I did 克鲁日科娃‘s challenge, it was such a fun one! The mini game and the story were both really funny.
I’m so tempted to explore more and start the world quests… especially the one associated with Huimou, but I think it’s best to finish the AQ first… It probably doesn’t matter, but I just want to avoid having several things opened at the same time.
1939년 명성아파트 by 무경 was so so great!!
I’ve been wanting to read more fiction set during the Japanese Occupation, especially about daily life and society, how people lived during this time, what life in Seoul/Gyeongseong was like and 1939년 명성아파트 is exactly that.
Our protagonist is a young Korean orphan working as a housemaid, and through her eyes, we see how traditional Korean lifestyle cohabited with Japanese and Western introductions: food, clothes, house equipment, and of course, language.
Even though it’s not a closed-circle mystery, the setting is pretty much limited to the Myeongseong Apartment and its direct neighbourhood, I don’t think there’a single scene taking place elsewhere. But the apartment serves as a microcosm of Gyeongseong society. The characters who live there come from different social groups, a haughty Japanese professor, a poor Korean writer, a young sophisticated woman working for a department store, the scary man from the 4th floor, and of course, our protagonist’s saviour, a mysterious woman who took her under her wing … Korean and Japanese live under the same roof, but as someone says, they never once gathered all together in a same place, and it soon becomes clear that they all have their secrets to hide.
And then murder happens. I wasn’t really expecting much from the plot part, I was happy enough with the setting and the characters, but the story really surprised me. It was a very good murder case with several layers of mystery. I really wasn’t expecting at all the revelations of the last chapter!
Everything in this book was a delight to read: compelling characters who all have their secrets, a portraying of society through the apartment residents, a really good murder mystery with twists… Both the characteristics of the period and the characteristic of the apartment were relevant for the plot, so the setting and the case are closely linked, making the novel feel very coherent.
In the afterword, the author hinted at a possible sequel, I would definitely read it if it happens!
The end was so great! I didn’t expect this book to have such a good double mystery.
I finished the first short story, 無尾巷底左邊那個房子 by 四弄一號, it was really great! There’s a double mystery: a good murder case and the identity of our mysterious narrator. I love the humour, and the end was very good too.
I’m currently at 10 new words per day on my flashcards, but since I’m studying the AQ, I have a huge source of new words right now, and I’m adding some words I already know if they contain a character I don’t know well. This way, it also feeds my character cards. So it’s not effectively 10 unknown words per day that I’m going through, but less than that. I’ll upgrade my quota to 15, and test for a few days. Might even go to 20 in the future.
I’m so happy to study the AQ. Even though I did enjoy the first acts of Nod-krai AQ, I also did not love it to the point of studying it. And the more it went, the less I enjoyed it anyway. So it was not easy to find study material I was passionate about during 6.x, some event stories were really good, but not all of them.
I originally planned to go through 2 chapters and then play Genshin, but I ended up playing until chapter 22. It was so engrossing! I don’t know how many chapters there are in total, but I think I did the final boss? I’m glad we don’t need to farm it, because the animations are so long on this one.
Keeping the end for tomorrow!
I forgot to update when I finished the first short story, but I found it very sad, though very good too, as always.
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I started 小偷抓住的手. Each story by Otsuichi feels so unique!
I’m halfway through the first short story, and it’s a very intriguing start!
I’m playing a bit everyday, just progressing one or two scenes at a time, but I have to say it again: the plot is really really good so far (I just finished the council part). For once, they managed to make the story really suspenseful, with a lot of mystery.
I enjoy Genshin story in general, but I also don’t find it the most suspenseful most of the time (like there will be a bad guy, and we’re going to defeat them), but here I can’t wait to know how it will unfold.
It’s crazy that Reverse 1999 current story is as suspenseful and engrossing and both happen at the same time, whereas recent patches were extremely boring in both games to me (AQ Act X and the Enigma story for example).
閲覧厳禁 is so different from 硝子の塔の殺人, it’s hard to think it’s the same author who wrote both.
I enjoyed reading it, because I love horror in general, but I’m not sure I liked the editing direction all that much.
The story, the plot and the characters are all fine, it’s just not as shocking or scary as it claims to be. It’s entertaining for sure, and very easy to read, but that’s the point: it almost feels like the book was made to be easy to read. I would say that the story in itself is very short, maybe more the length of a novella, but it’s artificially expanded with page layouts that leave a lot of blank space here and there. Layout effects are also not always relevant, for example, some sentences were in bold or used special fonts, but it did not have much impact in my opinion? I also found that some visual inclusions (the book contains pictures and plans) did not brought much, and were there mostly to make the reading experience easy and pleasant (and make the book look appealing if you flip through it in the bookshop?). They felt more like additions than a necessary part of the plot, and most of the things showed could have been described instead.
Still, it was entertaining, reads very quickly and very easily, and I personally enjoyed it from start to finish, but the story was also not as terrifying or impactful as I expected it to be.
Finished! The end was good, but I also didn’t find the book particularly shocking or scary…
As planned, my next read in Chinese is going to be the 24th Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award collection. I only read the one from last year, and I loved it, every short story was fantastic.
The book is really good, but every time I pick it up I get mad at the digital version.
I looked at the book I didn’t like this year so far: 5 out of 38 books read. Two Japanese, two Korean and one Hong Kong novel.
I really don’t know if it should be a 3 or 4 star rating, because I clearly disliked the book, but it’s hard to tell whether it comes from the book or me.
I do think the book was much too ambitious, and that was a real flaw in my opinion. It spawns 20 years and several countries, and tries to cover every major events that have shaped the region at the time, and that was just too much for just one book. From 9/11 to the London terrorist attacks, to reflexions on American military presence in Japan or the more recent Honk Kong protests. Each part of the novel takes place in a different country at a different time of the 21st century, but because the novel needs to lay out the setting for the reader, we end up with a lot of telling and explanations, and there’s less room for the plot. As a result, everything felt rushed, things happen by chance, or because our characters are so strong. They have access to large intelligence, easily gain access to what they need, solve everything and have really good combat abilities. Their small agency is like a nest of elite agents.
The novel goes from explanations about political or social events to plot parts which a lot of action scenes too, but I found none of them really satisfactory. The plot parts were just not my cup of tea, I like realistic scenario, I really don’t care for super heroes. And the setting parts deserved more space, and I think they should be integrated with the story on a deeper level rather than being artificially explained. The first story/chapter does this very well, but the following ones less so. It felt like we were told how the social climate would affect our characters rather than living through it with them. When the last chapters introduce a new character who again tells about their life, I didn’t really care. Too much telling and not enough time actually spent with the characters.
As a result, I really didn’t care for our main cast at all. The action based, super agents tone was also not what I was looking for. I did find the first chapter really good, it was a good police procedural, our protagonist was just a good police officer, the plot was suspenseful, and it cleverly mixed reality and fiction, integrating real persons and cases to the story. But then I started liking the following chapters less and less, and I probably would have DNFed it, if the book weren’t part of a reading challenge.
Overall, I think the author wanted to tell to many things in this book, and as a result it’s a bit all over the place, and the reading experience suffered from it.
Finished it! It took me almost a month. In the end, I never really cared for the characters, apart from Wong Yuen-man, so the last story that was more on a personal level left me rather indifferent. I think that overall, I was just tired of reading this book.
I tried a 2p/2p on Mizuki, I’ve been playing around with the pieces I have, I’m not sure which ones are the best. Is it better to have more EM or more crit? What about ER? Her burst will trigger more swirls so it can’t be bad? But I probably can’t burst every rotation with 120 ER anyway, so it might be better to build no ER at all and focus on crit… ?
