For form's sake, I complain about our frigid April, but aside from the inconvenience of snow I don't really mind it. These are November and March highs, with the calm grey weather that feels most normal to me. Get me another 10 degrees C- up into the 60sF- and I turn into another person, just as the weather belongs to a different world: the irritable, untrustworthy, too-warm too-muggy too-bright too-polluted spring one. Cool and grey spells equanimity; everything else makes me antsy. And this cool grey brings forgotten memories in its come-by-chance smells: got a whiff of the London Tube ca 1975 this afternoon, and on Friday evening, of stray Tokyo evenings coming back from Jean's. (I'd gone back to work to check that the stove which the cook had turned off and which the clean-up had had to turn off again really was turned off. This is why I hate computer operated appliances. Turn off the gas and the gas turns off. Shut down the computer and an electric glitch keeps the computer on.)
Having reached the sticking point in 1Q84 I can go back to reading it in Japanese, but I don't want to. I need to know what will happen too badly. Then again, if we're descending once again into 'oh I know this one' then, yes, Japanese will do fine. Our library has vol 3 in Japanese, if I want to finish it in that language. It also has Kafka on the Shore in Japanese, which tempts me... if I want to read more Japanese.
Jemisin's secondary worlds are too complicated for me to deal with when I'm multi-voluming stuff. They require undivided attention. And as my attention is tripartite at the moment, I'm tempted to go with The Master of Ballantrae. April is turning into Amnesty Month when all I read are male authors. Not white male authors, with Saunders and Murakami and Okri if I get to him, but male, certainly.
