halfcactus

I've been catching up on my journaling and updating my cnovel log and looking at everything, I'm beginning to suspect I don't actually like books. (Or movies.) 🤔

Personal cnovel + manhua log:


Recent/current reads:
公爵小姐不想被寵壞 The Daughter of Duke Doesn't Want to be Spoiled
Coming-of-age/slice-of-life comedy about the peerless beauty Yvette Winchworth, a sheltered duke's daughter with a lot of status privilege AND pretty privilege. The duke is, of course, Yvette's mom (screencap), who is sending Yvette off to stay with a mercenary group for two years while she (the duke) joins the political fray. The rest of the manhua is about Yvette adjusting to life outside her mansion and learning to fit in with the ML's motley crew.

This was a nice, light read. Yvette is super cute and she loves her mom so much she does everything to learn and be less of a burden. It gets a bit rushed in the end but I didn't mind because I wasn't interested in prolonging the storyline with Yvette’s dad or seeing the imperial power struggle plot lol. There's a (het) romance with the captain of the mercenary army, but Yvette cares most about her mom, her new friends/home, and the sheep. I enjoyed it a lot! Especially since it's only around 54 chapters total and has a clear destination.

The English translation is okay at first but gets progressively worse, to the point of feeling like MTL... Tapas and Manta appear to be using the same translation so there is no escape for me. >:(


她的山，她的海 Her Mountain, Her Sea by 扶華 Fu Hua
Loaded this up on my phone mostly bc I miss having something to read when I'm stuck in a bank queue. This is quite perfect for that! The reading difficulty is easy (it's a campus romance), the writing style is very clear, and the chapters are short. It's very easy to pick up and put down. Cons: there's a bullying storyline and I find bullying storylines much more annoying in novel form than in manhua or TV form. It's somewhat funny that that they deployed "and then they were roommates" as early as chapter one, though.


風之咒 The Wind Spell by Rrrrrrice
Plot as of chapter 1: Rosie is the deaf daughter of the last sea witch and a fisherman. She tries to supplement her father's income by selling oysters so he spends less time working and straining his bad leg, but one day he doesn't return. Rosie joins the search team and there, out in the deep dark ocean, she meets a siren.

Image

This is such a struggle for me to read but the art is just so beautiful and sensual and it's fun, encountering all sorts of new words. I'm wondering if this comic is going to be three chapters, one for every spell that Rosie holds on to in memory of her mother. I'm personally on team "let the wind obliterate the village and its churches while Rosie and her loved ones live happily ever after". (The last public update was part 1 of chapter 3, posted Aug 31, but it's going to take me a while to get there.)

About:
Ya She (Silent House) is a series of books about a magical antique shop with a customer-of-the-week format. A donghua adaptation (free to watch on Youtube) came out last year. A full-cast audiobook came out this year on Missevan and is currently releasing 10-minute episodes of volume 1.

I haven't read the novel (or gotten past the Bronze Mirror episodes in the audiobook), but I saw the donghua some months ago and wasn't too enthused about it—I'm finding the novel/radio adaptation more my speed in terms of emotional resonance and atmosphere. I'm tempted to read the novel now that I'm finding out the writing style seems appropriate for my reading level (low)? But the next chapters might dip into lore, myth, and fantasy more, so idk, we'll see.



( Translation transcript )

( Translation notes )

1.
snowflake_challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.
I don't have a favorite anything anymore since I have a very short memory and tend to move on from interests... But here's a list of favorites from the last five years:

the movie Legend of Hei: there's supposed to be a sequel in the works and I'm worried Xiao Hei will spend less time in his cat form in it. I think his human form is cute too but I have cat bias. XD

the manga Witch Hat Atelier: the art, design, and paneling are insanely good, and I cried almost every volume. Not very sure the anime format is for me but I'm excited for it nonetheless!

the baihe youth comic 她們的故事 Their Story: Found out recently that there's some controversy(?) around it, but I still love it and it continues to be a comfort reread.

the Yoruneko comics, which are about the daily (well, nightly) life of a cat owner: this is also a comfort read and the main reason I still check Twitter, as the artist posts there. There's an animated series too.

the webtoon Like Wind on a Dry Branch: I paused at around 100 chapters in (it's ongoing with 200+ chapters), but it was the most invested I was in a canon in a while, a rare occurrence. It has some of my fav tropes too, ie. hurt/comfort and demons raising a human child :'D

I guess it's easier to say that my favorite medium is comics these days... I need to relearn how to read books without illustrations. ^^;


2.
Vocabulary list from the first chapter of 全宇宙最后一只猫 The Last Cat in the Universe (which I'm dropping because I'm looking for shorter or maybe less webnovel-y reads):


3.
Recent bookmarks:

Public Domain Archive: you can filter by style, time period, and tag!

