feedeslilas

Read Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto*, a bite-sized memoir from a (new to me) Japanese social media personality about working as, literally, a rental person who does nothing: accompanying people to things they're nervous about or would just rather not do alone; simply being in the room while someone tackles something they've been putting off or talks about something they feel like they can't share with anyone else; holding down a picnic spot at an outdoor festival (as long as the client picks the spot— choosing where to sit would, by definition, be doing something). Fascinating read! It's a mix of anecdotes about the different requests he's gotten and musings on what motivated him to start this "business"**, the ways he does and doesn't craft a persona in his online and IRL presence as "Rental Person", what his clients get out of their interactions, etc.

( Footnotes )

I've been re-reading Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series more or less on a loop since 2021, albeit with longer and longer gaps both during and between books, and to this point recently picked back up on where I left off in Nona the Ninth at some point earlier this year, or possibly late last year. I appear to have last read Gideon in 2023 and Harrow in 2024, so now my goal is to finish Nona this year and then maybe we will get Alecto in 2026...? Have also picked back up on my neglected ongoing Patrick O'Brian re-read (The Far Side of the World).

Currently listening to the audiobook of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, read by Chiwetel Ejiofor— I've been meaning to revisit this since reading it when it first came out in 2020, and it makes a really good audiobook. On re-reading, it's even more obvious that anyone familiar with the book Clarke quoted as an epigraph would immediately know what's up with Piranesi and the Other, although in my defense, I've still never actually read ( that book ) and so Piranesi reminds me, more than anything, of The Tempest.

Finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; it was really, really good!!! I wish I had articulate and insightful things to say about it, but it was just really good. Eleanor Vance is a character of all time and she's going to be rotating like a rotisserie chicken/bouncing around like a screensaver in my head for a while. I'm now in that sort of discontented post-really-good-book state where you bounce off of everything else you try to read afterwards. Tried re-reading Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle but even that didn't take; suspect I will have to read something actively mid in order to reset my brain.