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zeerooth

zeerooth@ramblingreaders.org

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

My website :) tearoom.earth Let's be bookfriends

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zeerooth's books

Currently Reading

2025 Reading Goal

16% complete! zeerooth has read 2 of 12 books.

Tomihiko Morimi: Fox Tales (2022, Yen Press LLC) 4 stars

Intriguing and mystical stories based on Japanese folklore

4 stars

“Fox Tales” consists of 4 different stories loosely connected to one another, each set in Kyoto, Japan. All have some supernatural themes in them, with some blending into light horror. Tomihiko Morimi’s style carries on quite well from his other books, this time intersected with Japanese folklore and mystery. I quite enjoyed the book overall, but some stories I was more fond of than the others. “The Dragon in the Fruit” for example, is brilliant in my opinion, while “Phantom” and “The Water God” much less so. In my opinion it’s probably one of the weaker books of the author, but still an excellent read if one’s interested in tales, mystery or folklore.

Tomihiko Morimi, Emily Balistrieri: The Tatami Time Machine Blues (Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers) 5 stars

In the boiling heat of summer, a broken remote control for an air conditioner threatens …

Extremely fun and charming time travel story

5 stars

Shortly after the filming of their amateur movie wraps up and a group of rotten college students take shelter from a sweltering heat of an August day in the only room with an AC unit at a decrepit student dormitory, a disaster occurs! A bottle of coke spills on the AC remote, rendering it broken and unrepairable. With no technician able to fix the remote and no other way to operate the AC, are they going to be doomed and forced to sweat it out until the end of the summer?

When a dorky time traveller from the future shows up in the dorm the next day, with a time machine capable of travelling 99 years to the past or the future, a brilliant idea to go back and save the remote pops up and the plan is unanimously agreed on by everyone, before any of them have time to …

Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder, 小川洋子: The Memory Police (Paperback, 2020, Penguin Random House) 4 stars

**2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, …

Wonderful prose and an interesting premise, but the story ultimately falls short

4 stars

The concept of the book fascinated me the moment I read about it for the first time. People living in fear of an authoritarian regime as memories are being forcibly taken away from them? There was certainly a great potential, but sadly, I feel that even though the prose and the general vibe of the novel itself does not disappoint as it kept me hooked all the way to the end, the story, the characters and the many tropes that appeared and then had been left abandoned keep the book down at its core.

I made an entire list of issues I have with the novel, but I want to start things off with some well-deserved praise. “The Memory Police” is written beautifully. I’ll forever remember the scene of the disappearance of the roses. The river coloured red, white and pink as millions of petals had flown down into the …