Leo Tolstoy – Robert Tomoguchi

An image of My Favorite Reads of 2024 — My Favorite Reads of 2024

2024 was a good reading year for me. I’m happy about that. It’s a big bummer when it hasn’t been a good reading year. My Goodreads goal was 52 books and it looks like I’ll finish at 57. My favorite reads this year were To Live by Yu Hua and the manga I Want to Eat Your Pancreas written by Sumino Yoru and drawn by Kirihara Idumi. Both touched my heart. Both made me cry. (Oh Fengxia!) Both stayed with me. I’m thinking of getting a page from Pancreas tattooed on me.

Another book that stayed with me was For Whom the Bell Tolls. What masterful writing. What emotion. I hope I learned just a little about writing from Hemingway during that read. Other books I really enjoyed were Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee, and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy which I’m almost through but love in advance of finishing. I also reread a favorite read from 2023: All The Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami.

An image of my favorite music of 2024 — My Favorite Music in 2024

At the end of the year I always enjoy Spotify sharing my listening habits. My most listened to song in 2024, I believe was the same song in 2023: せかいでいちばん(Sekai de Ichiban) by Inoue Sonoko, the theme song of my favorite show, Ainori Love Wagon. According to Spotify, I’ve already listened to it 636 times this year, and I know I listened to it at least three more times today.

But if anything, 2024 has to be the year of ILLIT for me. I learned of them through Instagram in April and they became my most listened to artist of 2024 and three of my top five played songs were by them. I believe in the past three years, MXMS was my most listened to artist, but this year they didn’t make the top five. I’m guessing because they stopped releasing new work and that was a big bummer, but they’re still my favorite band.

I definitely think what I read in a year affects what and how I write in that same year. I believe music does as well as I’m usually listening to music most of the day, every day. I become obsessed with songs and listen to them on repeat and this definitely impacts my mood which I believe filters into what I end up writing even though during my longer writing sessions I tend to listen to ambient noise.

Anyhow, I just wanted to share that. Sorry if it was of no interest to you. Even if it wasn’t, I hope you had a good reading and listening year yourself.

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In my last post I mentioned a screenplay I was thinking of novelizing. Well, guess what? That’s what I’ve been doing every day since January 7. I wrote the screenplay in 2006 while I was in the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA. The screenplay was titled Exhume. I toyed around with renaming it and did rename it when I began the novel version, but I have since returned to the title Exhume. It’s about a string quartet who heads out to a remote location in Amish country to work on new music. There they do something they shouldn’t, and all hell breaks loose. The screenplay received an honorable mention in the annual competition at the end of the UCLA program. I thought it worked well as a screenplay, but we’ll have to see about the novel version. It might be too early to call it a novel. At the rate I’m going, it’s feeling more like novella length. I’m already appreciating getting to explore my main character more deeply writing it as fiction than I could as a screenplay. I hope I’ll finish it this year and plan to send it out to agents in the hopes of traditionally publishing it.

Lately, I’ve been on a reading streak where I’ve been reading very good books. Right now, I’m reading War and Peace and To Live by Yu Hua. A couple weeks ago I finished reading For Whom the Bell Tolls and was in awe for many reasons. I’ve also been reading the manga series Tokyo Tarareba Girls by Akiko Higashimura (my crush) which has been a lot of fun but whose viewpoints I’m often surprised by.

Two days ago, marked one year of being off social media. I don’t feel lacking because of it other than wondering if I’ve missed any messages from readers, but those are rare.

Well, that’s basically all I can think of mentioning. I hope you’re well and reading something really good.

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