Hey there, Kazen here, and welcome back to Always Doing.
[♪♪]
It is almost, kinda sorta fall here, which makes me really excited.
The leaves haven't changed yet but they're not quite as green as they used to be.
I have undergone what I consider the first rite of fall, though, and that is getting
my flu shot, which is always so much... fun?
Actually.
That's not joking, because I get my flu shot at work, at a really big hospital, on the
same day that everyone else at the hospital gets their flu shot.
It's an amazing operation.
I wish I could take pictures of it.
So what they do is they set up a large room.
It could hold maybe a hundred people for a class or seminar, and that's with chairs and
tables, like desks.
And what they do is they take those tables and desks and instead of being flat they lift
them at 45 degrees to act like, as barriers to help guide you through the room.
So you register outside, you're holding your form, and you go through the queue.
And they have three doctors, and they look over your form and say, "Do you have a fever? No?
Excellent, great," and they make sure everything's okay.
And they have whiteboards lined up and they all have flu facts for this year.
And they're flu facts for doctors so they're super interesting.
And then behind those whiteboards there's six nurses at six long tables all waiting
to jab you.
And whenever one opens up you go over there, they say, "Hello."
You put your hands on your hips because, something... back home, in the States, I would always get
get the shot up here in my shoulder, but here they actually do it down closer to the elbow.
The nurse has something like a hundred pre-loaded needles ready to go.
They give you your shot and my nurse this year was so good.
I didn't even feel it when he put the needle in.
And every year I swell up and depending on, some years it's worse than others.
But it's always a badge I wear with pride because I know I'm protecting my patients
and the people around me.
So get your flu shot. K? K.
So, to the task at hand.
I have my October wrap up for you guys.
A couple of the books I've mentioned in other videos so I'll be linking those up above.
It's been an uneven month of reading for me.
I've had some incredible reads, and some others I kinda wish I could forget... but we'll get
to that.
In the beginning of October a typhoon was bearing down on us and that's never fun.
Especially when it happens at night 'cause you can't see, really, what's happening.
You can only hear it.
And I was really wound up so I wanted a book that would take my mind away from all of that,
and I found one.
It's Silent in the grave by Deanna Raybourn.
It is the first book of the Lady Julia Grey series.
This is a period mystery.
It takes place in Victorian England.
Lady Grey is married to Edward and he dies suddenly before a party one night.
His whole family has weak hearts and he wasn't doing incredibly well before, so it's not
a complete surprise.
However, she's informed by a certain Nicholas that her husband was receving threats and
that it may not have been a natural death.
He may have been murdered.
And they go and they investigate.
This book had me from the first line.
"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body would not be entirely accurate.
Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching on the floor."
I was sold!
That's just, yeah, sure!
I'm here, let's go, take my mind off the typhoon, let's work out the mystery.
Lady Grey teams up with Brisbane to do this investigation but she has no background in
anything close.
No science, no anything.
So she makes mistakes and, on one hand, I'm glad that they show her making mistakes.
On the other hand, some of them are really stupid mistakes and you can see where they're
going to go pretty easily.
And that can get a little frustrating but it never took too much away from my enjoyment.
It's a whodunit.
I couldn't figure out whodunit.
...but I can never figure out whodunit so take that for what it is.
I like the world building.
The author doesn't overextend herself and try to show us all of Victorian England in
just one novel.
She makes this one corner of it very, very well, and things will, I'm sure, go out from here.
It turns out the author has done a lot of research in this area and while it never felt
like, 'Oh, I need to show off all my research to you,' she does explain things like widow's
weeds and putting black curtains over the windows and things that, if you're truly knowledgeable
about that stuff may feel a bit over-explained.
It's a feminist tale at heart.
I love that LGBTQIA+ characters are worked into the plot.
And some people have, online, have said that, 'Well, this wouldn't have happened in Victorian England.'
But you know what?
