Reviews and Comments

This book was insufferable. Beautifully written, but the content itself was absolutely insufferable. I'm so mad that the words were so pretty, but the meaning so bland.

This book basically follows a French woman in her 30s whose gone to Japan to read the will of her late father, a Japanese man who she's never met. He worked with artisans, poets, and the like, so he was very wealthy and very well connected in Kyoto--which sounds like an interesting premise, but what it ends up reading like is intense exotification and romanticization of Kyoto and Japan at large (because that's what it's doing). It also leans very hard into Japanese exceptionalism, which is really icky.

I believe there are people who feel this way about Japan, and it does seem that the author spent some time in Kyoto, so maybe that's the root of this weird vibe that's going on. But I think it's gross. You can't describe a whole entire nation of peoples using old poetry and aesthetics. Japan may be special to individuals because of specific personal experiences, but it's not especially unique in any particular way. The fact that this narrative still happens is very strong evidence that the Japan propaganda game is still very strong. Poetry is beautiful. Calligraphy and traditional pottery methods are beautiful. Temples are beautiful, but Japan isn't going to save your life by being special, because it's not some magical realm unique in the world at large. These types of narratives are infuriating.

Having somebody go to Kyoto for the first time and be dragged around without being given any information to temples throughout the city to have some kind of "awakening" isn't romantic or meaningful, it's weird and deeply uncomfortable. Being treated like a child and being forced to go on some aesthetic journey before you read your father's will is some weird power play shit.

Absolutely insufferable. This is exactly why I tend to avoid reading books that take place in Japan and weren't originally in Japanese to begin with. I can't even begin to comprehend how anybody feels this way about anything.

Finally after 6 months delay, I've started reading the books from the International Booker 2025 long list. This is the first book that I've read, and if I'm being completely honest about it, I don't even really know what I think or feel about it yet.

When I read the first chapter, I was kind of annoyed and confused because I hadn't read the book blurb since I bought the book in March I think? But after I looked that up, I was pretty game again, and I think what's really interesting about this book is how it kind of weaves in and out of different perspectives.

One may think that everything is kind of being told through the eyes of the Narrator, but for anybody with a keen eye, you'll quickly realize that that isn't the case and that may be there or even more views that you're gaining as the reader than even just from Fanny and the Narrator.

Is Felix there too? Is there somebody else? Many more somebody elses? There aren't a lot of answers, and in the lack of answers, it seems to me that you find the actual answer.

This book is about not belonging, about existing on a different rhythm than everyone around you, about the inner conflict that comes with figuring out and understanding who you are.

I liked this book, but I'm not sure this review articulates why, and perhaps somewhat ironically given the nature of this book, I'm not sure I even know why to begin with.

As the title of my review implies, reading this book in the evening before you go to bed may not be the best idea. While most of the stories are mostly just creepy rather than being absolutely terrifying, exceptions apply. But yes, I read all of the stories in this collection to "wind down" before bed. I never claimed to be the brightest cookie in the jar.

I liked this collection much like I've liked the earlier English translations of this author's work. It's critical of misogyny and machoism in all the ways I enjoy, and it doesn't hold back the punches when it comes to pointing out other societal issues like poverty, but I'm currently shivering under the covers and wondering how I'm going to be able to go to sleep without thinking of demon children finding me in my room and dragging me out of my bed.

Much like the title suggests and a kind of roundabout way, I feel like this book has a lot to offer in terms of comparing and contrasting, and the near future climate crisis setting really helps with that.

There are a bunch of troubled girls being pumped full of a drug called BeZen in an effort to dull them down. Yet the world around them is absolute chaos. None of the adults who are charged with looking after them seem to be trained to do that job and the narrator herself is a mess of traumatic experiences.

Yet as bleak as the setting is, the story still manages to be hopeful in a kind of dark way. I think I wrote about this more intelligently on my long form review on my blog, but I really liked this but quite a lot. It's calm chaos really resonated with me.

I love speculative fiction like this.

This isn't the kind of book I normally read. It's a book that was originally published for free online as a web novel that got picked up by a publisher and it's an isekai. For stylistic preference reasons, I normally don't read these.

That being said, I was kind of surprised by this! Basically, the main character Liar gets reincarnated into his favourite game and all kinds of chaos ensues. But the system that the world functions under is really interesting. It takes a lot from Christianity and the idea of the seven sins. So it's absurd in every way possible, but also extremely serious because it talks about sins and the consequences of lying and blah blah blah.

The magic system is also related to the seven sins, but there was also a part that kind of reminded me of Pokémon? I don't know, there's a lot going on with this.

It's a style I'm not used to, but the story itself is really interesting and the longer I read the more I got into it. Will definitely read the next book in the series at some point in the future.

I had no idea that this was a horror novel until I was halfway done the book even though there's a blurb on the front of the cover that says it's a horror debut. Anyway, I have no idea what I read, but I really liked it. Queer, creepy fiction that takes place at the beginning of the 20th century seems to be something that I like.

Natalie Naudus narration was also perfection as usual and I realized near the end of the novel that the author is actually from the same province as me, which honestly as an extra layer of fascination and coolness to the whole experience.

I found the concept for this story really interesting. It calls back to The Little Mermaid to form its base, but takes on a strongly feminist tone, though it's not necessarily extremely explicit in this. Exploring the monstrousness of the relationship Ceto and Naia do and don't have was something that was really interesting to me. It also had a very queer undertone. These are all things I really liked about the story.

