Stop counting your books out loud

Reading the Akutagawa prize winners and failing at the gym

Hello!

To anyone who made your way here from my day job, apologies — this is almost certainly not what you’re looking for. This is a personal newsletter, mostly about the things I’d text my friends. You’re welcome to stay, particularly if you’re also a 40-ish parent who enjoys such exotic hobbies as reading books, lifting weights, figuring out what to wear, and trying not to swear at children’s sporting events.

For my friends: I hope this takes the place of at least 50 of the text messages I send you each week. The structure will be pretty informal: a place to share the things that I like, especially the things I think would also look good on you or that you’d enjoy reading, too… having this outlet may even get me to stop texting to ask if you want to go to the gym. I’m sort of a pushy person, and this newsletter will probably be a little pushy, too.

This week, I’m writing about my progress on a (non-numeric) 2024 reading goal, my mildly embarrassing failed effort to improvise a hip thrust set-up at the gym, and an outfit that I felt pretty good about.

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I gave up publicly tracking the number of books I read many years ago — I felt like it turned me into a competitive asshole — and I don’t love that it’s become such a thing the last few years. I feel fortunate to have a handful of friends I can whine to when I’m in a reading slump or high-five when I really hit my stride, and I know everyone loves accountability. But I think it’s worth asking yourself whether you’re sharing your number to hold yourself accountable or because you want to feel like you’re winning at reading. We’re all winners! Just read your books in peace!

I still maintain a loose goal for how many books I’d like to read each year and track them in the Notes app as I go, but I’ve found that I enjoy reading a lot more when I focus on goals that aren’t based on numbers.

In that vein, I decided a few years ago to read more Japanese fiction. The decision was a pretty arbitrary one; I don’t have any particular connection to or knowledge of Japanese culture or language. But I’d been reading a lot of Murakami and felt sort of frustrated that I had very little cultural or literary context for what I was reading — I couldn’t tell whether certain things were just quirks of Murakami’s writing or literary tropes I was unfamiliar with, or whether certain phrases that struck me as odd were particular to those novels or related to broader questions of Japanese to English translation (on that subject, I loved this Matatsugo Ono essay in Paris Review). I decided the best way to remedy this was to read more Japanese literary fiction.

I’ve kept it up ever since, but I decided to make it a more explicit focus of my 2024 reading. And so I’m now working my way through all the Akutagawa prize winners I can find in English (or other books by authors who’ve won the prize, when I can’t find translations), in roughly reverse chronology. So far I’ve read:

• Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki

• Solo Dance by Li Kotomi

• Idol, Burning by Rin Usami

• Spark by Naoki Matayoshi

• The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya

The Lonesome Bodybuilder took a turn that I found difficult to navigate, but the first few stories were weird and delightful. Solo Dance was written in Japanese by a writer from Taiwan (it was one of her later books that won the prize, but I couldn’t track it down in English) and is the only book about queer life in contemporary Japan that I’ve come across on this journey. Others exist, obviously, but my reading has been pretty passive, limited to the books that have broken through on some level in American literary circles (a lot of Yoko Ogawa, Banana Yoshimoto, and Mieko Kawakami), and now to this particular list of winners of one award… and across the all of the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve still read fewer than 50 novels.

The others I mostly enjoyed but didn’t have strong feelings about. I found Spark the most difficult. It’s about a comedian trying to make it in the Tokyo comedy scene, and I felt like the humor was just too difficult to translate. I sometimes struggled to parse which jokes were supposed to be funny, and which were meant to be meh (the protagonist achieves only modest success), and I got only the most obvious and explicit cultural references. I’m honestly not sure how you could translate this in a way that fully communicates everything that unfolds without a lot of heavy handed exposition or footnotes. This isn’t really a criticism — it was still in many ways a lovely if strange read, whatever I didn’t get was due to my own lack of competence — it just seems like an exceptionally difficult novel to translate for most readers. There’s apparently a Netflix adaptation, though.

Genre fiction will always be my first love, so I’ve also plowed through all of the Keigo Higashino murder mysteries, which, to be honest, I enjoyed more than the prize winners, on the whole. They’re very solid cozy mysteries that are predictable enough to be soothing but well crafted enough to still be interesting.

Outside of this, I haven’t read anything the last two months that blew me away. I’m particularly struggling to find good a good romance series, so please tell me if you’ve read anything amazing recently. I read a few Christina Lauren books this month and liked them fine, but only fine. Maybe this is my year for mysteries instead?

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As I have complained to many of you, many times, over the last few months, I’ve been struggling to find a gym routine that works well for me. I spent two years working pretty intensely on weight lifting with a coach I absolutely loved. But after he left DC in November, I couldn’t find anyone I enjoyed working with — no, I don’t want to do cardio; yes, I do actually think it’s important for women to lift heavy things “as they age;” no, I am not interested in weight loss.

I have an enormous amount of anxiety about going to the gym and lifting weights on my own, though. I live in the sort of body that can move without scrutiny in most gym settings, which makes things easier for me, I know. But I also live with the sort of brain that freezes up whenever it’s uncertain of the rules or social norms. And each gym feels, to me, like it has its own, subtly different from those of every other gym I’ve been to in a way that creates just enough anxiety that I’ve never really been able to become a Gym Person. Group classes? Working with a trainer? No problem, I love being told what to do. On my own, I feel totally at sea.

But, one unexpected benefit of lifting over the last two years was that I feel more conditioned to respond to my brain’s “you absolutely cannot do that” with an “actually, you probably can” So, I’ve been going to a local Y three times a week and it’s going… okay? I’ve settled into routines for upper body push and pull days that feel pretty good, but I’m still struggling with leg day.

I’m doing my squat-like things and my hinge-like things, but I really love a heavy hip thrust. I know they’re controversial in some circles, but they’re pain relieving for me and check some boxes that I struggle to check on other exercises. So I’ve been frustrated that all of my efforts thus far have ended in… well, certainly not disaster, but mild embarrassment.

The first time I tried to do them with the Smith machine, but soon realized that this required getting into and out of a rather awkward position between the bench and the machine. There was also a mirror positioned directly in front of me and I did not find that feedback helpful.

This week, I had the genius idea to get around all of this awkwardness by using the fixed barbells to do single-leg hip thrusts.

And honestly, that would’ve maybe gone fine except that I overestimated how much I could lift with one leg (it’s apparently less than half of what I can lift with both!) and had to choose between doing very light sets with both legs or flaming out and ultimately giving up on one. I chose the latter and do not feel great, physically or mentally, about it. But there’s always next week!

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I’ve been making more of an effort to wear all of my clothes lately. I have a somewhat embarrassing backlog of items I felt so excited to buy and then just… never put on. This top (secondhand Nili Lotan) looks very chill, but I didn’t realize when I bought it that the one button you see is the one button you get. It requires digging out the wardrobe tape, which is a higher degree of difficulty that I’m game to attempt most days. But, I did it, there were no malfunctions, and I spent less time than expected worrying about things shifting around. I may even wear it again! It felt close enough to my usual style to be comfortable but different enough to be fun. I give the shirt a 7 out of 10.

This was not a picture I planned to share beyond asking a friend if she thought this outfit worked, hence the general state of things. And I think I ended up with a different bag by the time I left the house.

I try to buy mostly secondhand, but if you’re looking for a basic striped sweater, I bought this one from Uniqlo last month and have worn it constantly. The quality of the material is shockingly good, and the length works really well for my slightly-longer-than-average torso. I should also confess that I got it because I was buying the Uniqlo TikTok bag, which is as perfect as the internet says — $15 well spent!