Ellipsus: supposedly a Google Docs alternative.

Reading log + discussions:

Chapter 1-2

Chapter 3-7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10-12

Chapter 13

Chapters 14–15

Chapter 16

Chapters 17–18

Chapters 19-20

Chapters 21–22

Chapters 23–24.5

Chapters 25–26 (dayadhvam_triad shared a link to the timeline of novel events) (major spoilers)

Chapters 27–28

Chapters 29-32 (dayadhvam_triad shared a 50-minute Bilibili review)

Vocabulary log (compiled on Tumblr)

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No brain left to talk about any of it, but I finally managed to cross things off my reading list:

桥头楼上 End of the Bridge, Top of the Tower by priest (fiction, mystery/thriller, ~120k words)

Halo-Halo Manila by Jimmeh Aitch (nonfiction comic, 80 pages)

陰間沒有珍奶嗎？ Is There Boba in the Underworld? by 接骨木花 (fiction, m/m romance with supernatural elements, 10k words)

Originally meant to read two chapters / week, something I managed to do with the two other cnovels I finished this year, but my ability to focus on anything has been in shambles. I'm lucky if I even finish a chapter a week. /o\

Reading log:

Chapter 1-2

Chapter 3-7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10-12

Chapter 13

Vocabulary log

Chapters 1 - 7:




Miao Miao chapter and onwards:

Anxiety / attention / dysfunction things

I'm trying to get back into journaling for the 398740340th time so my brain can calm down, but once again I'm lucky if I even manage to take down my (work) notes and to-do-list... for the past week, I've been going rogue and starting new unrelated and unimportant tasks that I've been procrastinating from for years... and once I stop, I never continue any of them either. So now my workspace is just a map of my distractions. Here are the papers I was shredding before I got up to answer a call, there are the pile of files I was sorting.... Here are the objects I meant to move to a more logical place when I was cleaning out a drawer, there is the folder I moved so I could have a smoother workflow to finish that 10-minute task. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Meanwhile I'm barely keeping up with the more "important" aspects of my work... I can project the illusion of working hard and getting big stuff done, but there's so much that has fallen under the cracks and that I've shoved away from view, in the hopes that future!me will feel like picking them up. 😂

Similarly, I spend all my free time trying to read/watch ten minutes of something new and inevitably I give up and get stuck in a loop of trying to figure out how to optimize my "fun" time. I've been having sleep issues again too, so I think... my anxiety has come back to take over my life. XD I spent most of July avoiding all thought and sleeping as much as I can, and maybe that helped a bit, because my insomnia and intense midnight hunger pangs haven't been as bad as they were in the first half of the year... But I'd really like to be able to just relax like a normal person haha.

I feel like this book could have been 50-70% shorter? Love that the women are both competent, but apart from the general romance and Wen Nian, not a single storyline is justified... It feels more like snippets about someone's OC than a full novel. Scenes are perfunctory, abruptly dropped as soon as their purpose is served, and there's no sense of continuity or thematicness, and consequently, no momentum.The author doesn't seem actually interested in the characters—all the side characters are props and even the main characters themselves don't feel quite like people. Jiang Ci is a piano tuner and a scuba diver but you don't really see any of this affect her worldview in any way, so all these elements feel very artificial.

In terms of reading difficulty, the abruptness and lack of context-building made this pretty difficult for me to read and follow (as a non-native reader who's still learning Chinese :P)...

Vocabulary log:

Tried to make a graphic out of my doodle (with the vector tools in Affinity Designer) but it doesn't seem crisp enough? Maybe I messed up my export:


More Affinity notes:

Affinity Designer is meant to be an Illustrator alternative in the sense that it's a vector drawing program, but I can't find the Pathfinder features, which really limits my already basic shape manipulation abilities ;___; This is potentially a dealbreaker, but idk, I'll need to try it out some more and also try out the desktop version in case the commands translate more intuitively there. EDIT: Affinity Photo seems to have a Geometry feature under the Layers menu which has Add/Subtract/Intersect commands; I'll try finding it in Designer.

