Where do all these books come from?

Jennie recently blogged about where she finds recommendations and inspiration to read various books. In the spirit of turning her original post into a sort-of meme, I’ll start my list the same way she did hers.
Here are the books I read so far this month and why I picked them up:
On Basilisk Station and The [...]

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The Lolita Experiment

For the past two weeks, I have been conducting an experiment with my friend Mike. To give you some background first, this is how it started:
Back in November, Mike asked for some reading suggestions, and I of course jumped in. He immediately rejected one of my favorite authors (Neal Stephenson) as unreadable, however, which led [...]

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BBC 100 Books Meme, v. 2

Thanks to the comment Mike left on my original post, I now understand where the initial list came from (a BBC reader poll to determine Britain’s favorite book.) This explains some of the weird inconsistencies in the list, such as why some single books are listed in addition to a series that includes said single [...]

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BBC 100 Books Meme

Yes, I confess, I am cross-posting this from a Facebook meme. I have been assimilated. Please stop gloating. Anyway, the BBC at some point put up a list of 100 books (best of all time? that everyone should read? I’m not sure.) Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the [...]

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The Reading Year in Review – 2008

Since I don’t actually ever get around to talking about the books I’ve been reading on this blog very often, I figured I’d take a moment to look back over this year in books. For handy reference, note that I do regularly update the Reading page of this site, so if you’re ever curious what [...]

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The Unread Book Meme

Via k8 at Harmonia’s Necklace, I came upon a meme that, despite my usual apathy toward memes, I simply must participate in. The explanation:
This is a list of the top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Rules: Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, [...]

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Tea Ceremony: Live and in Books

This past Saturday, I filled in for one of my coworkers as the narrator (or commentator, as they seem to have listed me in the program) for a tea ceremony demonstration. Our department cosponsors this event with the university gardens every year in honor of the height of cherry blossom season. The ladies from the [...]

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On Being a Foreign Woman in Japan

Synchronicity can be so weird. Less than a day after discussing how different the experiences of foreign men in Japan are from those of foreign women, I came across this passage in Kickboxing Geishas:
The truth is that in many ways, it was my own loneliness that drove me to write this book. Before I [...]

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On the Opinions of Celebrities

I just came across another bit in Kickboxing Geishas that caught my attention. In a later conversation with a Japanese woman about women in the modern workplace, the subject circles back around to what appears to be one of Chambers’ favored topics: role models. The woman she is talking to expresses some dissatisfaction with the [...]

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On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen

From Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, by Veronica Chambers. I knew I was going to like this book before it ever got around to discussing the actual topic of the book, because by page 3, I already found myself saying, “Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s what it’s like.”
I grew up in [...]

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