Reading Report: 17 May 2026

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

This week was a bit English...

オオルリ流星群

I'm now in the fourth chapter of the book. The group have convinced a husband and wife who own an old cafe to let them use the property to build Keiko's observatory. The couple know that the building houses flycatchers at times, and they don't want to disrupt the nesting, so Hisashi, Osamu, and Chika help out to construct the observatory and clean up the cafe so it's fit for the flycatchers. Hisashi continues to be evasive towards his wife, Kazumi, about his time away from the pharmacy job they both have. The crew also become aware of Kazuya's (Ume-chan's) indie radio station, though it still hasn't really come up in a meaningful way. Keiko revealed the nature of her research as well. She wants to document asteroids in the Kuiper belt, which apparently doesn't require a very big satellite dish or anything. I liked Hisashi's observation of Keiko when she was explaining her astronomical interests. It brought back his interest in serotonin (mentioned in the first chapter) as he detected that she seemed to derive an unending well of the stuff when she discussed her passion. I hope Hisashi can find some of it some time.

Jorge Luis Borges Stories

The Lottery in Babylon

This story was quite interesting. A city-wide lottery expands from a benign profit/loss drawing into a society-wide system of chance where everyone is forced to participate and the rewards and punishments include every conceivable outcome. The randomness becomes so ubiquitous that people begin to ascribe to the Company (the group who created the initial lottery) the singing of birds and other acts of pure chance. I like how absurd it all becomes, and I think it's an interesting parable on finding meaning in randomness, but also in giving oneself up to chance. The people in the story seem to forget that they also have a role to play in their lives.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

This was a very charming story about a man who wanted to adapt Don Quixote but without all the modernising and business that goes on in adaptations like "Chris on a boulevard". So he sets about adapting Don Quixote in the exact text that Miguel de Cervantes wrote, word for word. The narrator/documenter applauds his intellectual efforts and notes how, despite being a replica of Cervantes' text, Menard's version is imbued with unique qualities. I really liked this story as a meditation on the meaning of text within a given context, the purpose of adaptation, originality, and also just the humour of intellectualising oneself into a futile exercise.

The Circular Ruins

A fairly engaging story about a man who goes on a personal quest to produce a whole man from his dreams. He goes out into the Amazon or some forest like it, and he dreams for hundreds of days and nights, failing and eventually succeeding to produce the man. I think the story would have just been okay if not for the final paragraph where we discover that the man himself was also the dream of another. It was a very touching last moment and it made me think about the lives we create in dreams and fiction that can feel just as real as our experiences.

Shakespeare's Memory

Sort of interesting. It's a story about a German man who has studied Shakespeare his whole life. An acquaintance who came from "the East" offers him the entirety of Shakespeare's Memory. From that day he's burdened with dual memories, but the story goes into a lot of detail about how memory is formed and accessed and it's quite a grounded setting given the premise. I really liked the idea that he couldn't force memories to emerge because he was just as likely to fabricate something entirely.

Cleanness

This is the (spiritual) sequel(???) to What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. It's about a gay American teacher working in Bulgaria and navigating his desires for community, sex, and love. I'm still basically at the start of the book. I read the first chapter of the first act, titled Mentor, which has the unnamed writer trying to console a student of his. The student, named "G." by the writer, recounts the heartbreaking experience of finding out that his crush has indirectly rejected him by sleeping with another person. There was a really strong line about the role, responsibilities, and risks of being a teacher.

"That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done." (p.18)

The Handmaid's Tale (TV)

I saw my family last weekend and had a conversation about this series (and the book, which I would like to try reading eventually), so I decided I'd give it a go. I normally don't write about English TV I watch because it doesn't really benefit my language learning and usually I don't find TV intellectually stimulating. But this was fairly interesting, so I thought I might as well include it in a report.

This series is set in a light science-fictionalised nation which occupies the former United States called Gilead. It's an authoritarian caste-based society informed by an extremely strict reading of the bible that honestly seems to serve no one, not even the people who built it. The story follows June Osborne, a woman who is designated as a "handmaid" - basically breeding stock - because she's capable of having children (a rarity in the setting). We learn most about Gilead through June's experiences navigating, and struggling, through society. The show also uses flashbacks (mostly of June's life but sometimes those of other people) to the "before time" where we see a relatively liberal America seized by a (probably undemocratic) change of government. Usually the flashbacks are interesting for thematic parallels and as a worldbuilding opportunity, but I can't help but get horrible Orange is the New Black trauma. That show went overboard with exposition through flashback.

Probably my favourite character is Serena Waterford, the mistress of June. At first she was just a regular pitiable woman, but I really liked one episode in season 1 where we saw her life before Gilead, and how she basically contributed through writing (now illegal for her to engage in) to the cultural revolution. She clearly believed in what she fought for, and now she suffers for her good work. I've always been a fan of self-defeating fervent types, and I think she's sort of in that camp (though not quite a Javert; I don't think she's a true believer; I'm not sure Gilead has any true believers, which is a weakness of the fiction I think).

When I started watching the show I could see some simple parallels with the Kaimeiji K9 universe, and I thought I'd do a "for" and "against" list to see how Gilead stacked up. I think it's about 50/50, but ultimately it fails for being a society completely devoid of sexual pleasure, and one which seems to reject human nature at every level except for the desire to reproduce and the desire for boundaries.