June has been an extremely good reading month: six books finished, that’s the most I read this year! Not being on social media anymore and not doomscrolling Reddit and others has given me a lot of time back.
I read a lot in Korean, but most importantly, I’m finally out of my Japanese reading slump. “Reading slump” is probably exaggerated, but looking at my last Japanese reads, there’s not a lot of them that I really enjoyed, and the two books that took me the longest time to finish are also Japanese. As I said last month, reading Otsuichi for the first time has helped a lot, but now that I have brought the mystery awards and mystery rankings to the blog, I’m super motivated to go through all the lists and work my way through them!
I’ve loved all the books I read this month!!
I must pick a single one “favourite book of the month” and this time it’s near impossible, because there are three books I absolutely loved: the second volume of ZOO by Otsuichi, 失われた貌 by Sakurada Tomoya and 죽은 집에 관한 기록 by Jeon Gunwoo. I decided against ZOO, because it was initially published as one volume, only the bunko (and ebook) edition have two volumes. Given that it was my favourite book of May already, there’s probably no need to count it twice. And 失われた貌 is just perfect, and I love police procedurals too, but I enjoyed reading 죽은 집에 관한 기록 so so much. I really just couldn’t put the book down, so it has to be this one.
June is also the month when I finally got around to continuing the 暗黑者 series.
I haven’t made as many progress as I wanted this month, and it’s probably because I have too many materials to learn Chinese and I’ve been doing a little bit of everything without committing enough to my main sources. I haven’t finished studying Genshin’s event 礁与浪的相逢, and I also want to study 幻友绮旅, and the new patch is starting tomorrow, and I’m pretty sure I will want to study this event too!
I’m still happy with my added words pace, and my flashcards progress, though it’s true that I haven’t focused enough while reviewing my cards and my retention rate has been rather bad overall.
I watched a lot of films this month! Finished the series Girigo, which was okay, but not really my cup of tea overall. My favourite watch is probably 홈캠, it was in the top films on Netflix this month, and I enjoyed it, even though I can’t help thinking that the film had potential to be much better.
As for 六人の嘘つきな大学生, it was more or less the same experience as reading the book: I don’t understand why so many people are praising it, it was okay, but not great imo. The things that I found annoying in the book were in the film as well.
And I just started 回魂計, the first episode is hard to stomach, but the series looks very good. Overall, I’ve been impressed by all the Taiwanese crime series and films I’ve watched on Netflix.
Listening to Chinese translations of Otsuichi’s works is one of my favourite things to do at the moment. It’s crazy to think that I’ve loved every single story I read or listened to by Otsuichi so far. Chinese audiobooks are also very good, it’s just a shame that I can’t find the name of the narrator(s) most of the time.
Weixin Dushu gives access to both the audiobook and the e-book, so it’s easy to check with the text whenever I don’t understand a passage, so it’s also a really good way to train my listening skills in Mandarin.
I feel like the website is still not ready to be linked to from notes… I feel terrible for putting off the moment to write a farewell blog post on notes, but oh well, it’s also not something really worth stressing over.
It’s crazy though how better I’m feeling without social media and interactions. And I have more time to read. I’m really feeling motivated to both discover new authors and explore the bibliography of my favourite ones.