That being said, the overall execution fell a bit flat for me. I really like stories told in present tense and stories that shift perspective and time, but there just wasn't time to feel any kind of connection with any of the characters. Nothing really surprised me or caught me off guard in any meaningful way and even though the ending had what it took to be moving, I found that I didn't really care either way. I just wasn't invested in anything that was happening. Given how emotionally fraught the story is, my lack of emotional commitment to the story honestly comes as a bit of a surprise. Even though the concept and key features interested me, I just didn't care for the storytelling itself.

I want to be emotionally invested in a story like this, but my experience ended up feeling clinical and detached. I felt no raw emotion when reading Ceto and Naia's story and I finished the book unconvinced by the emotions presented in the story either and I'm sorry about that.

I loved so much about this book, but it also made me so mad, and as a result, took me 3 months to finish listening to. There were so many anecdotes and tidbits from the author that I really appreciated and a lot of things I simply had never heard about before that I'm glad that I know now. It made me start to brainstorm ways that I can be more connected and take care of the earth better even though I live in a huge urban center. But at the same time, there was this really icky undertone of classism in some of the chapters that I really think made this book less. Perhaps this would go unnoticed by someone who hasn't been exposed to people from many different places before, or lived in many different types of environments before, but it was really noticeable to me. I also found the author's somewhat interchangeable use of immigrant, settler, and colonialist, to be rather unsettling given the current political climate. I realize that this book is somewhat older, and that topics of Indigenous sovereignty can be fraught in the Americas and Australia in particular, but it nonetheless struck me as somewhat careless in contrast to how much care the author puts into expressing reciprocity in such explicit terms.

I was really excited about this book given how many good things I've heard about people who've read it in the past year so, but I'm feeling more on the negative side of lukewarm about it, which is a shame. Maybe I'll have to try it again at some point with some more education under my belt and see if I feel more positively about it then.

Another review copy for me.

Really loved reading a story that involves Islam and places women so explicitly at the forefront. This was a really great follow-up to reading The Bird King. Very different books to be sure, but I have a lot of respect for what each author was doing each book. That being said, the prose for this one fell a little flat for me and I didn't really find myself caring about the characters or interested in anything that was happening until about halfway through. I was hoping that it would grab me a little bit more.

Getting back into reading Japanese novels after being sick with a 600 page family epic is certainly not something I would recommend, but this book was pretty awesome actually.

It follows a woman in her early 40s named Yoko living in Tokyo in what I think is probably the late 90s. She came to the city for university from a small mountain village and never turned back and now, post-divorce makes a living as a freelance photographer.

The story is more or less about her reassessing who she is and what she wants with her life now that she's single again. It seems like a pretty calm story, but everything suddenly explodes around her, making the novel one of the calmest wild rides I've ever taken.

Everybody is cheating on everybody, the family of her brother is falling apart at the seams, said brother is dying of cancer that nobody has told him he has, there's a murder, there's dealing with the aftermath of a past sexual assault. There's just a lot going on.

It really is a family epic. And while I really enjoyed it and think it would make a great addition to the English canon of Japanese translations, The story may be hard for some people because it does deal with issues of emotional recovery after traumatic sexual assault, dealing with abusive family members and terminal illness in the family, and just a lot of retrospection towards life and thinking about regrets and how you wish you had paid more attention to people before they were gone. So while the book isn't written in a way that feels heavy and overwhelming, the subject matter would be overwhelming to certain people and they should be careful if they want to read this novel.

I've finally reached the halfway point of this book after a concerted effort to finish it and I must say, I'm more than a little underwhelmed by the experience thus far. I'm actually kind of grumpy about it to be honest.

This book was really cool to listen to, especially because it's narrated by the author. I often find that books narrated by the author are a lot more fun, especially if nonfiction.

As for the actual content itself, this book was a lot of fun. I listened to the authors other book about microbes pretty recently, so I was super excited to know that he had another book about different animals and the senses that they have. In a way it's kind of a lot bigger scale than talking about microbes, but at the same time, the way the senses of many animals work, scientists are looking in really small places. Like a lot of the book talked about insects and I've just never thought about the sensory world of an insect before.

I also really appreciate how he spent part of the book talking about how human activity can have a negative impact on the sensory experience of other animals and how we can improve the situation. It's always really nice to see when animals just aren't used as some kind of interesting subject, but then their actual lives in relation to ours are ignored.

Super fascinating book that I probably would have got a lot more out of if I hadn't listened to most of it while trying to go to sleep and when I was sick with COVID. Definitely recommend either way though and I hope that the author has another book out at some point because these topics are wicked cool!

It must be said that even though I started listening to this book at the beginning of July, I'm still only a third of the way through it and have over 10 hours of listening to go.

I don't even know why it's taking so long. It's not like I hate the book or anything. I'm just really uninspired to listen to it 😭

It's probably a bit morbid that I listened to this in audiobook format while trying to deal with my third COVID infection, but music is too overstimulating to listen to at the moment and I needed something to calm my nerves.

It's always a pleasure to listen to John Green speak and this book was no exception. That being said, if you follow his social media very closely and watch all of his videos, you probably have already heard basically all of the information presented in this book. So in that sense, if you're looking for something new, you probably won't find it here.

Nonetheless, I had a really good time listening to this audiobook and I would definitely recommend it to anybody who wants to learn more about tuberculosis and how it shapes our world.