I'm having a hard time working with layers on Affinity Photo. Layer via Copy and Layer via Cut with the marquee selection tool aren't available, so you have to rasterize layer, make selection, and then duplicate. Similarly, to crop to selection, you select your crop area with the marquee then click on the Crop tool.

I probably just need to play around some more, but: Affinity Photo's paintbrush tool is ridiculously jagged at 100% hardness?? There's no anti-aliasing at all and there's no option to turn on anti-aliasing which ??? Do I have to draw with my phone/tablet's native photo editing app or—

-

In other news, my phone's having problems charging and I fear it's a hardware issue. :') Fingers crossed it's resolvable because I can't deal with the anxiety, especially because I basically live on my phone and don't even carry cash anymore ajk;jdapf;

Goddess of Yesterday: A Tale of Troy by Caroline B. Cooney

A retelling of events leading up to the Trojan War. Because it's largely driven by fate, I didn't find the main character (Anaxandra) particularly compelling, but I thought she was a very effective POV character. The world felt tangible in her eyes, and it made sense to me how, throughout the series of childhood separations, she always tried to grasp and hold on to love, but did not fight rejection. Someone smarter than me can probably make the different types of love alignment chart...

Liked: the characterization of Helen + the Medusa bits + the Cassandra twist in the end

(Read this because superborb wrote about it here and it seemed short enough for me... It still took me a couple of weeks to finish. XD Like her, I enjoyed the first parts the most!)


My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness by Kabi Nagata (translated by Jocelyne Allen)

An autobiographical meditation on loneliness, sexuality, and mental illness + journey towards purpose.

The manga begins with the story's destination—the main character naked in a bed with a female escort—and cuts back to answer the question of what propelled her into making this bizarre life choice.



This hit me very hard, and only partly because of the relatability and specificity of what it expressed. I was fully invested in the author's journey, and felt relieved and proud during each of her breakthroughs. Because of the way she sets down every individual episode into a logical path in retrospect, there's a feeling of progress and catharsis, and it gets more emotional as you take in how it took her around ten years to get there. Seeing how much time, effort, desire, and therapy it took to move her forward made me feel so hopeful both for her and for myself, a person who has yet to find the "sweet nectar of life" (reasons to wake up and function). :P It was also very sweet to see the adults obliquely rooting for her as she scrambled to get a "real adult job" as a young college dropout!

The author's relationship with her gender and sexuality at the time of writing was a work in progress, identifying as lesbian but not fully identifying as a girl, with sexual expectations that were shaped by 1) a lack of sex education 2) erotic BL manga/doujinshi that were representative of neither reality nor her sexuality.


Content warnings: self-harm (seen in the scars), eating disorder/disordered eating, anxiety, depression and other unnamed mental illnesses

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Started reading: 她属于我 She Belongs to Me by 妲婴 Da Ying

I hesitate to say I'm reading this because I've mostly just downloaded + converted the JJWXC chapters to a format readable on my phone ereader + Pleco (using this script to generate the epub and a random website to convert to txt...) so I have something to look at when I'm stuck in a bank queue or waiting room. (Pre-pandemic, this was the only way I read cnovels so the habit kind of stuck even though I spend significantly less time doing any physical banking now.) ^^;

I actually have no idea what this book is about, other than douqi recommending it as a short, light, and wholesome modern-day read... I didn't even bother reading the summary haha. I also didn't realize until today that the cover art is so! Pretty!!! And intriguing!

In terms of readability (as someone who has weak vocabulary and reading ability): I got intimidated with chapter 1 because it felt like there was a lot of plot/drama and some vagueness going on, but it ended at a place that I think I might be able to follow. \o/

I thought the romance was going to be between the MC (married) and her childhood love (pregnant and married—apparently unhappily—to a man) at first, which would have been potentially interesting if done well but much more likely to be... not. It seems like it's actually between the MC and her affluent businesswoman wife? It's a sort of a consensual temporary marriage arrangement for reasons detailed in the chapter 1 exposition. I'm actually kind of into this dynamic, especially with both women appearing competent in their respective career paths, so we'll see! At least it's only 57 chapters. XD

I kinda want to do a reading log, but I'm really struggling with platforms right now... I should probably just write my notes on my physical journal but that requires a different frame on mind...

