July Recap in Book Excepts

Excerpts and Quotes from my July Reads

This July, I set out with a TBR and, surprisingly, stuck with it for most of July. In fact, I read something extra: a Chinese translated fiction and two new manga. I even watched two dramas: a Thai BL, Love Upon a Time, and a C-drama adapted from a novel I loved last year, The First Jasmine. It was a wonderful month for absorbing stories.

I was watching some great quotes in the C-Drama and the idea stuck with me then. Why not make a review of the books in excerpts and quotes?

The C-drama quote in question:

“Don’t let your life become a play for others.”

Since I read a lot of manga, some reviews will be shorter than others. On the flip side, if something feels long, it will pass soon. I promise.

Animagicals by Paula Harrison

“He really wanted a black bear to be his true form. But what if being a bear meant losing his friends?”

I looked all over for something that sounded more aesthetic, but nothing hits like this one.

These two lines express something deeper about the story.

As the protagonist, Noah, starts getting comfortable in his new bear’s skin after years of turning into a fun or funny animal, inconveniences sprout among his friends, who stood by him in his awkward phase. While they gear up for the bigger problems in the plot, and Noah makes a newish friend, the personal problems still linger.

If you like simple kids’ fantasy about animals and forests, this is fairly enjoyable. The story couldn’t balance the character’s exploration with plot points, making it rather disjointed, but nothing major.’

Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai

I sit down by the door to the kitchen and gaze out at the trees as I wait for the miso soup to warm. Doing so, I am stuck by the feeling, I have done this before: sat down by the door to the kitchen in this exact posture, thinking the exact same things as I glazed out at the trees, and that I will do so again, in times to come, then I’m gripped by the strange sensation that the past, the present and the future are all nothing but transient moments.

This bit explains the monotony of the story I would have otherwise struggled to explain. The girl has a sense of bleakness about her life. A plain life that has nothing much to describe but her everyday. Yet, she punctures it with adjectives on simple things and dreams of other places, like a Parsian restaurant. In all of it, I still see a flicker of hope for her future, despite her firm sense of self-trap.

I pray I will soon become strong and pure enough to not be affected by trifles like this.

But I also see phrases that make no sense to me. Like, what do you mean ‘pure’? Is something ‘lost in translation’? I can only hope so as I read on and glaze over more such phrases.

The book is a collection of multiple stories, named after the first one. The rest of them aren’t exactly in the same theme, and I am glad they are not. I couldn’t handle the flat tone of the first story even if it was supposed to be the shining jewel of the collection. I, instead, prefer the later stories. Though I won’t spoil them with quotes or excerpts.

Maybe one more:

Humans need education.

The girl in the second story really needed some moral and social education. Her unrepentant actions really bewildered me. Now, to the next read.

Tsubaki Stationery Store by Ito Ogawa

In medieval Japan, lover letters were known as ‘ensho’, letters of romance, allure, lustre, charm.

The entire book is about Japanese letter writing, which means it has Japanese words and writing style at its centre. The tone was a mix of active and passive, and rightfully so, to keep the meaning of some words as close to the original intention as possible. Even the line above is passive.

In a book like this, either everything is a beautiful quote, new knowledge, or a favorite excerpt, or nothing at all. I struggled with later. When I found an excerpt, it couldn’t explain the story properly. When I found a quote, it suited the theme but left out the letter writing. If I chose letter explaining, it left out everything else.

In the end, I settled on two parts.

If my work could be helpful in conveying such soft hued affection, then I wanted to write as many of these letters as I could.

In this passage, we are still talking about ‘ensho’. Why is she writing being helpful? Because she is writing for someone else. Why? Because she is the village scribe. Writing letters for the people of her community is part of the job she inherited from her grandmother, along with the store (reference name of the book).

This brief line is important because a prodigal daughter fell in love with things she ran away from. She is changing.

Seasons is an atmospheric way to portray this change. The change of seasons, the change within people. There is one small quote stuck on her kitchen wall that expresses this pretty well.

Eat bitter in spring, vinegared in summer, spice in autumn, and in winter, oil.

The seasons change, and we have to change with them, to adjust to them, to adapt. Food is one way to explain it. Eating spice and oil in cold and wind generates heat within the body, while bitter and vinegar-based dishes help with the oncoming heat.

With so much writing, quotes, and advice going on, I also stumbled upon some writing advice.

If you get too wrapped up in following the rules, your writing becomes stuffy and stilted and reads awkwardly.

Good advice, right? There is more.

There’s no right or wrong when it comes to writing letters.

No matter how good the translation was, everything felt jerky (like this review), written in English. I could almost imagine how fluently it fit together in Japanese.

Aaah! So many good things this book had. I am going to buy it just to annotate it (and I never annotate).

What If I Said, “I Love You?” by Kumosoku

“Y’know, been a while since we have fallen out of step like this.”

When you read this, even without the manga pictures or context, just combined with the title, you can tell it foreshadows something deeper. This is a pivotal moment in the manga, followed by this line:

“If I told you… How I feel, and it was completely out of sync with what you assumed… what would you do?”

You think a confession is coming, but no, it leads to yearning. Loads and loads of yearning.

This manga had everything single thing I eat up in a friends-to-lovers trope. Yearning, bravery projected onto others but lacking in themselves, ambiguity that comes with long years of friendship, and the eventual build-up to courage and confession.

Blue Summer Haze by Dondon

“Let’s both try our best.”

I couldn’t tell if they were still talking about baseball or something else entirely. Let’s rewind. Here is the context.

The ML likes his childhood friend and catcher, who is not sure about his own feelings. The new catcher likes the ML too. Now all of them know who has feelings for whom. Is everything understood up to this point? The rest?

Very unexpected, warm and sweet!

Angst readers, let me warn you, no one but the ML is in charge of the angst. The other two are too sweet, not even dirty competing for the ML behind his back.

Coming back to the quote, this is what the two secondary leads are saying to each other while they chat about baseball. Are they still talking about baseball though? I don’t think so. Can it be anymore sweeter? My teeth ache.

Comeback After Fate by Anji Seina

Nothing in this small, standalone love story describes the sweet and sour romance between the alpha and omega of the entertainment world.

Pre-warning: The alpha has a traditional omega’s sweet, submitting nature while the omega has a more pragmatic, alpha-like personality.

Their personality setting is already cool, but added with the spice of the entertainment world, it gives flavor to the couple’s existing problems.

Blossoms of Power by Jin Huang

I have only started this one. So I will pick a favorite quote to describe my favorite character in it.

“Even if it’s as strong as brass walls and iron fortresses, if I want it to fall, fall it shall.”

This is what best describes the protagonist, the FL, as far as I have read the book. And I am loving her for it. She is sharp, cold, detached, and kind in singular moments.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read it too far in and can only rely this much. I look forward to finishing it and then jumping into the screen adaptation. But it might take the entire next month.

That’s Wrap!

I didn’t feel like I read enough this month. Writing this little recap put things in perspective. I achieved quite a feat. It deserves celebration.

If you are still reading past the long recap, I’ll tell you that at the beginning to July, I made a reading plan, complete with mood calculations and time allocations. I was prepared to hit a slump and assigned myself some manga to relieve those symptoms. So, to see that not only did I read, I read well, is very satisfying.

As a celebration, no TBR in August. Let’s dig into random things: novels that are being adapted, some genres do not visit often, magazines, short stories, and see where the next month’s reading journey goes.