FINALLY I catch up and post on the actual Wednesday! It only took about....three and a half weeks, go Moi!
What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!
What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it. Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored). Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.
What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.
descensus Averno facilis est