Library card!

In fabulous news, I got a library card in October! I can now borrow up to five books from anywhere in Dublin where there’s a public library. This also gives me access to BorrowBox where I can rent five titles (audiobook or ebook). It’s been a long-time dream of mine to make a library my “regular haunt.” I’ve tried that a couple of times in the Marikina Public Library and once or twice in UP Main Lib, but I just didn’t have as much free time as I do now.

Recent fast reads

I’ve listened to Strange Pictures and Strange Houses (both by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion and read by the soothing, cozy, mesmerizing voice of Andrew Grace) back to back, mostly because of the audiobook narrator, so much so I had to look him up to see what else he’s read and was surprised to find he didn’t have a lot of audiobook projects yet, I would assume he’d be the go-to voice for the cozy horror/thriller/detective genre that’s all the rage these days. Would love to hear him in more.

I also borrowed Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, but did not finish not because it wasn’t good, but because it was repeating things to me that I already knew and have already internalized (also if you’ve read Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, or Gilbert’s Big Magic, or Pressfield’s The War of Art and Turning Pro, and other books of a similar vein). So I think this is a fantastic read for me when I take a break from actual creation and need a moment to refill or remind myself of creative philosophies.

I’ve also gotten a ton of notes out of the Irish Writers Handbook for 2025, which contained essays about writing craft and the publishing industry. It really tells me how huge literature is for Ireland and maybe I should spend some more time here to learn from the best. In any case the Irish are one of the few if not only European countries that had been colonized (for 700 years, by England). So theirs is about the only opinion about the human condition from a relatively stable, high GDP-per-capita nation that I really care about. (See how hard I avoided saying global north LOL.)

A deeper detour: Dead-end Memories

I also read Banana Yoshimoto’s Dead-End Memories (translated by Asa Yoneda), which are five short stories about essentially lonely women who grapple and grow through tragedies or strangenesses that come into their lives. I hesitate to call it cozy na naman, as the word has lost all its meaning despite all of us knowing exactly what we mean when we call something that, because I sometimes wonder how much of it has to do with the linguistic limitations of the work having been translated from Japanese and how much of it is really because that’s the mood Banana is going for.

Banana once wrote that she writes stories for fun, not for therapy (she has a really old searchable Blogger), and whether or not that has persisted for her in later years, the way her stories do end up as healing by not targeting the healing, but instead dwelling on the moments that make up her characters’ lives, makes me think of the universally recommended sideways pursuit of happiness. She also has a way of surprising me with incredibly accurate descriptions of emotional nuances, like when she described how accepting that an ex has fundamentally different values as you did was an almost soothing feeling, “like I was young again.” That to me was so precise, because it did capture that sense of hope and meaning and freshness that the world was kind again, because it didn’t hurt you intentionally, your ex just simply wasn’t the person for you after all.

The other thing I want to say about the concoction of stories (you can read other reviews that will inevitably tell you their favorites or the standouts) is how she chose Tomo-chan’s Happiness to be the fourth in the series. It was the perfect placement even if or entirely because it contained one of the strangest fourth-wall breaks that record-scratches your reading experience in a way I would describe as more delightfully disorienting than unpleasant. It suddenly hints at the nameless witnesses in the natural world that spiritually hold our hands while we go through the senseless tragedies in our lives.

That’s probably a great way to give you a vibe of what the stories seem to want to show: that throughout the macabre, the weird, the heartbreaking things that happen, the stories describe a silent faith in good things nevertheless happening through people around you. I’ve seen the phrase magical realism thrown out a lot when reviewers describe the book, but there are no elements that ring out as surreal or outside of the physical laws of reality to me. What stands out to me is how bright and warm the narrators manage to see the world in spite of its randomness and tragedies–or maybe even because of these.