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Skating into 2025
I hope everyone's new year is off to a good start! Z and I began ours with medical appointments that had good news (Z received an actual diagnosis for his painful hands and a steroid injection, fingers crossed; I was told that my eye condition was improving even if I can't tell yet), a baby shower for Z's sibling (I stayed at home and enjoyed being the sole object of our cat's affections), and airing out the main room of our house in below-freezing weather (landlord decided to re-seal the floors and re-paint the walls while we were gone; it looks nice, at least!). Overall going decently so far, I think!
While I don't have any detailed Japanese learning goals for this year, I looked at my time tracking from last year, and as I expected, with the big dip during summer, I didn't spend as much time working on it as I had the year before. However, one of my goals was to proportionally spend more time reading and listening rather than e.g. studying flashcards, and that definitely happened, so I'm pleased about that. The last thing I watched in Japanese last year was the new Mononoke film - the Japanese subs definitely helped, but I was surprised at how well I was able to understand it given the historical context and all the visuals going on, even though I usually think of listening as my weaker skill.
I finished reading the Captive Prince series through the library and quite enjoyed it. IMO the high point was in book two, which had a very nice enemies-to-lovers dynamic, although I didn't mind the slavefic part of book one (which I remembering seeing some fuss about at some point), and I also really enjoyed their relationship during the first part of book three. Damen also remained an enjoyable POV character to me; Laurent grew on me as Damen gets to see more of his true nature and it throws past events into more perspective, but I liked Damen's straightforward, honorable by his definition (with that changing over the series) nature more. The ending was a letdown and abrupt; I see there's a short story set afterward, so I might pick that up. However, the action scenes improved in the later two books, although I confess I rolled my eyes at the scene when Laurent first gets to show off his swordplay and the description is basically 'his swordplay was smart and schemey, just like he was'. The one thing that really dragged it down for me was the poor quality of the editing - I would have given it a pass if I was reading a self-published version, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay full big publishing house ebook prices for such poor SPaG editing, even leaving alone the stylistic aspects that bothered me.
Next on the reading list, I have two nonfiction ARCs I need to finish and review. I am struggling with Frankenstein now that I'm back to the Dr. Frankenstein section, but I'm far enough in that I don't want to DNF. I saw that Phoebe Judge did a reading of it, and I like her voice; not usually an audiobook person, but I think I'll give hers a try.
While I don't have any detailed Japanese learning goals for this year, I looked at my time tracking from last year, and as I expected, with the big dip during summer, I didn't spend as much time working on it as I had the year before. However, one of my goals was to proportionally spend more time reading and listening rather than e.g. studying flashcards, and that definitely happened, so I'm pleased about that. The last thing I watched in Japanese last year was the new Mononoke film - the Japanese subs definitely helped, but I was surprised at how well I was able to understand it given the historical context and all the visuals going on, even though I usually think of listening as my weaker skill.
I finished reading the Captive Prince series through the library and quite enjoyed it. IMO the high point was in book two, which had a very nice enemies-to-lovers dynamic, although I didn't mind the slavefic part of book one (which I remembering seeing some fuss about at some point), and I also really enjoyed their relationship during the first part of book three. Damen also remained an enjoyable POV character to me; Laurent grew on me as Damen gets to see more of his true nature and it throws past events into more perspective, but I liked Damen's straightforward, honorable by his definition (with that changing over the series) nature more. The ending was a letdown and abrupt; I see there's a short story set afterward, so I might pick that up. However, the action scenes improved in the later two books, although I confess I rolled my eyes at the scene when Laurent first gets to show off his swordplay and the description is basically 'his swordplay was smart and schemey, just like he was'. The one thing that really dragged it down for me was the poor quality of the editing - I would have given it a pass if I was reading a self-published version, but I wouldn't have been happy to pay full big publishing house ebook prices for such poor SPaG editing, even leaving alone the stylistic aspects that bothered me.
Next on the reading list, I have two nonfiction ARCs I need to finish and review. I am struggling with Frankenstein now that I'm back to the Dr. Frankenstein section, but I'm far enough in that I don't want to DNF. I saw that Phoebe Judge did a reading of it, and I like her voice; not usually an audiobook person, but I think I'll give hers a try.