The Essex Serpent

Sarah Perry, 2016

(June 2017)

A drily amusing (and on occasion laugh-out-loud funny) historical novel from the author of After Me Comes the Flood. The Essex Serpent has been receiving plaudits left, right, and centre, and it’s certainly very readable (that most ambiguous word of praise); it’s a little over 400 pages and I got through it in a weekend. It’s not, on the surface, a hugely challenging book. Engaging, yes. Thoughtful, certainly. Erudite, even, but you don’t emerge at the end feeling as if you’ve been put through the wringer, emotionally or intellectually. This is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing at all.

Central Station

Lavie Tidhar, 2016

(June 2017)

  

Central Station is a mid-future cyberpunkesque novel comprised of a dozen or so chapters, many of which were originally published as stand-alone short stories. They’ve obviously been reworked fairly carefully (or, more generously, were originally written with a very clear eye on the big picture), and for all that there is something of a central plot running through the book, its focus is very much on these interlinked vignettes exploring migration and belonging, faith and memory.

City of Stairs

Robert Jackson Bennett, 2014

(March 2016)

In which I finally get around to one of last-year-but-one’s must-read books and it is every bit as good as everyone says it is. In lieu of anything approaching a reasonable amount of time to compose my thoughts, I’ll instead remind you all of the impromptu dance contest Pep and I held a few months back, and merely state that I concur with pretty much everything my more erudite and better informed friend had to say.

10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights

Ryu Mitsuse, 1973 [Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander, 2011]

(August 2015)

  

I invite you to marvel dumbfounded at the depth of my ignorance and the height of my hubris, as I attempt to mix it with people far, far smarter than me over at the Strange Horizons Book Club.

After Me Comes the Flood

Sarah Perry, 2014

(February 2015)

  

Starts strong but fades a little, though is all the while executed in the most beautifully, transparently opaque prose, which is a ridiculous oxymoron but I can’t think of anything more apt. I know what I mean.

Boxers and Saints

Gene Luen Yang, 2013

(March 2014)

This is phenomenal.

So This Is Christmas

 Fried Chicken!

Illuminations!

Santa on a Cross!

Tacky Commercialization!

Irreligion!

Heathens!

Barely Concealed Racism!

I think that’s everything. Please let me know if I’ve missed any of the traditional expat tropes. It is frightfully difficult to keep track.

  

Laughing All the Way

We put up the christmas decorations last weekend. Well, I say ‘we’. I put them up while my wife tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to prevent the kids from eating the tinsel. They’ve been shitting glitter for the last five days, which if nothing else makes for a more festive visual experience during nappy changes.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, 2000-2003

[Mattias Ripper and Blake Ferris, 2003. Anjali Singh, 2004]

(August 2012)

I really don’t set out to create ‘themes’ in my reading habits. I buy a ton of books every so often according to what I think looks worthwhile, and when I finish one just grab whatever it feels like I’m in the mood for next. Somehow that seems to create little runs (like my recent New York Season), and sometimes stuff emerges over longer periods.

Mmmmm… Sacrilicious

“…hence I will excite their minds

With more desire to know, and to reject

Envious commands, invented with design

To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt…”

God, I love my job. It was my base school’s culture festival last Saturday, and that’s always a great reminder of how creative and motivated the students can be when the leash is loosened a bit. Great fun.

The school’s pretty high level, and has a specialist art course. Every class produces a big mural/poster to hang outside their homeroom, and the kids spend a couple of weeks getting it ready. The 3^rd year art course class did a pastiche of the Last Supper, with Kocho-sensei as Jesus and various other teachers as the apostles. It was the last thing I was expecting and I pissed myself laughing when I saw it. I think the students were just happy that someone had got the joke. That’s the trouble with parodies; if people don’t know the source material, they can die a rapid and embarrassing death.

One ha' penny, two ha' penny

Hot cross buns.

If you have no daughters,

The Origins of Political Order

From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Francis Fukuyama, 2011

(December 2011)

Obviously we all know this guy as Mr End of History, though I’ve never actually read any of his stuff before. Being a parochial Little Englander, I was particularly pleased by his repeated use of the phrase, ‘Britain, and its colonial offshoot the United States’, which proves that there’s at least one yank who knows his proper place.

Christmas is over (if you want it)

Easter is the most important festival in the christian calander, but christmas comes a pretty close second. Anyone who’s had an even nominally christian upbringing will recognize the significance of gathering together to celebrate - if not the birth of christ - then at least the communal warmth of friends and family in the middle of a long, cold winter.

Not that that’s what christmas is all about these days, of course. These days it’s a graphically indulgent gang-bang of venal (and possibly venereal) grasping and wanton consumerism. I say ‘these days’ but I suspect it was ever thus. You need, at the very least, an appreciation of the irony of it all to shepherd your psyche through the bruising month(s) long assault of branding, annoyance, and false cheer which comprises the ‘holiday period’. Can you imagine experiencing christmas in a country which lacks not only religion, but worse, any sense of irony?

Epistemologically Unsound Conclusions Concerning Japan and the Japanese, Based on Japanese Television

Number five in a series of some.

“Japan is a deeply christian country.”

How else do you explain all that praying? Look at this. And this. Also this. Sure, a few of the early Japanese christians may have been crucified, beheaded, and burned alive, but what religion hasn’t experienced a little youthful exuberance in its formative years?

Japan has to rank as one of the most pious and devout countries in the world, forever and ever, amen.