Hello friends! It’s been a long time, and I’ve actually been slowly writing book reviews here but not publishing them as life got more and more hectic. But I think I’ll be back for about one or two weeks with a few posts before disappearing again.

The impetus for this slight return to the blog is that I crunched the numbers and realised that I’m making progress towards my reading goal! I mentioned at the start of the year that I slowed down my reading in 2025 and wanted to continue embracing the slow reading trend. Well, I kind of bucked that trend in January by finishing 13 books. February and March had a bit of a slow down, with 9 and 8 books read, but I was still thinking that I was reading faster than I liked.

Until April – I decided to read a book that I bought at the start of my time in Japan for my Japanese April book and it slowed me down considerably. And that was such a good experience! The book was basically an illustrated dictionary of Ukiyo-E and since I have been reading some art museum catalogues after visiting the Impressionism exhibition, I was interested in how Eastern and Western cultures intersect. So it was pretty cool to learn about how many different genres of Ukiyo-E paintings existed and how it influenced Western painting as well (this article I found has a picture of a Van Gogh painting with Ukiyo-E paintings in the background, the image I saw while reading the book). Additionally, the book also had a few entries on Yuujo and their impact on the genre, another fun find since I did some research on this topic a few years back as well.

And thanks to the fact that I took time to read this from cover to cover instead of skipping around so that I could finish faster and read more books, I ended up reading 6 books in April. And for the past few days, I’ve been slowly savouring a new book I bought, which is a Japanese book on the Church and society. I don’t think I’ve read much Christian non-fiction from the perspective of the Japanese Church, so I’m really enjoying this one.

I think this year, I’ll also aim to finally finish reading a French book that I bought. That might actually take me a whole month because I’ll need to slow down to even concentrate on what the book is saying!