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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Useful Skills

You really never know when some random skill you picked up by chance sometime in the past is going to turn out to be useful. Today, for instance, I spent several hours of my workday taping together large boxes, filling them with books, and making a spreadsheet noting which books were in which boxes, so [...]

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Holiday Books, Gifts, Travel

More catch-up posting! If this ends up not making sense, it’s because my brother caught some virus of doom and gave it to me and my dad right before he went back to the mountains. I forgive him, though, because he will have to suffer through it sleeping in a cold tent in the mountains [...]

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Reading List

I decided it would be interesting to try to keep track of what books I’ve been reading, all in one place, so I’ve started the new “Reading” page. It would probably have made more sense to wait until January, so then it would be all new year, new slate, but I’ve been reading some good [...]

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Reading on the Beach in December

My latest library book apparently traveled to the beach with a prior reader, and now the beach has come to me, in the form of fine sand distributed liberally all over the outside of the book, trapped between the dust jacket and the library’s protective clear plastic. It makes for an interestingly unseasonal juxtaposition in several ways, [...]

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Come to me, my pretties…

I have discovered the most horrible thing. I may never catch up on my book stacks again. They will always be replenished. And what about all those books I wanted to go back and reread? All of my free time may be indefinitely accounted for!
What has happened, you ask? I discovered my local library’s online [...]

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The political history of food

More from Oracle Bones, on the historical baggage our innocent take-out dinners can carry. The author is accompanying his Uighur (Chinese minority) immigrant friend on delivery rounds in DC:
Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot [...]

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It’s so true

From Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler, who was a foreign journalist in China:
[Background: Hessler is being told the story of why Mr. Xu, the owner of the cornstarch plant he is visiting, started a second plant after being forced out of his first one.]
I was growing more interested in meeting Mr. Xu. I wanted to see exactly [...]

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