And just like that, it is nearly Christmas. Autumn finally began in October, then stalled, (we had unseasonably warm days) only to return and stall again. Like summer, autumn has seen record high temperatures.
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| Autumn 2023 in Showa Kinen Park |
This year flew by quickly because we've been busier than ever before. E has had a lot of extracurriculars. Her school offers after school clubs in anything from cooking and yoga to origami and jewelry-making. She wanted to sign up for everything, and we let her sign up for as many as she could. With ballet and piano outside of school, we are rushing through the weekday at breakneck speed. It's Monday, and then suddenly it's Friday. Repeat, again and again. I wish we could slow down so time slows down.
Despite this, E had a school break back in October and we were able to enjoy some time in Ishigaki, one of the southern Okinawan islands. It is closer to Taiwan than mainland Japan and is a popular beach destination, especially with expats in Japan. It is marketed as a domestic Hawaii, but its jungly beauty is far rawer than any of the popular Hawaii destinations. More on Ishigaki in a separate post.
In this post, I want to focus on one of the best things about my year: books. For me it was a slow transition from paper books to digital ones. For months after receiving a Kindle, I didn't use it. But the world of digital English-language books is much, much bigger than paper ones in Japan. Now that I've gotten used to reading on my Kindle, my world has opened up in the best way.
The obvious downside of digital reading is that you never know what you will get, since you can't normally browse through it before committing. So if you have similar taste to mine, maybe you will also enjoy some of these favorites from this year.
Whalebone Theatre
Chemistry
I first came across Weike Wang's writing from "Omakase," her New Yorker Fiction piece. The author studied chemistry at Harvard and started her pre-med before adjusting her career path. I enjoyed Chemistry so much that I read her second novel Joan is Ok in quick succession. Her characters' matter-of-fact narrative belies a lot of hard truths, deep emotions, and humor. I don't think I have ever related to the Asian-American experience as much as the ones represented in these books.
Upper Bohemia
An unlikely choice for me, as it is a somewhat random memoir about the author's childhood. Hayden Herrera, now 83, writes about her unconventional childhood with upper-class "bohemian" parents who, by any standard today, were negligible at best and by her own admission, terrible parents. For the parent-reader, the child's perspective is especially interesting. It made me think about how my kids will remember their childhoods and how they perceive our actions. The story is a fascinating one, and I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would.
The Book of Form and Emptiness
In the Unlikely Event
I hate flying, so this was a terrifying book to read. It a fictionalized story based on some real characters and real plane crashes - three crashes that happened in Elizabeth, New Jersey in the winter of 1951-1952. As an American living abroad, I appreciated this book in a way that I couldn't have if I had been still living in the U.S. The main character is a teenage girl, who really takes you back to that era of the country in all its anxiety and wholesomeness. The book represents how different America of the 1950s is from America today.