EDIT: I just found out that there is a fantranslation that hasn't been updated since chapter 40... I feel less stupid/alone now for my moments of confusion hahahaha. I don't know if it's still appropriate to leave translation feedback in the comments since it's been 3 years since the blog was updated and I'm not exactly qualified to say anything........

This is now being fantranslated in Chrysanthemum Garden, and it seems like they update weekly! So I might actually reread everything in English to remember the past cases and use it to review the chapters I've read raw. \o/

Started reading this... two years ago... and I keep forgetting how difficult it is to pick up a book you dropped a while back. /o\ Trying to take more notes now, in case I drop it for another two years...

BASIC DESCRIPTION:
Modern-day supernatural novel with horror, folklore, and comedy elements, and centered around feng shui.

The main character is Zhou Jiayu, a civil servant who gets into a fatal accident and transmigrates into the body of a fraudulent and viciously criminal fengshui master, also named Zhou Jiayu. He is captured and then taken in as apprentice by Lin Zhushui, a blind fengshui master who is extremely renowned in the fengshui world for both his looks and his talent. Zhou Jiayu is then forced to help Lin Zhushui with his work and participate in a fengshui tournament where he shows unusual talent which may or may not help him save Lin Zhushui from his fate.

I'm only 24 chapters in and I don't particularly care for any of the characters or the romance, but I've been enjoying the tournament shenanigans and the cases of the week. I tend to lose interest in the chapters in between. ^^;

In terms of reading difficulty, this is SO MUCH more easier to read than the previous cnovels I've read (*cries in Little Mushroom*). It's written in a very plain and light webnovel style with episodic mysteries that have you learning things bit by bit instead of being loredumped for paragraphs at a time. Definitely very mobile-friendly! There is more slang than I remember, or maybe just more that I recognize now, but still a lot less than the other light modern-day novels I’ve tried, so I’m not really struggling on that front. The fengshui concepts that are relevant to the plot are typically explained after they're introduced, so knowledge isn't required to follow—though I sometimes do some very light Googling to supplement—and it's a learning experience for me.

CW: horror of all flavors (more creepy than scary, so it's tolerable for me), violence, gore (mostly offscreen, IIRC), child harm, sexual harassment by a fellow contestant (though by chapter 24 it dies down to shameless flirting and professions of love, and Zhou Jiayu gets fed up and bullies him back)

( recap + notes, for my own benefit )

Cross-posting from Little Mushroom Reading Club because I like keeping track of links and resources.

This is the poem that Bai Nan writes from memory in an exam, with these passages quoted:

"你们的身体
还挣扎着
想要回返。"

"而无名的野花
已在头上开满。"

Translated in the licensed English translation of the novel as:

Your bodies
still struggle
to return.

And yet the nameless wildflowers
have bloomed amply upon your heads.

FULL TEXT:
〖森林之魅〗
The Charm of the Forest

Chinese text source:
http://www.shigeku.com/xlib/xd/300/4004_mudan.html

English text source:
https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/lishi/20180810/983731.html

在阴暗的树下，在急流的水边，
Under the gloomy tree, by the water's edge of the rapids,
逝去的六月和七月，在无人的山间，
The passing June and July, among the deserted mountains,
你们的身体还挣扎着想要回返，
Your body^[1] is still struggling to return,
而无名的野花已在头上开满。
And the unnamed wild flowers are already full on the head.


那刻骨的饥饿，那山洪的冲击，
That bitter hunger, the impact of the mountain torrent,
那毒虫的啮咬和痛楚的夜晚，
The bite of the poisonous insect and the painful night,
你们受不了要向人讲述，
You can’t bear to tell people,
如今却是欣欣的树木把一切遗忘。
Now it is Xinxin's forest^[2] that has forgotten everything.

过去的是你们对死的抗争，
The past is your struggle against death,
你们死去为了要活的人们的生存，
You die for the survival of the people who want to live,
那白热的纷争还没有停止，
The white-hot dispute has not stopped,
你们却在森林的周期内，不再听闻。
But you no longer hear it during the forest cycle.

静静的，在那被遗忘的山坡上，
Quietly, on the forgotten hillside,
还下着密雨，还吹着细风，
It was still raining, and there was a gentle breeze,
没有人知道历史曾在此走过，
No one knows that history has gone through here,
留下了英灵化入树干而滋生。
The heroic spirits were left to grow in the trunk.

^[1] Some versions of the text appear to have 你的身体 (your body) instead of 你们的身体 (your bodies)
^[2] I think this just means a flourishing forest, but what do I know lol