Books of 2008

(In order that I read them)
1. Snow Country Yasunari Kawabata
2. Austerlitz W.G. Sebald
3. Kokoro Natsume Soseki
4. Lizard Banana Yoshimoto
5. 猫目小僧 (Cat-Eyed Boy) 楳図かずお (Kazuo Umezu) *
6. Some Prefer Nettles Junichiro Tanizaki
7. Confessions of a Mask Yukio Mishima
8. ブッダ 第１巻:カピラヴァストウ (Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu) 手塚治 (Osamu Tezuka)*
9. Thousand Cranes Yasunari Kawabata
10. Modern Japanese Literature ed. by Donald Keene
11. The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy
12. Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre
13. Modern Japanese Stories ed. by Ivan Morris
14. Patriotism Yukio Mishima
15. 双子のオヤジ (The Twin Middle-Aged Men) しりあがり寿 (Shiriagari Kotobuki)*
16. 子供の遊び (Child’s Play) 西岡兄妹 (Nishioka Kyoudai)*
*read in Japanese

An unremarkable year in reading. One of my goals in 2009 is to read a little more, and my aim is to read one manga in Japanese and one book in English every month.

I don’t really know why I really like reading in the first place, but whenever I do stumble upon a good book, I think its ability to make me believe (however fleetingly) that books are capable of influencing insight and the imagination is usually enough for me. Sometimes, certain books (anthologies I read in 2008) are hard to get through, though, and the only goal I have then is to just finish since I don’t want to see such heavy, boring books hanging around, anymore. Out of the books I read, though, I can recommend some interesting, non-boring ones: Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask (This is the only book I like by him that I’ve read so far), Sartre’s Nausea, and the manga I read this year was pretty all right, too.

I’m now halfway through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, having picked it out from the dust of my bookshelves after many months. It’s not light reading, and I won’t get through it by the new year. It’s quite good, but my brain is rotting…

And lastly, HAPPY NEW YEAR, everyone! I hope you all have a merry time. I will be eating mochi cream all day, and I hope you will also have many delicious, delicious treats!

Chocolate cake with an echidna

I hope everyone is having a nice holiday season! That green postcard you see up on my wall is from Satou Rei. 零さん、ありがとう！！！

Today was chocolate birthday cake day full of expanding waistlines, bag weightlifting, and long socks. No nosehair trimmers, though.

A Tenderly Sleepy Vacation

The glories of vacation time. Now I can spend my days treating every day as a weekend, and Sundays no longer have the gloomy clouds of Monday lingering overhead. Today, I gorged myself on hummus, baked too-hard pitas, knitted, and am planning to knit and study some Japanese soon. I’m looking forward to more treats over the holidays, too. Perhaps some warm socks (I have too many socks, but most of them aren’t thick enough for the winter), リンカラン／lingkaran magazine (featured above), maybe a book or two, a sometimes overly-full belly.

pon pon

I’ve fulfilled my need for ポンポンs! My very warm poncho with wooden buttons came in the mail today, and it’s already delighting me in its toasty warmness.

There are also pom poms on the tassles, perfect for protecting my eyeballs from the cold.

I have learned how to knit. I don’t know anything very advanced or anything like that, but I now have the capability of fusing string into large rectangles and am making a scarf through my newly acquired knitting and already-known crocheting abilities.

The Finished Comic and a Bread Loaf

The Sinister Winter and the Inflatable Suit (my comic) is up on my website!

The JLPT went okay. I am not sure how did. I read the reading portions too carefully and ran out of time at the end. I know I am supposed to skim, but I gave in to my natural tendencies towards reading and re-reading.

Anyway, let’s move on to more interesting things. After making some bread yesterday evening, I noticed that the bread loaf beared a strong resemblance to カピバラさん. It’s too bad I gave into my natural tendency towards overeating because the bread loaf/カピバラさん completely vanished in only a span of three hours.