It’s planner season and this year I decided to splurge and order a hobonichi planner with a cover. When I say splurge I’m not kidding, the planner+cover+shipping from Japan was fantastically expensive and I bought one of the cheaper covers.
The multi-pen and notebook are store exclusives you get when ordering online.
The “Only is Not Lonely” is maybe a little on the nose and I don’t normally like journals or notebooks with quotes or messages on them but I do really like this colour with the strap and the otherwise plain design.
Here’s to daily journaling in 2025!
Currently dipping into The Nō Plays of Japan. I’ve had this on my shelf for a while and I decided now’s the time to take a look at it because it came up several times in the notes for Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, translated by Donald Keene, which I finished recently.
City of Madness
Big book splurge on the weekend. This deluxe slipcased hardcover book is about Kowloon Walled City, a place l’ve been fascinated by for years-along with many others! It was for decades a largely self-governed and self-regulated Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong and for a long time was the most densely populated place on earth with roughly 35,000 people in an area of 6.4 acres. What this book offers aside from many beautiful images showing exterior and interior shots plus maps and diagrams are stories about many people who lived and worked in the walled city.
It was demolished between 1993-94.
Picked up second hand today. Should pair well with the copy of A Journal of the Plague Year I bought recently. 💙📚
Like The Anatomy of Melancholy, A Journal of the Plague Year is another one I wish l’d picked up at the height of the pandemic.
I’ve just discovered Backlisted the book podcast and this is the first book I’ve bought directly attributable to one of their episodes 💙📚
The Translator Without Talent, a book from Ryan Holmberg who’s an art historian, translator and comics scholar. I love niche books like this. It collects a series of instagram posts from 2017-2019 during a stint the author spent in Japan as a visiting professor at Tokyo University. The entries detail manga news, thoughts on translation, manga history research findings plus meetings with various manga artists and more!
Sadly I was not following @mangaberg on IG back when these posts were made and the only downside to reading this now is finding out about a lot of great books that are out of print and no longer available (Bloody Stumps Samurai being the prime example).
If you have any interest in alt-manga you should definitely be checking out Holmberg’s translation work as well as the in depth essays that accompany them from publishers like D&Q, Breakdown Press, New York Review Comics and others. Also check out his IG account.
