I heard some of Loreena Mc Kennitt's work when I was in Japan and bought her whole backlist after I came home. Now all her earliest stuff says 'spring of 1996' to me. 1996 was a weird alternative dimension, precisely because I was just back after five years in Japan. So when I come across it again- as now, when my exercise music has started into the vocal stuff- I'm in a double reality shift. The oddness of 2020 looking back at the oddness of 1996,

Saying oh it's been so long, you've been so long on the sands
So long on the sands, so long on the flood,
They have married your Jeannie, and now she lies dead.

P/T staff from work dropped by today to deliver an orchid and a goodie bag from herself and one of the F/T staff. (Also a take out Ethiopian dinner and a latte. Dinner will last me three meals, the way I eat now.) It was sweet of them and I'm sad, but also, from things said and unsaid, aware that the place is as dysfunctional as it ever was and I'm well out of it. A. is now into her ninth month of pregnancy, and though it's a bad time to have a baby (grandma can't fly in to help) I'm glad A. will also be out of it too. 

Last finished?

Ovidia Yu, The Betel Nut Tree Mystery
-- I see there's a third volume of this which I'll give a miss. It's 1936 and the Japanese army is already devastating China.

Ima Ichiko, Hundred Demons 28
-- my heart fails within me. See, the last three or four volumes have been all about a collatoral branch of Ritsu's family, his great-aunt's children, grandchildren, and for all I know great-grandchildren as well. One of whom is supposed to have killed another girl when she was young but I can never remember who she was because these are all female children etc who marry and change their names. And now it seems maybe the murdered girl wasn't murdered after all? or it was someone else who died? And I really don't want to have to wade through the last four tanks in an attempt to figure exactly what's going on.
 
Reading now?

Down in the cellar was a box with the umptymany volumes of Kaguya Hime which, on evidence of the first tank, is an unholy mess. 'He found this dead baby in a bamboo grove but she wasn't dead so he raised her himself and neglected his wife so that they separated so he had to put the child in an orphanage from which his estranged wife adopted her five years later and made the girl her artist's model and also her lover only now the teenager has been abducted by these American army brats with yellow hair and Japanese names one of whom can fly jet fighters perfectly the first time because he's practised on flight simulations...'   It's Japanese practice, I suppose.

Have the first Phryne Fisher in e-format but it's not grabbing me, partly because Phryne was poverty-stricken in childhood but now wears designer clothes huh? And wears a lot of designer clothes, I mean seriously this is fashion porn.

Next?

The Dark Archive arrived from G today. Am tempted to drop everything else and just read that.