In our year of 2018 I will take every single bit of feminist escapism that I can *get, thank you.
If you're looking for a straight up mystery you may be disappointed.
There's a lot going on here.
There's a lot of character work, there's a tiny thread of romance running through it,
it's obviously going to be a series.
This was fine by me, I liked it.
But if you're looking for straight mystery, nnn, maybe you want to skip this.
For whatever reason I connect with the writing strongly, and if that first line grabbed you
you'll probably like it, too, as long as you keep the other things in mind.
The next book I read is The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Motoya Yukiko, translated by Asa Yoneda.
It comes out the first week of November and I received an advance copy from Soft Skull Press.
It's a collection of short stories as well as one novella.
What I love about these stories is that they're weird but they don't start weird.
They start off completely normal and you'll have a situation at work, or a husband and
wife, and one will say something that's slightly odd but you think, you know, life is weird.
That happened to a friend of mine.
But then there's another thing that makes it a little weirder.
And a little weirder after that.
And you slowly slide into absurdity in a really believable way.
Like, if there's a believable absurdity, that's what she's aiming for.
I like a lot of stories in this.
There's one called Q&A that's by an advice columnist, or an agony aunt, and she starts
off - and she's at the end of her life.
And she starts off giving fairly normal advice but it gets weirder and weirder as you go.
But my favorite story is the novella-length tale.
And I talked about it a bit in my Most Anticipated Reads video for November about a husband and
wife where they start looking like each other, quite literally and beyond their control.
And it talks about what it means to get married to someone and to keep your sense of self
despite being so closely linked to another person.
And when you should give that up, if you should give it up, or how hard you should protect it.
At first I was worried with a 100 page novella that all of the absurdities that build up
quickly in the short stories would continue ad infinitum and quickly get tiring, but that's
not the case at all.
The absurdities are much more spaced out, much more subtle, much more nuanced.
There are subplots that really make you think, and it was an engrossing reading experience.
I remember exactly where I was when when I reached the end of it and...
I was on a train commuting, actually.
And I just kind of walked off in a daze, like, 'oh, I have so much to think about now...'.
A lot of the stories touch on the theme of women's place in Japanese society where women
are still expected to be wives and mothers before anything else.
And I just...
I loved it.
The translation is good.
Now, I am in a weird position because I could've read this in Japanese but instead I read it
in the English translation, and it holds up really really well.
I was never tempted to back translate, and the Japanese doesn't poke through anywhere.
So even though I haven't seen the original Japanese in saying it's a good translation.
If you would like to hear me blabber on more about this book do check out my Most Anticipated
Reads video for November, but, four stars.
Really enjoyed it.
The next book I read is also from the Japanese it's コンビニ人間, translated into English
as Convenience Store Woman, by Murata Sayaka.
The Japanese cover...
I'm not quite sure why it looks the way it does.
I can't really explain it.
It's definitely memorable, though.
But the English cover looks like this.
The English translation is by Ginny Takemori and I've only heard good things about it.
The book is about Furukura-san, she is a- I want to say Furukawa.
Or Furugawa, or something, but it's Furukura.
She is a woman in her 30s who has worked at a convenience store for the past 18 years.
In Japanese society you're expected to go to college, get a quote unquote real job,
get married, start a family.
But she skipped pretty much all of that and went straight from high school into this quote
unquote part time job, even though she's working full time hours.
Her family is concerned, her friends are concerned.
They're always trying to nudge her to get a real job or, you know, fall in love with somebody.
But what they don't realize is that the job at the convenience store is the best thing
for Furukura.
It fits her personality perfectly, she thrives there, and while she doesn't always get along
with other parts of society this is one section that she can own.
And she's got it.
Halfway through she meets a young man and their relationship...? changes a lot of things
in her life.
And he is awful.
He is absolutely awful.
And he is the reason why I kinda wish I read this book in English instead of Japanese.
