Bold of you to assume I organise it at all.

Picking my next book is more or less like playing a game of “Go Fish”.

We like it because we like the depiction of pain and sadness through a twisted and unique mindset.

I am literate in Japanese (L2) and English (Native), and I will almost always read a Japanese book in Japanese even if there is an English translation. The only exceptions are for translations that have significant scholarship/discourse around them.

On the other hand, I do like to read Japanese translations of works that were originally written in English, but not for first-reads. It’s super-interesting to me to see what kinds of choices the Japanese translators made.

Ultimately, read whatever and in whatever language you think is interesting!

Was it the book or other circumstances that just happened to be going on at the time?

I hit a huge reading slump around one year into the pandemic, and I know lots of other people who experienced the same thing. I’m only just now starting to feel like I’m getting out of it for real (ironically, I’m in the middle of the book that killed me last time, and enjoying it significantly more than I did when I tried to read it before).

The Hobbit. I was probably 8 or so, and I was in love with the Rankin-Bass film.

De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy To Find A Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’

A lot of times I simply don’t have anything worthwhile to say about a book.