The book haul video is a thing on the Japanese corners of YouTube, just as it is among English-language booktubers.
As in English, the Japanese book haul video (and the entire booktuber sector) is dominated by young women. No complaints here, except to point out that men of all ages, in all countries, should read more.
I have not been to Japan for more than a decade now. One thing I really miss about being in Japan is browsing bookstores, and looking for new books to read.
Even with the Internet, the acquisition of Japanese-language reading materials remains something of an ordeal in the United States. The US division of Amazon stocks relatively few Japanese-language titles. The demand simply isn’t there.
At the same time, US-based, independently owned mail-order Japanese bookstores have mostly gone out of business. This is yet another case of the Internet ruining a business model without providing an acceptable substitute.
I recall Sasuga Bookstore of Cambridge, Massachusetts with particular fondness. I purchased many books from them throughout the 1990s and early 00s. (Sasuga closed its doors for good in 2010. 残念でした.)
I’m a lifelong foreign language learner. Russian is my newest focus.
Eli from Russia is one of my favorite Russian YouTubers. She recently made a video about the similarities of the Russian and Serbian languages.
There are similarities between Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Polish. (I don’t know much about Bulgarian, so I’ll refrain from commenting on that one.)
As the above video demonstrates, Russian and Serbian are substantially similar, but still mutually unintelligible, even though a speaker of one of these languages can understand large chunks of the other one.
The Serbian language is not on my list—at least for now. No offense to Serbian speakers intended.
All languages interest me somewhat. But I’m now in my 50s. I’ve been studying languages since my early 20s. Thirty years of language study has taught me that I’ll never have time to learn them all. In a limited human lifespan, one must set priorities in all matters, including language study.
If you have done any reading in the business/self-help genre, you have no doubt come across the following sentence:
“You are the CEO of your own life.”
On the surface, this sounds empowering. There is, moreover, a large measure of truth to it. If you are an unincarcerated adult living somewhere in the free (or semi-free) world, you are, indeed, the CEO of your own life.
***
But there’s a problem here.
Imagine, if you will, a CEO sitting alone at the head of a large table in a boardroom. The boardroom is located on the sixth floor of the company’s headquarters.
The headquarters building is empty, Except for the CEO.
How much could such a CEO get done?
Who would do the hiring? Who would plan production? Who would ensure that the company’s products were of the highest possible quality?
By himself, a CEO doesn’t get much done at all.
Let’s bring this back to the personal metaphor. Yes, by all means, you are the CEO of your own life. But you are also the sales manager, the quality control chief, the head of purchasing. You’re responsible for personnel matters, and for economic forecasting.
You’re much more than the CEO of your own life. Being the CEO of your own life is just the starting point, really.
In the summer of 1987, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers released the song “Jammin’ Me”, with an accompanying MTV video, embedded below.
The theme of the song is: mass media overload.Some of the specific references in the song are now dated (El Salvador, Vanessa Redgrave, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, etc.). But with a few updates, this song would be perfectly relevant in 2024.
It’s worth noting that 1987 was a year before social media, the Internet, and mass-market cell phones. There were no podcasters. Talk radio had yet to take off in a big way.
And even in 1987, it was possible to feel news and media overload.
While 1987 was not without its political controversies, that was a calmer, saner era than the one in which we find ourselves today. There was a general sense that in the halls of power, adults were in charge.
The video therefore focuses on the excesses of 1980s consumer culture, but you can see and hear multiple nods to the political issues of that bygone time, too.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was one of the 1980s teen movies that I never got around to seeing. This was not a conscious decision on my part. (No one thought of “boycotting” movies back then.) Rather, it was more like an oversight.
For one thing, the movie was released on June 11, 1986. This was the week after I graduated from high school. Perhaps I had a sense that having graduated myself, watching movies about high school kids was no longer an entirely appropriate thing for me to do. I had, after all, eagerly watched early teen films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and The Breakfast Club (1985). But I had no time for Ferris and his adolescent adventures. For me, the most memorable film experience of the summer of 1986 was the original Top Gun.
I’ve rewatched Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club as an adult. I’ve toyed with the idea of watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But I fear that moment has simply passed. I’m now 56 years old. I have even less interest in watching a teen movie in 2024 than I did in the summer of 1986.
One factoid for you, though: that movie I never saw was a box office success. So much so, that the dust had barely settled on the movie, before Hollywood got to work on a spin-off TV series, entitled Ferris Bueller.
