What've You Been Reading?

[sweet_sparrow]

I don't have a whole lot of time right now as it's Crunch Time with the semester's end and several nasty deadlines - for this week! - looming over me (so my apologies if replies are incredibly slow and/or just fall to the wayside altogether in advance). Please can someone have a talk with Time and have it freeze it until I get/feel caught up on stuff? *whinge*

I've managed to get a neat amount of reading done this month - about 15 books in all and a slew of short stories I haven't bothered to keep track of. The most notable reading of the month is no doubt the two thirds of N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy that are out so far: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms, both of which I really enjoyed.

Disappointments of the month were Emma by Jane Austen and Sabriel by Garth Nix, neither of which I finished. I may try them again at a later date.

What about you? What's your reading month been like? What stood out in any way?

Comments

[marshtide]

In October I read almost nothing (I finished the two books I mentioned as in progress in September, and I read a few chapters of sci-fi academia - that's it!) & therefore completely forgot to post. But November was more productive! Kind of.

Let's see...

Fiction in Swedish:

Sent i november by Tove Jansson (Moominvalley in November is the name of the English translation). Natural November reading and went very well with the mood of the month, which is to say, rather dark and bleak. It's the very last moomin book and really, really melancholy. I love it ridiculously much, I think it's one of the best of Tove Jansson's books.

Baby Jane by Sofi Oksanen (translated from Finnish - don't think there's an English translation yet). This was my first encounter with Sofi Oksanen, and I have to say I was really impressed. It's a thoroughly tragic story that is brilliantly well-told. The language is easy to read but still very interesting and the story is fascinating. It was a tough read psychologically; it deals a lot with abuse, anxiety and depression, for a start. But really great. Definitely going to read more by her, when I'm feeling mentally tough enough.

Att springa by Maria Sveland ("To run"). Also no English translation. This one was very... journalistic, I guess, and when I'd finished it I saw the author give a talk and understood exactly why it feels only quite nominally fictional; it's because it's based on stories she encountered as a journalist but which could never be published as journalism. Another really bleak one, about parents who abuse their children and about the justice system in Sweden which completely fails to take care of people in those situations. Did I mention bleak? Bleak.

Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster ("A new land outside my window") by Theodor Kallifatides. A book about being an immigrant, basically, extremely well-written, extremely interesting ideas about identity. Yup!

Lyssnerskan by Tove Jansson. A collection of short stories about situations which feel unreal, and maybe are. Or aren't. Obviously, I love Tove Jansson, and there were some great stories in here.


Non-fiction in Swedish:

Anteckningar från en ö by Tove Jansson, illustrated by Tuulikki Pietilä. Not released in English, alas, but the title means "Notes from an island". Misc notes and thoughts about the island the two of them lived on, from throughout the time they were there; really lovely and fascinating.

Simone och jag by Åsa Moberg. ("Simone and I") Part biography of Simone de Beauvoir and part thoughts inspired by her, thematically rather than chronologically arranged. Åsa Moberg is interesting but in a way that I often disagree with, and I'm more interested in the bits of the book where she talks about Simone - which often seem pretty insightful - than the bits where she talks about herself, but overall, this was pretty good & I learnt things.

Non-fiction in English:

Greta Garbo: A Life Apart by Karen Swenson. Biography. I'm easily annoyed by biographies, but this one was comparatively good, I felt. At least, I found it pretty easy to sift out the stuff I actually wanted from it.

Manga:

Solanin by Inio Asano. Realistic storyline about college graduates trying to find their way in life. Music! Depression! Uncertainty! It was pretty great. And sometimes really sad.

Flower of Life 1-3 by Fumi Yoshinaga. Ridiculous high school drama, but Fumi Yoshinaga does write it better than most.

Paradise Kiss 1-5 by Ai Yazawa. Fashion manga! Both completely stupid and oddly plausible, which is mostly down to the fact that Ai Yazawa's characters tend to have some kind of psychological believability. I really did enjoy this but I'm not absolutely sure why.

To Terra 1-3 by Keiko Takemiya. Brilliant classic sci-fi manga. Brilliant! Category-defying!

A, A' by Moto Hagio. More classic sci-fi, with a lot of exploration of gender and sexuality. Really interesting but I'm not sure it nailed it; I kind of love it anyway, but the gender stuff is obviously trying to get at an idea it doesn't quite have the language for.

The Aromatic Bitters by Erica Sakurazawa. Two women in dead-end relationships try to figure out their lives. I don't really know what I thought of this; it was probably pretty well-done but for some reason didn't really grab me, which is possibly down to the subject matter. I was interested but in quite a distant way.

Banana Fish 1-8 by Akimi Yoshida. Why did I read 8 volumes of this? It's stupid and more than usually racist. Gah. (Answer: I was sick and needed something with no brain at all.) I know it's meant to be classic shonen-ai but oh boy. Pretty representative of 80s manga in some ways, though.

Andromeda Stories 1 by Ryu Mitsuse and Keiko Takemiya. Some kind of sci-fi/fantasy hybrid which has interested me so far.

Jojo's bizarre adventure 1 by Hurohiko Araki. Title is accurate and descriptive. I honestly don't even know what to make of this manga. It's about the most homoerotic thing I think I have possibly ever read. I also genuinely wish that if it was going to be so inept at dealing with women it would just not try, to be honest. It's ridiculous. I guess one needs to approach it with a special sort of mindset.

Red Blinds the Foolish by est em. Yaoi, which I don't really tend to read, but was assured this one was actually interesting on a different level to the usual and yeah, it was, with interestingly constructed relationships. And no-one got raped. Amazing. See, yaoi! You can do it if you try! Good grief, when you type sentences like that you know you have problems with a genre.

Pet shop of horrors: Tokyo 1 by Matsuri Akino. I will now disappoint half my online friends: I really disliked this quite intensely.


...yeah, November was a month in which I didn't really have the energy to do much other than lie around and read. Ta-da.

[sweet_sparrow]

I'm sorry to hear you were so low on energy in November, but I'm glad you got so much reading done all the same. I hope you're feeling better now!