April stats

[flemmings]

English:
Buncha mysteries--

A Potion for a Widow
-I didn't bring a book to the hospital, fool I. But I was appallingly early and had to sit around in inpatients preop for two hours and the hospital had a small selection of paperbacks for the use of people like me, and I snagged the medieval Jewish physician in Spain one. Fortunately, cause that's what I read during my pain-filled insomniac first night. I assume it's the morphine's fault that it made no sense, though I think it probably just didn't make much sense.

Oh, and let me rant here about why in sweet heaven did the first writer of medieval mysteries have to be a romance writer?? because the deleterious hand of Ellis Peters can be seen ever after in the neat-and-tidy pairing up of faceless young people with other faceless young people in all medieval detective stories I've read. To say nothing of utter unperiod English. There's a reason I don't usually read these things.

Instead I read
Jane and His Lordship's Bequest,
because the period pastiche there is pretty damned good, and
Mystery of the Haunted Monastery
because van Gulik's second-language generic English, oddly, is generic enough to feel like generic Chinese translated.

Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island and The Ionian Mission
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Japanese:
Godchild 8
Boy's Next Door (sic)
Cruel Fairytales
--which leaves me only two Yuki Kaoris to go and I'm **done**!! la la

Kiss xxxx
--Kusamoto Maki, a manga paleaswater bought for me eight years ago and more, that made no sense when I first read it, It makes no sense now. It exists to be, not pretty because Kusamoto doesn't do pretty, but stylish. Unfortunately her heroine looks like a round-eyed Yuki Tamura character cosplaying Anne of Green Gables in ruffled white aprons, which is unfortunate in that everyone else is a whatever-the-Japanese-equivalent-of-Goth-is pop singer.

Films
The Promise
Matchless
Lan Yu
Green Snake
and a fastforward through The Banquet.
---not bad. Slowly I overcome my aversion to the visual.