like the first book but much better, when of course it is unlikely that it ever would have been.  I would definitely recommend it though, it made me think about how lucky I am to have a lot of the freedom that I take for granted. 

Long time no blog

Yet again I have failed at updating this anywhere near regularly. To be fair though, I have had an eventful 2014 so far (not in a good way at all), and have good excuses for the lack of updates, which I will not go into here, but let's just say that so far, 2014 isn't that great. I have been getting a fair amount of reading done though, yayy!

To catch up, I’m going to do some mini review posts and some proper reviews*, so look forward to opinions about the following books:

Beloved

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Dark Places

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Eleanor and Park

Fahrenheit 451

Maine

Maus

More Than This

Persepolis

Siege and Storm

Smoke and Mirrors

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

The Crane Wife

The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder

The Sense of an Ending

Tiny Beautiful Things

World War Z

Note: The inclusion of a book on the list above is not a guarantee that I will write anything about it. So is the list pointless? Yes. But hopefully writing it will motivate me to actually write some posts!

*As proper as anything gets on here, anyway.

A Tale of Two Cities - Tickle tickle, pickle pickle (or, the final installment)

So it's a day late, but I finally finished a Tale of Two Cities! I say that like I was struggling to get through it this whole week, but honestly I only started reading the last bit today (in spite of what I said in my last post, I got distracted by shiny things).

Spoilers from here on in, beware!

I started reading the last bit this morning and actually got annoyed when my husband woke up and interrupted my reading. If any of you know him, don't tell him that! Hehe.

So... what an ending! I knew that Sidney was going to do something good, and I am happy to be proven right. (Although if I knew, that probably means it was super super obvious.) I knew that the last line was also famous, but I couldn't recall what it was, and didn't look it up while reading, otherwise I might have guessed the ending much earlier.

I'm sad that Lucie continued being pretty pathetic throughout the whole thing, but never mind. Her and Darnay were both pretty stupid: Darnay for going back to France when it was pretty obvious that he wasn't going to be safe, and Lucie for following after him for no apparent reason, and taking her child?! Okay, so the reason was probably love or whatever, but I'm not sure that taking the kid along was the best idea in the world. Honestly.

I also found the way that Darnay was portrayed to be quite... unrealistic. He was shown to be very brave and whatever to the end, but honestly, how many people would actually behave like that?! I think that might be one of the problems that I have with Dickens (the Dickens that I know, anyway)... The whole Sidney storyline made sense, but unless I completely missed it I don't think that any reason was given for Lucie to be so damn perfect (and irritating), or for Darnay to be that good. The other characters were all much better drawn, I think.

I'm really glad that I came into it not knowing the story at all. I think that a problem with reading classics sometimes is that the plots are generally pretty well known, so it's rare to go into a classic book without knowing really anything about what happens.

General thoughts on Dickens - I definitely don't dislike him like I thought I did. Once I got a few chapters into the book I started to get on better with his writing style, and by the end I was having no problems with it at all (although some of the things that his characters said were slightly bewildering - "I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again! Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off HER head comes! Now, a child. Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off ITS head comes. All the family!"... Tickle tickle pickle pickle?! What? I wonder if that was the reaction that people were supposed to have when reading, to make them think that that character was slightly insane, or whether that was actually a thing? I'm guessing that that line is not included verbatim in any adaptions of A Tale of Two Cities, hehe.

So all in all... I really enjoyed the readalong! If it wasn't happening, there is no way that I would have made it through the book this month, and I probably would have always been slightly afraid of tackling Dickens. But now, while I don't have a particular burning desire to start reading his other stuff straight away, I definitely do want to tackle one of his other books at some point, yay!

I have also realised, yet again, that I try to read way faster than I actually can. I think with some books this is okay (pretty much any YA, for example), but I kept on having to go back and reread stuff because I was getting confused. So, more careful reading in the future for me!

I'm really looking forward to my next readalong now! Yayyy!!!
Thank you to Bex for hosting it, and making me face my Dickens fears.

Jen fails at book blogging

So I am not particularly good at this whole blogging business, it seems. I have a huge pile of books that I've read but haven't talked about at ALL on here. And I'm getting to the point where I would really struggle to write about some of them at all coherently, so I think I might have to a few mini book review posts with just a few comments about stuff that I've read. I'll do better next year, I promise!!!

I have recently passed the 1000 page view mark, which I'm sure is not a big deal for most bloggers, but I'm quite shocked considering how spotty/incoherent my posting is! And happy! Thank you! *happy dance*

I have hardly had a chance to read this week at all (I've been doing stupid amounts of overtime whilst being slightly ill, this is not a combination that leads to the ability to do anything more than sit gormlessly on the sofa when I get back from work) but I'm going to try and remedy that as well! And now I'm going to go and make a start on the final part of A Tale of Two Cities now, yay!

Thank you again for reading my blog! I will try to post more regularly/more coherently from now on, although um, that may have to wait for the new year as I'm going to be stupidly busy again at work next week (which includes working on Christmas day. What a lovely Christmas present, Japan!), and then next Saturday I'm going off to my in-laws for a week. But come January, when I'm back in Yokohama, I'll be better! I WILL!