Reading Wednesday

Finished reading: How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino. This is an unusual kids novel; it's kind of hard to classify. It's a story about a teenage boy in prewar Japan, dealing with friendship and bullying; but it's also very didactic. The introduction describes it as "a story about growing up, bravery, cowardice, social class, and finding out who you are, interrupted by essays about scientific thought and personal ethics". I'd say that's a fair description. It reminds me of certain philosophical novels I've read, where the subject/philosophy being discussed was more important than the plot, though in the case of How Do You Live? I feel like the plot and the philosophy were given roughly equal attention.

Anyway - the reason I picked this up is there's currently a Studio Ghibli adaptation of it in production (no release date yet). I thought the story would be very straightforward, but after reading the novel, I'm very curious as to how they're going to adapt it. It's probably easy enough to just do the actual plot, but some of the conversations on ethics seem like they would fit into a Miyazaki film pretty well, though they'd have to be in a trimmed-down form.

Currently reading: The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor. Murder mystery set in 1666, during the Great Fire of London. Not very far into it yet, but so far it's very atmospheric, with some really vivid setting descriptions.

Reading next: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg. Described as "speculative historical fiction", and one of the protagonists is trans. I don't know much about it beyond that. Will report back once I get to it. ;V