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!

Dickens in December: The Pickwick Papers readalong, part 2

So this is going to be short and sweet as I am not feeling particularly well.

I knew that Jingle would be back! Yay, I predicted something correctly for once! (It doesn't happen often).

I enjoyed the side anecdotes more this time round (maybe because I was expecting them and was thus mentally prepared for the break in tone from the rest of the book), but I still don't really think they belong in the story, and I kind of wish that Dickens had had a much more aggressive editor.

Ode to an Expiring Frog was amazing.

I couldn't have cared less about any of the election related stuff. My eyes kind of glazed over for most of that chapter.

I liked the old fashioned mic drop at the end of the story that the old man who was obsessed with inns was telling:

As the old man concluded his tale, he advanced to a peg in one corner, and taking down his hat and coat, put them on with great deliberation; and, without saying another word, walked slowly away.

(Although to be honest I'm not sure that the story that he told warranted it, but whatever)

I left it a bit late to start reading this week's chapters, so I'm going to try and start earlier next week. I definitely seem to enjoy the book more when I'm reading at a more leisurely pace without worrying that I'm getting behind.

I will have a more substantial post next week, I promise!

Mini reviews of end of October/beginning of November reads

Let's face it, I am never going to find the time/inclination to write proper reviews for everything that I have read. So my new plan is to give everything that I have read a mini review at least, and then do individual posts for books that I actually have a decent amount to say about.

And I did actually write this in early November, but then forgot to post it, haha. Oh well.

On with the reviews!


Geek Girl by Holly Smale

If you are looking for a light-hearted, easy to read book that doesn't take itself too seriously, this might be one for you. The story follows Harriet, a girl who is a self-professed geek who hates fashion, but is then scouted at a fashion event that she only attended to support her best friend Nat who actually wants to be a model. Awkward. It is completely ridiculous, and I am pretty sure that the fashion industry does not work at all in the way that it is depicted in the book (although I could be wrong I guess, according to the author biography it seems to have been based on personal experience!), but it was thoroughly entertaining, and I really loved Harriet as a character. I only bought this because it was really cheap, but I think I will definitely read the rest of the series the next time I need something that I know will be very entertaining.

My only complaint isn't anything to do with the book really, but there were "handwritten" sections that ended up being really tiny and difficult to read on my e-reader. I couldn't figure out a way to make the pictures bigger, so ended up having to squint at them. Probably just me being stupid, but I feel like that should be accounted for when it's made into an e-book!


The Dinner by Herman Koch

I'm sure that those of you who haven't read this have at least heard of it. I don't really want to say much about the story as I think it's the kind of thing that works best if you know as little about it as possible beforehand, but it is about a man who goes out for a meal with his wife, his brother and his sister in law, and throughout the dinner it is revealed that all is not as it seems.

I have heard some people say that they couldn't relate to the characters at all, but I didn't find that to be a problem. I enjoyed the book and the revelations weren't at all what I thought they might be. It was quite a tense reading experience, and on the whole I enjoyed it. I did find it slightly annoying that it kept on purposefully not telling you the names of things, like "at a hospital, but I won't tell you which one because..." when there didn't seem to be any need for it to be written that way.

I also went into the book thinking that everything would be revealed through the dinner, but there was a lot of remembering things that had happened, and I think conceptually it would have been much more interesting if it had just been the meal. I'm not entirely sure why I thought that it would just be the meal, I must have misunderstood something that I read about it! (I tend not to read reviews/blurbs too closely if I know I actually want to read something, so sometimes completely get the wrong end of the stick)


Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Creepy cheerleaders? I'm there! This was a pretty creepy sinister book, and although I'm not sure I would count it amongst the best books that I have ever read, it was very well written, atmospheric and above all, enjoyable.

The book opens on some horrible event that has happened involving the narrator, Addy, and then the book goes on to cover the events that led up to it and... well to say any more would involve spoilers.

I enjoyed this, although I found some of the dialogue pushed the lines of plausibility (especially some of the things that Beth, Addy's best friend said). But overall, it was a very enjoyable read.


The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

This was an interesting one for me, as the book is set in Harare (the capital city of Zimbabwe, obviously, I so knew that before I started reading the book), and most of the books that I read that are set in countries that are not the UK or America tends to be more serious literary fiction (like the two books that I read this year that are at least party set in Zimbabwe and Nigeria, We Need New Names and Americanah - neither of which I blogged about, apparently! Bad Jenny. They were both excellent!), and this was definitely not.

The story is about a hairdresser, Vimbai, who is the star hairdresser in her salon until a man, Dumisani, shows up and takes a job as a new hairdresser. The story follows Vimbai and Dumi as their relationship evolves from rivals to something else, as we find out more about Dumi's mysterious past.

I liked reading a book set in a country which has a lot of political and economic issues, where those issues were not the main focus of the book, but to be honest, if it wasn't for the setting I'm not sure how far I would have got into the book. I spent a lot of the time that I was reading it saying "ARGH Vimbai stop being an idiot!" in my head, as she was infuriatingly naive about a lot of things, and I didn't find the plot particularly interesting, although it didn't outright bore me at any point. What I did find fascinating were the insights into daily life in Zimbabwe and being exposed to a completely different culture. If this book had been set in... I don't know, Birmingham or somewhere I probably would have read a couple of pages, shrugged and decided that I didn't care.

Also, every chapter seemed to end with a sentence like this: "Little did I know that this small twist of fate would cost me my crown.", which I think is okay occasionally, but gets irritating when it is repeated ad infinitum!