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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 10th, 2020 04:48 amMy thesis is REVISIONS COMPLETE as of last night! \o/ One step closer to officially-officially graduating!!
Z and I are now in self-isolation mode so we can visit my parents for Christmas. We went on one last grocery trip, where I bought a Buddha's Hand citron because they look cool and smell good, and I will probably try making candy from it.
Have read: Spirals in Time, a book about molluscs. It is full of cool mollusc facts. Also missing commas! (FFS, publishers, I know everyone is tossing their editors nowadays, but please have a little pride in the readability of your books.) Anyway, the mollusc facts were cool enough to make up for the commas. My very favorite was probably the one about Romans eating glow-in-the-dark clams until the juices dripping all over them looked like fire, but I also enjoyed learning about sea-silk. Apparently those articles about 'the one last sea-silk spinner' are kiiiinda PR and she is not really the last one. It sounds like sea-silk is also not as quite magical in person as the name sounds :( Probably good for the clams, though.
I also read in one sitting a few weeks ago A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness, which is... I think someone on GoodReads described it as a three-star book with a four-star reading experience. Yes. It's horrifying, but also a lot less creepypasta than most online accounts of the case. I ended up feeling sorry for the doctors and nurses while also wanting to shake everyone in charge of the poor man's case - his treatment really, really, really should not have been allowed to go on as long as it did, and while perhaps the doctors had too much hubris, it's also clear that at some point they were also emotionally and probably physically exhausted and should no longer have been in sole charge of making decisions about his care. One really starts to wonder who the fuck was signing off on all the expenses and why they never once seemed to poke their head in and ask what was going on. No hospital ethics committee, either?
The translation from Japanese is not great - it's definitely translatorese - but it's workable. I suspect the original writing itself was not great, either. I could hear every single one of the 300 がんばるs that were probably in the original; as an outsider, I grew increasingly frustrated with that aspect of the culture as the book went on, since it seemed to help fuel the madness that was poor Ouchi's treatment.
Slightly more cheerily, I would rec the free short story Postcards From Natalie, a short and touching horror story. I also liked two of the other short stories in the magazine by the same author - I would only anti-rec Sea Glass because it felt under-written and never actually reached the horror. Unless 'woo horseshoe crabs spooky' is supposed to be the horror in that one? But horseshoe crabs are cool.
Am Reading: Almost done with Genji! Also re-reading 不機嫌なモノノケ庵 vol. 3, this time in Japanese. Sensei does love their obscure kanji, lol.
To Read: Will probably pick something at random from my new Calibre library. I also read a little of Satton's book and I think I could get through it without too much trouble, actually, so I might try it! Would be interesting to read the perspective of a Japanese person learning English.
Z and I are now in self-isolation mode so we can visit my parents for Christmas. We went on one last grocery trip, where I bought a Buddha's Hand citron because they look cool and smell good, and I will probably try making candy from it.
Have read: Spirals in Time, a book about molluscs. It is full of cool mollusc facts. Also missing commas! (FFS, publishers, I know everyone is tossing their editors nowadays, but please have a little pride in the readability of your books.) Anyway, the mollusc facts were cool enough to make up for the commas. My very favorite was probably the one about Romans eating glow-in-the-dark clams until the juices dripping all over them looked like fire, but I also enjoyed learning about sea-silk. Apparently those articles about 'the one last sea-silk spinner' are kiiiinda PR and she is not really the last one. It sounds like sea-silk is also not as quite magical in person as the name sounds :( Probably good for the clams, though.
I also read in one sitting a few weeks ago A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness, which is... I think someone on GoodReads described it as a three-star book with a four-star reading experience. Yes. It's horrifying, but also a lot less creepypasta than most online accounts of the case. I ended up feeling sorry for the doctors and nurses while also wanting to shake everyone in charge of the poor man's case - his treatment really, really, really should not have been allowed to go on as long as it did, and while perhaps the doctors had too much hubris, it's also clear that at some point they were also emotionally and probably physically exhausted and should no longer have been in sole charge of making decisions about his care. One really starts to wonder who the fuck was signing off on all the expenses and why they never once seemed to poke their head in and ask what was going on. No hospital ethics committee, either?
The translation from Japanese is not great - it's definitely translatorese - but it's workable. I suspect the original writing itself was not great, either. I could hear every single one of the 300 がんばるs that were probably in the original; as an outsider, I grew increasingly frustrated with that aspect of the culture as the book went on, since it seemed to help fuel the madness that was poor Ouchi's treatment.
Slightly more cheerily, I would rec the free short story Postcards From Natalie, a short and touching horror story. I also liked two of the other short stories in the magazine by the same author - I would only anti-rec Sea Glass because it felt under-written and never actually reached the horror. Unless 'woo horseshoe crabs spooky' is supposed to be the horror in that one? But horseshoe crabs are cool.
Am Reading: Almost done with Genji! Also re-reading 不機嫌なモノノケ庵 vol. 3, this time in Japanese. Sensei does love their obscure kanji, lol.
To Read: Will probably pick something at random from my new Calibre library. I also read a little of Satton's book and I think I could get through it without too much trouble, actually, so I might try it! Would be interesting to read the perspective of a Japanese person learning English.
