What Am I Reading Wednesday - December 20

Is it Thursday? Oops.

What I Just Finished Reading

We Don’t Eat Our Classmates – Ryan Higgins
A cute story nicely illustrated with a diverse cast of supporting characters.

Spindle’s End – Robin McKinley
This retelling of Sleeping Beauty is my second favorite of McKinley’s books, behind only Beauty. Rereading it this year, I was struck by how much of McKinley’s style Naomi Novik has adopted. Like Rosie and Peony from this book, they’ve almost melded into a single individual in my mind.


What I Am Currently Reading

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Simon Armitage
I’m very much enjoying working my way this facing page translation, reading each chapter of the poem in the original and then checking how much I’ve understood reading Armitage’s modern English rendering.

Basic Japanese Grammar – Everett Bleiler
“There are slight shades of meaning between the different forms, though these shades are too subtle for correct usage by English speakers,” says Bleiler. Given that he also says,
   kaku - 来る - to write
   kaita - 来た - wrote
   kaite - 来て - writing
the intricacies of Japanese may indeed be beyond him, but he has no business including the entirety of the world’s English speakers in that statement.

The Dream Hunters – Neil Gaiman & Amano Yoshitaka
This time through, I’m really appreciating the art. It looks like a gloomy, supernatural Heian period world should look.

[ ] - [ ]
For reasons.

The Truth About Fat – Anthony Warner
Warner makes a number of good points—that fat-shaming probably does very little to help people lose weight; that BMI cut-offs are arbitrarily chosen for ease of use and of questionable utility for characterizing many people’s weights—but then belabors them for paragraphs. It’s turning what should be an accessible and informative read into a slog.


What I'm Reading Next
Right now it's a toss-up between Cooper's The Dark Is Rising and PTerry's Hat Full Of Sky.


これで以上です。