Because while the Japanese wasn't a big issue for me - I do have to look up words every
once in a while, but that's normal for almost anything I read - I can't read at speed the
same way I can in my native English.
So he would be spewing all this toxic, horrific stuff and I had to wallow and bathe in it
for much longer than I wanted to.
And it's demoralizing when I was like, 'Oh, I don't know that word, let's see what that means!
..."to rail at." '
It wasn't a fun read in a second language.
All in all it's good, just try to read it in as few sittings as possible and blow through
it and I think you'll get the most out of it that way.
If you'd like to see another review of it Jaclyn over at Six Minutes for Me read this
this month as well and I'll leave a link to her review down below.
The next book I read was the 2020 Commission Report about the North Korean Nuclear Attacks
Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis.
I did a full review of this one in a 2-for-1 review which I will link up and down below.
As a quick summary, Lewis is a nuclear disarmament expert with a specialty in North Korea and
so he puts together a government report of how, possibly, North Korea and America could
end up lobbing bombs at each other in the year 2020 with the current US president, and
what that would all look like.
The report is written after all these events have happened and it is funny in parts, it's
disturbing in a lot of parts, and what gets me the most is that everything that happens
before August 2018 is completely real.
So sometimes you're reading and you go, 'Oo, wow, that's incredible,' and you realize that
it's actually happened.
It's not fiction.
If you have any interest in novels that are told in a way slightly outside of the norm,
or nuclear anything, or politics, I recommend you check out my full review so you can get
the whole story.
After all of the heaviness of Convenience Store Woman and this idea of a nuclear attack
against the United States I needed something light so I turned to paranormal romance...
what I thought was paranormal romance.
Let's start there.
And it's The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark.
It's a pseudonym for Carol Goodman.
Our protagonist is Callie.
She recently finished grad school and is looking to get into academia.
She studies folklore and her thesis was about the demon lover in literature and it actually
got picked up for wide publication and made her slightly famous.
And now she's looking for a teaching job at a university somewhere.
This is made slightly more complicated because she has a long-distance boyfriend who's currently
in California and they would like to meet up in New York one day, as in New York City,
but instead she ends up taking a job in upstate New York, in the Catskills.
She does this because this tiny college in the middle of the mountains has a folklore
department that is beyond compare.
She ends up finding a house that's being sold for a song and seems a bit haunted but seems
perfect, I mean, she's a folklore/Gothic literature person.
So she goes and ends up getting visited by an incubus.
Like you do.
Everything spins out from there.
At the core I see how this could be a great story but it falls flat in oh so many areas.
First of all, the world building isn't all that well done.
The author throws a lot of things into this first novel.
It's like, oh yeah, there's incubi and there's fae and there's vampires and there's weird
stuff going on over here and, it's a lot to take in over one novel.
Especially when it's all introduced in this haphazard way.
And in line with that we're introduced to a bunch of different characters but because
there's so many of them we don't know them very well and it muddies the narrative.
One of these characters, who tend to be quite one-note, comes in, does the thing that they
need to to advance the plot, and then they fade into the background again.
It's not very satisfying.
Callie's working as a professor and she's working with freshman students and she always
seems to give them capital S Sage advice which doesn't ring well with me.
It doesn't feel like it's coming from an authentic place when, you know, there's one student
who is an orphan and she's like, 'oh, I lost my parents, too' and... it didn't feel right.
And on top of all this the author is very meta and heavy handed.
Callie is studying Gothic novels and she finds herself in the middle of a Gothic novel.
So there are lots of parts where she's like, 'oh, wow, it's almost as if I'm the heroine
in a Gothic novel!'
Or, 'oh, if this were a Gothic novel, this is what would happen next!' and I got sick of it.
Quickly.
I see where this book could go.
I see how the series could become interesting.
It should be classed more as an urban fantasy than as a paranormal romance, though.
Callie doesn't make many decisions.
Things just happen to her.
And maybe that's also part of this Gothic romance thing where it fits in well, but...
