August 2026

I can’t believe I read so many books in August too! And it’s even in terms of languages, two books in each!
I used to read about 4 books per months before, I don’t know if me reading 6 on average this past couple of months is a new norm or an exception.

Even though it was my least favourite book, I’m still happy that I made some progress on the Readmoo Reading challenge. I’m aiming for 10 books, and I just read the 6th one. So I just need to go one book per month now.

I’m also bringing my reading challenges to the website, which includes the 2026 bingo, the Korean food collection and a new one for stories that take place in Seoul. Of course, the 2026 editions won’t be complete (just started this month, didn’t bring the entries I had on paper), but I see it more like a test, and hopefully, the feature will be perfect for next year.

It’s interesting that I liked the two Japanese books I read, I loved the two Korean ones, and the Chinese ones are two extremes: one HK novel I didn’t enjoy and a Tw/HK collection of short stories that is my favourite book of the month.

I can never go wrong with Jeong Gunwoo, and no surprise, 믹스테이프 was an excellent horror novel. As for 1939년 명성아파트, it would have been my favourite book if I hadn’t read 奇巧玩具店, it’s a good mystery with a historical setting, I really loved it.

In Japanese, I chose 禁忌の子 by Mio Yamaguchi because it was ranked very highly in several mystery rankings. I did enjoy reading it, and it was a good novel, but maybe it lacked something to really stand out to me. As for 閲覧厳禁 by Mikito Chinen, it was also an enjoyable read, but I guess it suffers from looking too much like Uketsu’s 変な series without being as impactful?

My favourite book of the month is without hesitation the 24th Mystery Writers of Taiwan Award collection: 奇巧玩具店. This year it contains stories by three Taiwanese authors and two Hong Kong authors, including one living in (and setting their story in) the UK. It’s only the second year I’m reading the collection, and I know I’m going to read the new release every year. It was a real collection of gems!

Things are really going well with Chinese right now! First of all, I was really happy to see that 奇巧玩具店 was pretty easy. Given that it’s a collection of five different authors, I was expecting at least one or two short stories to be a struggle, but either all five authors wrote with a similar level, or I really did make progress! Another thing is Reverse 1999’s story. Usually I find it quite difficult to follow entirely in Chinese, but this time, I had no problem at all for On Another’s Sorrow.

So yeah, even though I’m far from being able to read everything comfortably, I feel like I must have made some kind of breakthrough.

I also have a steady source of material to study and new words for my flashcards thanks to the Archon Quest. I still have almost the whole of Act II to study, and it was quite long, but I’ll try to not fall too far behind.

And it’s a very recent addition, but I’m testing with single character flashcards in addition to my normal words flashcards. We’ll see how it goes. I know a lot of words, but most of the time, I find it difficult to tell a character’s exact meanings. I might drop it if it’s too much work, but I’ll give it a chance first. Let’s try to do the flashcards during the whole of September and see then whether it’s useful.