The TV series was short-lived. It ran for only a single season, from 1990 to 1991. Youth culture has always been fickle and fast-changing. What was cool for high school kids in 1986 was uninteresting for high schoolers a mere four or five years later.
I only recently learned of the television series’ existence. 1990 and 1991 were busy years for me; I wasn’t watching much television.
Among the members of the Ferris Bueller cast was Jennifer Aniston, who was then unknown, and probably less annoying than she is now. But even Aniston could not make a success of Ferris Bueller the television show.
A late-summer heat wave has come to Southern Ohio this week. That means temperatures in the mid-90s, and high levels of humidity.
I am reminded of another heat wave, in another late summer, 42 years ago.
In 1982, I was a freshman at a Catholic high school in Cincinnati. This was a working-class parochial school of the twentieth-century kind, not one of the posh private institutions that is so popular today.
The school building was old. (My mother had attended the same school, in the same building, in the 1960s.) There was no air conditioning.
Also, in those days Catholic school kids wore hot, uncomfortable uniforms year-round: dress slacks and a button-up white or blue dress shirt for the boys, a button-up blouse and a skirt for the girls. No wearing shorts and golf shirts to school, as is so common nowadays.
The early September of 1982 was an exceptionally hot one. Mr. Fairbanks’s freshman English class was held on the second floor, during the fifth period. Around one o’clock in the afternoon.
One day it was perhaps ninety degrees outside. Mr. Fairbanks had opened the windows, but the classroom was still a sweatbox.
We students were miserable, but Mr. Fairbanks was just as miserable. (As a male teacher at the school, he had to wear a tie, in addition to a dress shirt and slacks.)
As class was about to begin, it was clear that no one was in the mood for the lesson. Yes, this was 1982. But even in 1982, 14-year-olds from the suburbs had certain expectations where creature comforts were concerned.
Struck by a sudden burst of inspiration, Mr. Fairbanks stepped over to the blackboard and wrote, in large letters, all caps:
“THINKJANUARY”
Everyone laughed. Then Mr. Fairbanks proceeded with the day’s lesson, which—if memory serves—had something to do with diagramming sentences.
Did those two words on the blackboard do anything to lessen the heat? No. Nor did this turn into a life-changing, mind-over-matter exercise for me. I may have tried to “think January” for a minute or two, but there was no thinking away the heat that day.
What I learned in that fifth-period English class, 42 years ago, was that sometimes you just have to put up with unpleasant circumstances and situations. Some of these circumstances are simply beyond your capacity to change—like a second-floor classroom in an unairconditioned school building on a hot September afternoon.
When that happens, you have two choices: wallow in your discomfort, or set it aside and get through the minor ordeal.
Sooner or later, every heatwave passes. Think January for long enough, and one day it will be January.
A quick personal reading note: I’m on volume 6 of 課長島耕作 (Kachou Shima Kousaku). I’m rereading the whole series, which I read for the first time in the mid-1990s.
And yes, I’m reading it in the original Japanese. I was a Japanese language translator throughout much of the 1990s. I started studying Japanese back in 1988.
But if you don’t read Japanese, you can probably find the long-running Shima Kousaku series in English. (I’ve definitely seen it out there.)
People who know about my Japanese-language background often ask me about manga. Do I like it?
Well…yes and no. In general, I don’t care for the (often) sexualized fantasy tropes that comprise so much of the manga sphere. I much prefer the more realistic Japanese manga; and Shima Kousaku is my favorite.
The Shima Kousaku series begins in the 1980s. It follows the journey of a Japanese corporate employee, or salaryman, as he moves up the ladder of his employer, Hatsushiba Electric.
Not much happens in these stories, in terms of high-concept plot. These are basically soap operas, but they’re exceptionally well-done soap operas, with plenty of microtension.
A story doesn’t need zombies and car chases to be enthralling. (Though a story certainly can be enthralling with zombies and car chases; don’t get me wrong.)
Twitter (or “X”, if you prefer) informs me that Shout, the highly successful album from the British new wave/synth-pop group Tears for Fears, was released this week in 1985. Thirty-nine years ago.
Aug 3, 1985: "Shout" by Tears for Fears hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. #80s Held the top spot for 3 weeks. pic.twitter.com/EkqZKAfPBB
A teen of that era, I liked lots of music from the 1980s. One of the wonderful things about that decade was the sheer diversity of the music scene.
And I mean “diversity” in the best sense of that word. There were plenty of nonwhite and female artists. That was the decade of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Pat Benatar, and Billy Ocean. But there was also a lot of stylistic diversity.
