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Part of me wants to bring all my read books to this new website, but the task sounds daunting… I could start with Taiwanese and HK authors, because there’s not a lot of them and they are listed on Readmoo. For Japanese, most of the books I read are on my older website, so maybe there’s a way to fetch them from there? As for Korean, it’s all over the place or nowhere at all…
I won’t be doing full book pages, just write the name of the author and the title of the book somewhere so that stats like “number of books read by author” would be more accurate.
What I could also do is only add books for authors I’m currently reading. So if I start a book by an author I already read, then I could make a list of the already read books.
Or maybe I’ll get too lazy and drop the idea entirely.

I loved the second volume as much as the first one, it’s crazy to think that all the short stories of ZOO are, without exception, equally fascinating. My favourite ones were 血液を探せ！and 神の言葉, but I loved them all.

The last story was much shorter than I thought… and so strange too!

Finished chapter 18, this one was really great, I might just continue and read 19 today as well.

I wanted to try Lohen in the current Abyss so I did a run last minute! He is still half built (level 69, talents 6/6 and no Witch’s Homework yet).

First half:

Lohen

Durin

Kazuha

Nicole

I tried with Citlali, but it didn’t work, I was missing a few seconds on the third chamber. Changed to Kazuha and cleared everything with a lot of margin. Lohen’s damage was really low given his build. I was also not doing his combos really. But Durin’s damage is impressive. I never really played Durin dark form before, he was just a Xiao support. But with Lohen, I gave him his DPS set, and I’m really shocked by his numbers!

Second half:

Columbina

Lauma

Linnea

Ineffa

The support team from Nod-Krai. It’s probably not optimal to make them all fight for hydro, but the team is mega strong still, and I find it fun to play.

I finished the short story 落ちる飛行機の中で, I loved it!
I’m tempted to read the last one too, because it’s very short, but I’ll keep it for tomorrow instead.

Either I don’t understand what I’m reading, or there’s a problem with the book. Talking about Han Hao and Eumenides, the book says:

那个“很坏很坏的坏人”，自然就是Eumenides! 正是他害得韩灏身负血案，不得不抛妻弃子，亡命天涯。

What?! Han Hao shot his colleague by mistake, then decided to kill the witness to protect himself. When another witness resurfaced, Han Hao decided once again to protect his position, by killing him and killing the captain of the SWAT team Xiong Yuan too who was protecting the witness. So this guy not only killed a policeman by mistake, but then coldly murdered three other persons to protect himself! Then he also killed Deng Hua thinking it was Eumenides but oh well. Eumenides had nothing to do with the shooting of the colleague and the first murder, and even though he did stage the setup for the two following murders, Han Hao didn’t have to play along, he is the one who took the decision to kill Xiong Yuan to continue hiding his secret. I just don’t get it, why is the novel describing it as if Eumenides was responsible and Han Hao was a victim?
More generally, I find the whole Han Hao thing very strange, like the man killed innocent people to protect his position and privileges, what could be more despicable? Even Eumenides kills for justice. But even though they had knowledge of all this, Yin Jian and his colleagues were still very respectful towards Han Hao at the beginning of the novel. It also always seems like Liu Song is singled out as being strongly vindictive for personal reasons - he loved and admired Xiong Yuan - but his attitude should actually be the norm rather than the exception.
And since I started pointing out things that bother me, it’s the same with Ding Ke. The single one argument to prove how good a policeman he was is the 100% success rate, something repeated several times in the novel. But to me, this looks extremely bad: a 100% conviction rate screams wrongful convictions. And everyone sighing in admiration when just hearing his name is just cringe. And when the characters thought that Ding Ke quit the police because he couldn’t face a failure, they still admired him? What is there to admire when someone flees as soon as things don’t go their way? But worse, we later know that Ding Ke covered for Zhibang, and the novel makes it look like it was the right thing to do, and he resigned to what? maintain his integrity? Like, knowing he covered for his favourite student - and not a slight mistake, Zhibang did kill a man (although I’m sure, we’ll learn he had no choice or a good reason to act so), shows him under a very bad light, but it’s almost described as a noble sacrifice.

I finished chapter 16, and I was not convinced at all by the whole thing, especially Huang Jieyuan’s plan to catch the murderer of the 1/12 case. It also felt very repetitive, like for example, we already went through the whole description of the special performance given at Jieyuan’s bar, but we have to go through the same exact description a second time.
Some details were also strange and not convincing.
I also find that some things that I would consider flaws in the novel but that I accept because it doesn’t prevent me from enjoying it, are becoming more and more pronounced to the point when it’s becoming irritating. (Some generalisations about policemen, women, etc., a tendency to over explain things that were obvious in the first place, some sexist attributions of roles, like Mu Jianyun being here mostly to fill the “woman” role - she can’t bear gory descriptions and gets really unsettled by the performance - a strong tendency to idealise characters, they are all so clever, perfect, diligent, fighting for justice, etc., and maybe it’s a writing style, but constantly adding small commentaries, for example describing a scene and then adding an explanation or a generalisation as to what happened or why characters react as they did, often feels like the author thinks the reader is stupid.)
I’m still really enjoying the book!

Chapter 16 is great, and we finally get to know more about something the author has been teasing for a while, but I was so tired today, I could barely keep my eyes opened while reading, so I preferred to stop mid-chapter. I’ll continue tomorrow!

I can’t really express how much I loved this audiobook. It’s kind of scary that one person can write so many unique and fascinating short stories (I’m currently reading Zoo, which is equally incredible).
Otsuichi’s stories all have this strange mix of sadness and loneliness, but also something warm and tender, while being excellent mysteries or horror stories or delivering really unsettling plots or denouements.
I loved all the stories in the collection, but 山羊座的友人 and 宗像與鋼筆事件 are my favourites.
And as I said before, I can’t find the name of the narrator, but the narration was top-notch.

Now that I have Mika, it makes farming 空羽蛾 for Lohen much easier than it was for Linnea!

I can’t wait to start Lohen’s SQ but I didn’t have time this weekend… I’ll wait to have the ascension materials from his SQ to fully ascend him too, so it slows down his build. I’m working on building Prune in the meantime.

I looked at which Otsuichi books were available as audiobooks on weixin dushu, and there’s 失踪假日 (失踪HOLIDAY), 只有你听到 (きみにしか聞こえない CALLING YOU) and 寂寞的頻率 (さみしさの周波数), which are all early works. If I’m not mistaken they are respectively from 2000, 2001 and 2002.
So that’s perfect, I’m going to listen to them in this order, they’re going to be my next audiobooks. I might listen to something else in-between to change things up, but these three audiobooks are on my list for this year.