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Recent reading
Jan. 5th, 2022 07:28 amLast book I read in 2021 was Christianna Brand's Green for Danger, a murder mystery set in a military hospital in WWII. Everyone who recommended this book was right! This is definitely her best one! The atmosphere is great, and the ending was probably the best in all of the many mysteries I've read this year, in terms of whodunnit, why, and how it was revealed.
( Spoilers )
First book I read in 2022 was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. Sentaru, an aspiring writer burdened by his criminal past, has been phoning it in at his job making dorayaki until he hires Tokue, an elderly woman with her own secret, to make the shop's sweet bean paste, turning around the shop's fortunes; they also befriend Wakana, a teenage girl from a broken home. Bit of a Lifetime/Hallmark movie vibe, especially once it turned out that Sukegawa had framed the story around a specific, and unexpected, social issue, but it was a sweet little book. (Pun intended.)
( Spoilers )
Read The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson. Knowing Jansson for the Moomin books and her at least semi-autobiographical Fair Play, I was surprised by how unsettling many of these stories were— not creepy, exactly, but with an undercurrent of tension, or menace, or the sense of something being ever so slightly off. Artists, especially illustrators, were a reoccurring theme. My favorites were "The Squirrel," about a woman on an isolated island who becomes obsessed with a squirrel that washed ashore on a piece of driftwood, and "The Doll's House," in which a retired man's passion for building an elaborate miniature mansion nearly wrecks his relationship.
Not reading, but book-adjacent enough to include here— I listened to BBC 4's radio play of Howl's Moving Castle (available until Jan. 10th)! It's only an hour long, so it cuts out a lot (including Sophie's family, and most of her backstory, although it kept Howl's) and condenses what is left, but it's still fun. I enjoyed the voice-acting, and that it has an actually Welsh Howl!!
( Spoilers )
First book I read in 2022 was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. Sentaru, an aspiring writer burdened by his criminal past, has been phoning it in at his job making dorayaki until he hires Tokue, an elderly woman with her own secret, to make the shop's sweet bean paste, turning around the shop's fortunes; they also befriend Wakana, a teenage girl from a broken home. Bit of a Lifetime/Hallmark movie vibe, especially once it turned out that Sukegawa had framed the story around a specific, and unexpected, social issue, but it was a sweet little book. (Pun intended.)
( Spoilers )
Read The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson. Knowing Jansson for the Moomin books and her at least semi-autobiographical Fair Play, I was surprised by how unsettling many of these stories were— not creepy, exactly, but with an undercurrent of tension, or menace, or the sense of something being ever so slightly off. Artists, especially illustrators, were a reoccurring theme. My favorites were "The Squirrel," about a woman on an isolated island who becomes obsessed with a squirrel that washed ashore on a piece of driftwood, and "The Doll's House," in which a retired man's passion for building an elaborate miniature mansion nearly wrecks his relationship.
Not reading, but book-adjacent enough to include here— I listened to BBC 4's radio play of Howl's Moving Castle (available until Jan. 10th)! It's only an hour long, so it cuts out a lot (including Sophie's family, and most of her backstory, although it kept Howl's) and condenses what is left, but it's still fun. I enjoyed the voice-acting, and that it has an actually Welsh Howl!!