(This is one of the many aspects in which I pity the youth of today, who must face a nonstop barrage of coverage surrounding that overrated mediocrity, Taylor Swift.)
Everyone could find something that they liked in the 1980s. I liked Def Leppard, Triumph, AC/DC, Journey, and Rush.
British new wave/synth-pop? Not so much. I remember groaning when the eponymous single of Tears for Fears’s 1985 album came on the radio for what seemed like the zillionth time. (And “Shout” got a ton of FM radio airplay in the late summer of 1985, let me tell you.)
But time changes our perspectives in myriad ways. I’m still not a fan of 1980s British new wave/synth-pop. But it was so much a part of an era for which I am now hopelessly nostalgic. I find—somewhat to my chagrin—that this formerly groan-inducing music is now a trigger for scores of happy memories.
Ditto for a hit song from another ‘80s British new wave/synth-pop group called Soft Cell.
In 1981 and 1982, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was on FM radio nonstop. I literally cannot hear it today without being transported 40-odd years into the past. But there is one memory in particular that stands out.
For me, the summer of 1982 was the summer between the eighth grade and the first year of high school. That summer, I accompanied my parents on a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
I was thirteen years old, not quite fourteen. I was bursting with the hormonal energy that made me constantly preoccupied with all female humans falling between my age and about thirty.
But all of this was very new. Alas, I often found myself tongue-tied when it came time to talk to one of those female humans. And so it was on that trip to Myrtle Beach.
One afternoon, I walked out of the condo my parents had rented and headed for the beach. Little did I know, when I set out, that I would remember that walk for 40 years, though not for any reasons worth bragging about.
Directly in my path was a girl in a dark blue one-piece swimsuit. She was lying on a towel in the sand, facing my direction. I remember that she had shoulder-length brunette hair, and she was deeply tanned. She was wearing sunglasses.
She had an FM radio on her beach towel. What song was playing? Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love”. I distinctly remember that.
As I drew closer, I saw that she was probably a year or two older than me. Maybe an incoming high school sophomore. A junior? Possibly.
And then, the impossible happened. She smiled and said, “Hi”. But not in a dismissive way. She removed her sunglasses.
That was my cue to talk, to strike up a conversation.
What did I do, though? I uttered some guttural response that roughly approximated American English. “Haa-augh!”would be a close transliteration, I think.
Then I kept walking. And walking. When I returned an hour later, she was gone. I looked for her later in the week (having prepared a dozen cool conversation openers), but I didn’t see her.
***
What would have come of it, if I’d had a bit more game in the summer of ’82?
Probably nothing. We were both very young, and we were both on vacation. Our homes were likely hundreds of miles apart. And that was long before email, texting, or FaceTime.
But hey, you never know.
That’s an embarrassing memory, but also a good one. As anticlimactic as that incident was, the summer of 1982 was the portal to many happy times. I had a pleasant teenage experience, as teenage experiences go.
I’m still not a fan of British new wave/synth-pop. But I no longer groan when I happen to hear it.
The Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 is one of the first major global events that I remember.
I was 11 years old on November 4, 1979, when Iran’s revolution came to a head, and a mob of student militants overran the US Embassy in Tehran. The student militants took 66 American hostages. 52 of these hostages would remain in Iran until January, 1981.
American hostages in Tehran, Iran in 1979
I followed the 444-day crisis on the news. But being 11 years old, I was sketchy on most of the historical background.
I’ve read a lot more about the crisis since then. I’m presently finishing up the above book, Guests of the Ayatollah: the First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam, by Mark Bowden.
Bowden’s book includes not only the overarching historical details, but also many individual stories: of the hostages, and others whose lives were impacted.
Definitely worth a read if this is a subject that interests you!
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
I am a diehard fanatic of only a handful of books, movies, and musical oeuvres. And I evangelize only a subset of those.
For example, I love the music of Rush and Iron Maiden; but I don’t consider the appeal of these bands to be universal, by any means. Likewise, I realize that a coming-of-age movie that spoke volumes to me in 1984 might not have the same significance for a teenager of 2024. Or for a Boomer who was a teenager in 1964, for that matter.
But everyone should see The Americans.
The Americans is part family saga, part period drama, and part espionage thriller. The show is set in both America and Russia during the last decade of the Cold War.
I watched The Americans in its entirety during the show’s original primetime run on FX from 2013 to 2018. During those years, I looked forward to each new episode.
