another link in the chain

Recently Finished
The Honjin Murders
The first in the Detective Kindaichi series. I am a long time fan of the Kindaichi Shonen manga in all its iterations, and the central conceit of those is that Kindaichi is the grandson of the famous detective, which is like saying he's the grandson of Sherlock Holmes to western audiences. But despite loving the manga, I've never got around to checking out the original novels. There's been a boom in translations of Japanese mystery series in recent years (this book was originally published in 1946 but only published in English in 2019) and having now read a few, more are popping up in the recommendations on Goodreads and such, and they all seem to be easily accessible at my local library. Anyway, I enjoyed this, and it was fun seeing what the Kindaichi manga drew on in addition to the name. The OG Kindaichi is a shabby, eccentric young man who no one would expect to be a famous detective, which is definitely something they carried over to his grandson! I'll be reading more in the series for sure.

The Night Diary
Middle grade book about a girl whose family has to trek from what is now Pakistan to India when Partition goes into effect. Told through diary entries to her dead mother. I really liked this. I listened to the audiobook and enjoyed it, though the narrator is Indian American and while she does a very good Indian accent, she does randomly sound American every once in a while lol.

The Souls of Black Folk
Classic essays by WEB Du Bois. A lot of interesting stuff in here.

Fadeout
First in a series of gay mysteries written in the late 60s. There's definitely some stuff that's "of its time" and not in a good way, but I enjoyed it and will be reading more in the series. Looks like they were written all the way up till the early 90s!

Dreadnought
YA about a closeted trans girl who inherits super powers from a dying superhero and is transformed into the body she's always wanted. But there's no escaping transphobia. At home, her dad tries to find a way to turn her back into a boy, while another superhero exhibits more TERFy type hatred towards her. Feeling uncomfortable with the superhero league when they make no move to stand up for her, she instead starts fighting crime with a minor crime-fighter, a girl in her class, and they start trying to find out who the super villain is who killed her predecessor and what she wants. I liked the story well enough, but cannot recommend the audiobook. The narrator made some weird choices, including having a bunch of minor characters speak with southern accents even though this is taking place in the pacific northwest, and the superhero persona of the MC's classmate is cowgirl/western themed and has an exaggerated cowboy way of talking that would be annoying enough to read but is excruciating to sit through in an audiobook. There's a sequel, but the main story is wrapped up in this book, so I'm not going to bother with it.

Twixt
A young woman wakes up in a strange place with no memory of anything before that moment, and is told by the first people she meets that they are "sleepers" who have to hide from "snatchers". It's not a spoiler to say they're dead and this is a sort of purgatory because it's super obvious from the beginning. There were some twists, but the pacing wasn't great and motivations didn't really make a lot of sense. There's a f/f romance between the MC and the girl who first finds her, but it's insta love, which I always find annoying (in fact, the whole timeline seems extremely compressed and would have been a lot better stretched out). The ending is abrupt. It's not terrible, but it wasn't good, either.

A Star Brighter Than the Sun vol. 1
Current series by Kawahara Kazune. I had seen this on Amazon Japan and it sounded sort of generic, so even though I really liked a lot of her stuff over the years, I hadn't bothered with it, but I saw it's on the Viz app in English, so since I already have a subscription for that, I decided to give it a go. It's cute. I'll continue for now.

Carla hasn't been able to go to Disneyland since the start of the lunar new year festival since she's been out of town, so rather than wait for the weekend we decided to go down there today for lunch.

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1. I worked from home again today and it was a pretty chill day. Nice to be able to do that this week when the cats are more clingy with Carla being gone.

2. Speaking of which, Carla is currently on the plane and should be home in a few hours.

3. The city sent around a post card the other day about food waste bins and I almost didn't read it because we're already good about putting all our scraps in there and not the trash but I'm glad I did because they've changed the rules and allow biodegradable bags now! When the law first went into effect a couple years ago, they said no bags were allowed in the bin, which makes it a pain to collect scraps, because we have to wash the container that's in the house frequently. I kept forgetting to order bags for it, but finally did so today, so I'm excited about less frequent bin washing.

4. All my blood tests the other day came back with good results, so I don't have to do it again for six months. I don't actually mind getting blood drawn, but having to do so on a certain day of the week just always makes getting it done inconvenient if something else crops up.

5. Tuxie!