Tokyo on Foot: Travels in the City’s Most Colorful Neighborhoods by Florent Chavouet My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book called out to me the moment I saw it in the book store. There are numerous books which try to capture the feelings one has when visiting Japan for the first time. Few do […]
It’s no secret that space is tight here in the metroplex. Tight, orderly, clean, and tight. Public and private – everything is tighter than things in the West. It’s basic physics in most respects, and you have to learn to deal with it, or risk a mental breakdown. When I visited by folks in suburban […]
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell My rating: 4 of 5 stars What I enjoyed most about this novel is the language of the traders on Dejima. You’ll learn over 20 ways to describe the pain associated with gout and/or syphilis via the descriptive prowess of a 1800s English sea captain. […]
Sometimes building up the motivation to hike a mountain in the Tokyo area is tough. Not the hikes themselves, though they can be challenging, but the often extremely early wake up times necessary to catch the train to the mountain. This had been a problem for the past couple weekends for me and my wife. […]
Books with this much hype don’t usually appeal to me. There may have been some sort of collective unconscious peer pressure at work here, urging me to put this book on my Christmas list. What is more interesting is that I am not really an Apple guy, I only own one iPod that I bought […]
Usually when visiting a particular place that gets raving reviews from critics of contemporary design I am left feeling a bit let down. This is especially the case in Japan, where critics often praise particular locations but neglect to mention just how overwhelming expensive those locals are (Omotosando, Roppongi, Ginza) and the type of clientele […]
A sudden, cathartic end to one of my more mammoth undertakings. And to think that two equally sized volumes remain! Biblio-exhaustion is rarely so enjoyable. As I read this massive tome, I came across an excellent article on The Millions about ‘Literary Stockholm Syndrome’. In essence, it is the theory that long, seemingly tedious works, […]