Journal

Tiếng Việt

Xin chào!

Tôi đang cô viết một bài viết tiếng Việt. Tôi muốn thử nghiệm điều này và học hỏi.

Đây là một câu chuyện vườn.

Vườn của tôi yên tĩnh. Đã có rất nhiều mưa, nhưng cây cối không phát triển. Thời tiết lạnh đã làm cây cối chậm lại. Mùa đông đang tới!

Đó là tất cả. Tạm biệt. Hẹn gặp lại!

November garden update in Vietnamese

Hello!

I’m trying to write a journal entry in Vietnamese. I want to experiment with this and learn.

This is a garden update (story).

My garden is quiet. There has been a lot of rain, but the plants do not grow. The cold weather has slowed down the plants. Winter is coming!

That is all. Goodbye! See you later.

I loved this album, and the novel was the very latest from one of my favorite authors. But for some reason I couldn’t settle down, couldn’t focus on either the music or the book. I considered watching a movie I’d recorded, but couldn’t find one I really wanted to see. Some days are like that. You have time on your hands, and you try to decide what you want to do, but can’t come up with a thing.

Overall this collection of short stories was a mixed bag—more so than typical short story collection from Murakami. The start was particularly slow for me, making it hard to build momentum.

The concluding story First Person Singular was certainly the standout.

Ranking the three books in the series, this would fall squarely in the middle, with The Dark Forest being the highlight of the series and The Three-Body Problem being my least favorite of the three. All that to say, stopping at the second book would be a reasonable choice (and clean ending).

This book was a little more empty than its predecessor. It had lots of interesting ideas, but never really explored any of them—and their implications—in depth. I would love to learn more about this universe of Liu’s creation and was left craving to learn more about it. The book accelerates in time and space as you go through it, leaving many details to the imagination.

As many Goodreads reviews point out, there’s some weird gender representation in this book. Those reviews represent this better than I could ever hope to.

Overall it was fine. It definitely drew me in and kept me turning the pages. But it could have been so much better.

So much better than the first book in the trilogy.

It took me at least three times to make it past the opening scene of this book, perhaps in part due to my tepid feelings about the first book. After a few years I finally made it past that opening, and I’m pretty glad I did.

It’s been so long since I read the first in the series that it’s hard to compare the two. One challenge I had with the first that still stands out was that it felt hard to understand the character’s motivations for doing what they were doing—it all felt like an act. I didn’t have that concern with this book. Motivations and character progression generally made sense.

The stakes and action in this book were also much larger, which helped buoy this book as well.

The writing style was less-than-ideal from my perspective, feeling flat for lack of a better way to describe it. Like I thought for the first, I tend to wonder if this is more of a translation concern.

One final criticism of this book I have is also shared with the first. The name-dropping of various scientific ideas and historical figures is not something I enjoy. It just feels cheap to have this breadth of concepts that are not fully explored or deeply relevant.

It’s a rough time of year for my garden. Every plant in my garden has been suffering the wrath of the hot summer sun. The natives have of course been doing better than the plants less adapted to the 100°F+ weather, but even they have been suffering. The one plant that seems uniquely immune is the Texas mountain laurel. I love that plant. I just wish it would grow faster!

Fruiting trees

Since the fruiting trees have only been around for a year or so, I wasn’t expecting any fruit this summer. The persimmon tree held to those expectations, but the fig tree surprisingly produced some figs this year! Unfortunately due to the heat and my lack of watering the figs didn’t turn out super edible, but it’s still progress.

Watering the wildlife

Inspired by my dad, I’ve started leaving water out for the wildlife in this extra-dry summer of ours. I set out a little flower-pot platter I had sitting around and I fill it up daily. I put a rock in the water to give wasps and other small wildlife a perch to sit on or a means of escape. It’s been really neat seeing all the wasps and birds come by to refresh themselves.

New edging technique

As I’ve begun replacing my grass with various trees, shrubs, and other plants, I’ve created mulch islands around them. The big battle I’ve had is with the grass attempting to encroach on this area since I don’t have any boundaries preventing it. Recently I’ve learned of a natural edging technique meant to help with this. I’m going to try it out and see how it goes!

Planting things too early

I couldn’t help myself when I went to the plant store recently and I bought a couple of plants. I got a native mountain laurel and non-native bottlebrush. Here’s to hoping I can keep them alive in this brutal heat.