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Not sure how, but time seems to accelerate. I have tried several times recently to write something for the Sunday Post, but then gave up for lack of time. Let’s try again.

Even if I’m not posting often these days, I do keep reading, a lot. I actually finished 5 books since last Sunday.
With 136 books read this year so far, I’m at 113% of my original goal (120 books).

I only posted once this week:

• Book review: Japanese Kanji Made Easy

Here are the 5 books I finished this past week:

JUST READ/LISTENED TO 🎧 

📚 A Death in Tokyo 
(Detective Kaga #3),
by Keigo Higashino
Translated by Giles Murray
Japanese mystery
麒麟の翼 was first published in 2011
368 pages
Published in English
on December 13, 2022 by Minotaur Book
Received fro review thourgh Netgalley

I will write a review, so I’ll just say this is another very enjoyable mystery by Higashino, with a brilliant plot. It’s amazing how it leads you from one thing to the next.

“In the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo an unusual statue of a Japanese mythic beast – a kirin – stands guard over the district from the classic Nihonbashi bridge. In the evening, a man who appears to be very drunk staggers onto the bridge and collapses right under the statue of the winged beast.
The patrolman who sees this scene unfold, goes to rouse the man, only to discover that the man was not passed out, he was dead; that he was not drunk, he was stabbed in the chest.
However, where he died was not where the crime was committed – the key to solving the crime is to find out where he was attacked and why he made such a super human effort to carry himself to the Nihonbashi Bridge.
That same night, a young man named Yashima is injured in a car accident while attempting to flee from the police. Found on him is the wallet of the murdered man.”

📚 Jasmine Toguchi, Brave Explorer
(Jasmine Toguchi #5),
by Debbi Michiko Florence
Middle Grade
128 pages
Published on October 18, 2022
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 

I went to the kids floor of my library to check out the illustrations on Kipling’s Just So Stories (which I recently listened to).
They didn’t have it available, BUT on my way out, I looked at the display of new books, and I found this cute MG set in Japan. I’m going through a Japan/Japanese obsession right now, so this book was perfect.
Jasmine is quite a pistol, though once she understands what’s going with her sister for instance, she does all she can to make it work.
But anyway, the emphasis is on Jasmine’s discovery of her grandparents’ country: Japan. As she flies there for the first time, she learns some basic words and customs, and discovers a couple of must see places in Tokyo.
A lovely book, with cute illustrations as well. I am looking forward to the next book in the series, to come out in 2023, which whill also be set in Japan, as Jasmine will finally meet her gradnparents after a long trip.
Oh, and there’s a super easy Dorayaki recipe at the end!

📚 Diary of a Tokyo Teen:
A Japanese-American Girl
Travels to the Land of Trendy Fashion,
High-Tech Toilets and Maid Cafes,
by Christine Mari Inzer
YA graphic “novel” nonfiction
127 pages
Published in 2016 by Tuttle Publishing

After reading a MG novel on Jasmine going to Japan, I just read this graphic “novel” nonfiction narrative by Christine, 17 when she wrote this book, who also went to Japan, to visit her grandparents.
It’s a cute simple narrative, full of cultural elements, from food to clothes, etc, and she accompanies her stories with very simple drawings. The art is not terrific, but expressive enough.
A lovely book for teens wanting to know more about Japan.
She first travelled there by herself, so there’s plenty about how it feels to land in a very different country.

📚 Du fond des âges,
by René Manzor
Thriller/scifi/horror
414 pages
Published on October 19, 2022
by Éditions de l’Épée

Read with one of my French students.
The book is not yet available in English

Wow, that was intense, and I was not expecting that type of thing at all.
I liked the supense, but not the ideas, as it got really weirder and weirder.
But it certainly is very well written, and with intriguing characters.

“New Zealand. A little boy runs breathlessly through the streets of Christchurch, chased by an armed man. Gunshots erupt. At the hospital, they realize the child was reported missing three years earlier.
His name is Nateo, he is the son of the famous explorer Marcus Taylor.
Why is he found now? Was he kidnapped? Did he run away? And who would want to kill an eight-year-old child?

A year earlier, glaciologist Marcus Taylor led a mission of scientists to a base in the middle of Antarctica. When they arrived there, they discovered ransacked and deserted buildings. The previous team had disappeared without a trace.

What connection is there between the reappearance of the child and this expedition which turned into a nightmare? One thing is certain. It’s too late to be afraid…”

🎧 An English Murder,
by Cyril Hare
Mystery
175 pages
6H10
Published in 1951

It counts for The Classics Club

Some characters were interesting, but I found it both too simple (I knew who the murderer was) and too complicated, with many characters, and a bit on the lengthy side.
I suppose some details were supposed to be funny, but I didn’t really find them so.
Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for that.
And even if it’s set at Christmas time, this was not really relevant to the story, except that they were stuck in a house because of the snow, and it made it like a (very pale) version of And Then There Were None.