I just, no. I'm good.
I'm gonna let this series go.
The next book I read is Meet Me at the Museum by Anne *Youngson.
I have this as a physical copy, as you can see, and the design is really nice.
On the inside here we have the museum and that line connects to a fountain pen.
This is the British, um, UK edition.
I read this as part of Dewey's 24-hour readathon so if you would like to see my thoughts as
I read it do check that out.
It's an epistolary novel so it's told in letters, and I love epistolary novels.
It made it really easy to pick this up.
By way of backstory there's, um, the Tollund Man who is from the Middle Ages and was preserved
in a peat bog, which was rare at the time because most people were cremated.
So when it was discovered it went in a museum and archeologists and anthropologists have
studied it extensively.
Back in the day the professor that studied it wrote a book about it and some schoolgirls
in the UK were writing back and forth to him.
And it's now many decades later and one of those schoolgirls writes back to the museum
saying 'hey, I don't know, Professor, if you're still there, but this is the way my life is
going now,' and stuff.
And the professor is long dead but the current curator writes back and they start an exchange.
They talk about their lives, they talk about things they've lost, and one of the major
themes is about the direction of one's life and... if certain decisions you make in your
past limit what you do in the future and to what extent.
The letters are well written.
It doesn't feel like the debut book that it is.
I like that the author is retired and probably close in age to those of the people who are
writing, so it makes it feel more authentic, I think.
So I enjoyed the reading experience until I got to the end and...
I'm not going to spoil it.
But I'm just going to say, in general, I do not like it in literature when you have a
cishet man and cishet woman communicating in any way they either have a romance, there's
a will-they-won't-they with a romance, romance is hinted.
I was hoping, the way that the letters went until the end, that they would remain friends
and not even consider anything else... and they may have considered some other stuff, so.
Mmmnh.
I think I need to read the book Radio Silence by Alice Oseman because that apparently has
a platonic friendship.
But I'm just done with this romantic thing.
It's not needed all the time.
I feel bad because this is an issue I have with literature as a whole, not with this
particular book.
It...I'm bothered that it falls into this trap but... nnn.
So I ended up giving it three stars.
I enjoyed the reading experience until the end and then I got mad, but other than that
it was alright.
And finally, the last book I read this month was When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a
Transplant Surgeon by Joshua D. Mezrich.
I received this as an advance copy.
It actually comes out in January so what I'm gonna do, right after this, is I'm going to
film a full review of it that I can put up closer to the release date.
But for now I'll say that this is a book that, it's not a history of transplant surgery,
nor it it a memoir of him, nor is it just full of patient cases.
It's a combination of all three and they're woven together very well.
I was never mad when it changed or, 'go back to the other thing!', it all hangs together.
Transplant surgery, when it first started, was pretty much a rogue field because it's
kind of like you're making a Frankenstein monster, right?
In the very early days of the field brain death wasn't defined.
It wasn't a thing.
It wasn't recognized as dying.
So they could only take organs from people whose hearts had stopped for a particular
length of time which makes transplantation harder and all of that stuff.
So learning about that history was really interesting, his writing style is easy to
understand no matter how medicine you know, and I enjoyed it.
The full review will be coming up in January right around its release so instead of giving
it, like, a star rating right now I'll just give you a wordless review of:
Mmmm! Mmmmnnnmmmnn mmm mm mmm.
How's that work?
So we're finally done with all of the books I read in October.
Have you read any of these books?
Are you looking forward to reading of them?
Let's have a chat down in the comments.
Subscribe if you're new, and thank you to all of new subscribers.
I think some of you have found me via All D Books or Shawn the Book Maniac and I'm so
happy to have you.
And I'll see you in the next video.
Bye!
[♪♪] Thanks for watching and thanks for reading my run on sentences because oh boy that must
get tired real quick but that's just the way I talk and I'm not sure I can change it so again, thanks! 💕
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