I loved the series so much, I recently decided to watch it again. But as is so often the case with these modern conveniences of ours, the situation has been made less convenient than it would have been in pre-Internet days. No longer do non-primetime shows circulate to rerun syndication in non-primetime hours. They move to paid streaming platforms.
If you want to see all six seasons of The Americans in 2024, you have several options. You can pay to download each episode from Amazon, or you can purchase a subscription to Hulu, where the series is now streaming.
Or you can purchase the complete series on DVD. I determined this to be my best and most cost-effective option. The above package arrived on my doorstep from Amazon yesterday.
I look forward to watching this series again from beginning to end. And if you haven’t yet seen The Americans, you might consider buying the DVDs, too. They are still in stock on Amazon.
Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
I discovered the books of historical novelist John Jakes (1932 – 2023) as a high school student during the 1980s. The television miniseries adaptation of his Civil War epic, North and South, aired in 1985.
North and South was extremely well-done for a network (ABC) television production of the mid-1980s. The cast included Patrick Swayze, Kirstie Alley, David Carradine, Lesley-Anne Down, and Parker Stevenson. The sets were realistic and the production values were high.
After watching that, I decided to give John Jakes’s books a try. I read North and South(1982), plus the subsequent two books in the North and South trilogy, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987).
Then I delved into The Kent Family Chronicles. The books in this long family saga were published between 1974 and 1979. These are the books that really put Jakes on the map as an author of commercial historical fiction.
I emphasize commercial. John Jakes never strove for the painstaking historical accuracy of Jeff Shaara, or his approximate contemporary, James Michener. Jakes’s first objective was always to entertain. If the reader learned something about the American Revolution or the Civil War along the way, that was icing on the cake.
As a result, John Jakes’s novels lie somewhere along the spectrum between literary fiction and potboilers. His characters are memorable and he imparts a sense of time and place. But these are plot-driven stories.
At the same time, Jakes’s plots have a way of being simultaneously difficult to believe and predictable. Almost all of his books have a Forrest Gump aspect. His characters are ordinary men and women, but they all seem to rub shoulders with figures from your high school history classes.
That said, Jakes is one of the few authors whose books pleased both the teenage me and the fiftysomething me. This past year, I started rereading The Kent Family Chronicles, and catching up on the few installments I missed back in the 1980s. I have changed as much as any person changes between the ages of 17 and 55, but I still find these books to be page-turners.
This past week, I started listening to the audiobook version of California Gold. This one was published in 1989, after Jakes’s long run of success with The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold is the story of Mack Chance, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who walks to California to seek his fortune in the 1880s.
I will be honest with the reader: I don’t like California Gold as much as Jakes’s earlier bestsellers. California Gold is episodic in structure, and the main character is far less likable than some of Jakes’s earlier creations. In California Gold, Jakes indulges his tendency to pay lip service to the issues of the day (in this case: the budding American labor movement and early feminism) through the voices of his characters. Most of these pronouncements are politically correct and clichéd.
Worst of all, California Gold employs sex scenes as spice for low points in the plot. This is always a sign that a writer is struggling for ideas, or boring himself as he writes. When Jakes wrote California Gold, he may have been a little burned out, after writing The Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South trilogy.
California Gold, though, won’t be tossed aside on my did-not-finish (DNF) pile. This is still a good novel. Just not the caliber of novel I’d come to expect from John Jakes. No novelist, unfortunately, can hit one out of the park every time.
There really was something special about growing up in an era when video games were not old hat, but something brand-new and on the cutting edge of the technology of that time.
I suppose I like my 21st-century iPhone and my MacBook as much as the next person, but they are tools for me, not objects of indulgence. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed anything quite as much as that first Atari console I received for Christmas in 1981.
Did I have a favorite game? Of course I did. Space Invaders, hands down. Missile Command came in a close second, though.
Today’s solar eclipse was a bit anticlimactic here in Cincinnati. The local news channels all predicted a 99.2 percent eclipse in my area just outside the city.
That didn’t happen, not by a long shot:
Me, eagerly awaiting the full eclipse as the shadows start to lengthen
This is going to get good any minute now! I tell myself. But I am already growing skeptical.
The high point of the eclipse, at around 3:20 p.m. EST. The sun has been noticeably dimmed, but it’s a long way from dark.
What can I say? Here in Cincinnati, the local weather forecasts are right only about 50 percent of the time. Why should the eclipse forecast be any different?
This was worth walking outside for, but I’m glad I didn’t make a day of it.
I hope the eclipse was better for you, if you live in an area that was forecast to experience it.