“A country-house murder-mystery classic, as a party of people find themselves snowed in on Christmas Eve with a murderer among them….  
The snow is thick, the phone line is down, and no one is getting in or out of Warbeck Hall. All is set for a lovely Christmas, with friends and family gathered round the fire, except as the bells chime midnight, a murder is committed. 
But who is responsible? The scorned young lover? The lord’s passed-over cousin? The social-climbing politician’s wife? The Czech history professor? The obsequious butler? 
And perhaps the real question is: Can they survive long enough to find out?”

 CURRENTLY READING/LISTENING TO  

📚 Wanderlust, by Rebecca Solnit
Nonfiction / History and Travel Essays
Published in 2001
328 pages

Still working on this one, though it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s a vast history of walking, with so many subthemes, and references across time and cultures. 
I can’t even start to imagine the amount of resaerch that went into this!

“This volume provides a history of walking, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking and between walking and culture. The author argues for the preservation of the time and space in which to walk in an ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.”

📚 Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret,
by Georges Simenon
Mystery – short stories collection
Published in 1944
It counts for The Classics Club

Still reading this one with French student E., we have 8 more stories to go.

It’s really neat to see that Simenon displays the same quality of writing than in his novels.
Some plots are brilliant, sometimes quite different to what I am used to with this author.
We also find Maigret here at times violent.

🎧The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
(Nils Holgersson #1),
by Selma Lagerlöf
Translated from the Swedish by Peter Klusen, 
Mathilde Mann, Mustafa Yalçıner, 
Velma Swanston Howard
Children’s Lit/Fantasy/Adventure
Published in 1906
240 pages
17H06
It counts for The Classics Club

I was eager to listen to this audiobook. 
The stories are great, but the narrator (not sure about his name) is not the best. He is actually really good when he is reading the dialogues, whether said by people or animals, but in the narrative parts, he is very boring. Too bad. Still, I plan on listening to it all, to see what will happen to Nils.

“Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909  — the first woman to be so honored — Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was a gifted storyteller whose writings were often tinged with the supernatural and rooted in the sagas and legends of her homeland.
She secured her reputation as a children’s-book author with  The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, long considered a masterpiece of children’s literature. Written at the request of Swedish school authorities and first published in 1906, it is the enchanting and remarkably original tale of Nils Holgersson, a mischievous boy of 14 who is changed by an elf into a tiny being able to understand the speech of birds and animals.
Brilliantly weaving fact and fiction into a breathtaking and beautiful fable, the story recounts Nils’s adventures as he is transported over the countryside on the back of a goose. From this vantage point, Nils witnesses a host of events that provide young readers with an abundance of information about nature, geography, folklore, animal life, and more.”

  BOOK UP NEXT  

📚  Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar,
by Michel Tournier
French historical fiction
288 pages
Published in 1978
Was translated into English as The Four Wise Men

As a teen, I really enjoyed Michel Tournier. I started this book some time ago, but for some reasons, I stopped. The Christmas season is perfect to go back to it.
Too bad the English title and synopsis gives too much away.

“Displaying his characteristic penchant for the macabre, the tender and the comic, Michael Tournier presents the traditional Magi describing their personal odysseys to Bethlehem–and audaciously imagines a fourth, “the eternal latecomer”‘ whose story of hardship and redemption is the most moving and instructive of all.
Prince of Mangalore and son of an Indian maharajah, Taor has tasted an exquisite confection, “rachat loukoum,” and is so taken by the flavor that he sets out to recover the recipe. His quest takes him across Western Asia and finally lands him in Sodom, where he is imprisoned in a salt mine. There, this fourth wise man learns the recipe from a fellow prisoner, and learns of the existence and meaning of Jesus.”

 LAST BOOK ADDED TO MY GOODREADS TBR  

The Chocolate Cobweb, by Charlotte Armstrong
Mystery
288 pages
Published in 1948

“When Amanda Garth was born, a nearly-disastrous mix-up caused the hospital to briefly hand her over to the prestigious Garrison family instead of to her birth parents. The error was quickly fixed, Amanda was never told, and the secret was forgotten for twenty-three years . . . until her aunt thoughtlessly revealed it in casual conversation.

But what if the initial switch never actually occurred, and what if the real accident was Amanda’s being “returned” to the wrong parents? After all, her artistic proclivities are far more aligned with painter Tobias, patriarch of the wealthy Garrison clan, than with the uncreative duo that raised her. Determined to discover her true identity within her aunt’s bizarre anecdote, Amanda calls on her almost-family, only to discover that the fantasy life she imagines is not at all like their reality. Instead, she encounters a web of lies and suspicions that ensnares her almost immediately, and, over a murky cup of hot chocolate, realizes something deadly lurks just beneath the surface. . . .”

📚 MAILBOX MONDAY: BOOK RECEIVED THIS PAST WEEK 📚 

📚 Japanese Kanji Made Easy: An Easy Step-by-Step Workbook
to Learn the Basic Japanese Kanji
To be published some time in 2023
by Lingo Mastery
155 pages
Nonfiction/ Language book/ Japanese

Click on the cover to see my review
And share what books you just received at Mailbox Monday

HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?
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