Then and Now #50 (21/8/23 - 27/8/23)

Happy Sunday and welcome to July!  The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads! 

Last Week

It's my 50th Sunday round-up post, ah how the time flies. Anywaysss, this week has been a mix between being very productive and being very much non-productive. I was in the office Monday to Wednesday, when the temperatures were averaging 33 degrees Celsius. I got some great work done and also made a good start on some projects etc., but I was also sweating my ass off and by the time Thursday came around I was just *dead*. It's like I'd spent my energy budget for the week surviving the heat and Thursday and Friday were struggles. I also felt a weird dissatisfaction those days and couldn't motivate myself either towards work or towards fun things. I did a Tarot card reading Friday afternoon to kinda help me sort out my thoughts and that was very illuminating. Tarot cards might not work for everyone, but for me they're a great tool to figure out what my brain might be stuck on or what my emotions might be pointing it. It's a good tool for me :)

I also did some reading this week and finally got another review out! I also wrote a review for next week for a book I didn't really enjoy reading and that whole ordeal really affected by desire to pick up another book. It was less that the book was absolutely horrendous, it was more that it was not at all what the blurb had led me to expect and so I just had to slog on in the hopes I could still get something out of it. That never came, but at least the books I'm currently reading seem to be hitting the spot so hopefully this is just a blip rather than an impending reading slump. On the bright side, Ahsoka started this week and I was absolutely IN LOVE with the first two episodes. It somehow really affected me to see three complex women talking to each other without romance in the mix, if that makes sense. Ahsoka, Hera, and Sabine are such well-rounded characters who clearly have history with each other and strong but difficult relationships to one another and getting to see that on screen was oddly impactful. And I made a delicious cauliflower and chickpea curry last night so yay.

Posted this week:

• Review: He Who Drowned the World (The Radiant Emperor #2) by Shelley Parker-Chan
• Book Central #7 - Books for the 'Unreal Unearth' Feral Hangover
• Friday Friyay: The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang

Recommendation

Another Hozier song for you this week! This is 'First Light', the final song. Unreal Unearth is kind of structured alongside Dante's nine levels of Hell and the final song is something of an ascent back to the surface. It's just stunning and it's been echoing throughout my head all week.

Mailbox Monday

Only one book this week!

The Siren's Lament: Essential Stories by Jun'Ichiro Tanizaki (9/26/23; Pushkin Press)

Lavishly opulent stories of sensual obsession, cultural heritage, and mythological creatures—translated into English for the first time—from a classic Japanese writer

Featuring “The Qilin,” “The Siren’s Lament,” and the novella Killing O-Tsuya, this gorgeous new edition of 3 classic works translated by Bryan Karetnyk distills the essence of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's shorter fiction: the co-mingling of Japanese and Chinese mythologies, the chillingly dark side of desire, and the paper-thin line between the sublime and the depraved.

• “The Qilin”: The sage Confucius travels to a kingdom ruled by a struggling duke, whose pursuit of virtue is threatened by his consort's obsession desire for pleasure.
• Killing O-Tsuya: A naïve servant elopes with his master's daughter, only to be plunged headlong into a world of murder and corruption.
• “The Siren’s Lament”: Exhausted by a lifestyle of never-ending debauchery, a young prince finds himself in possession of a dazzling, beguiling mermaid.

The essential short works of one of the most important and widely-read figured in modern Japanese literature, author of hugely popular works including In Praise of Shadows, The Makioka Sisters, and Naomi; renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity.

I love short stories and I love mythological creatures, so this collection of tales felt right up my alley. I'm also very much enjoying a recent dive into Chinese and Japan literature (or books inspired by their cultures and histories) so this fits into that as well.

And that's it for me this week! What are you reading?