One Piece Ficathons!

Part 3 of notes on recent reads:

Hot Lights, Cold Steel, Michael J. Collins
Memoir of a surgical resident at the Mayo Clinic. This was well-written and variously entertaining or existential but so full of casual old-school sexism, ugh. Not exactly surprising, since judging by the pop culture references and the fact that this guy had coworkers who’d been in Vietnam the memoir’s timeframe must be the ’70s, but still kind of exhausting. I was also kind of appalled by an anecdote of doing bone screws without anesthesia that came out to a moral of “we do what we can and it sucks that sometimes people get severe medical trauma” because actually, like, I do think that one was entirely the fault of the surgeon who went “it’s fine he’s already in pain” and (presumably this is the real reason, even if unstated) “general anesthesia for a quick procedure is too expensive”… Anyway, my core takeaway between reading this book and scrolling through a bunch of r/Residency a while back is that residents everywhere desperately need to unionize, because judging from the available evidence there is simply no valid reason to be literally working new doctors to death. (At least the hours this guy was working appear to be illegal now per ACGME, but then apparently those limitations are basically the opposite of enforced…)

The Owl Service, Alan Garner
Asked the library to get this a while back and remembered nothing whatsoever about it by the time they did, so was very disconcerted to discover that the titular owl service is not an organization of owls but a set of plates with owls on them, lol. Anyway: this was extremely Welsh and very sharply class-conflict-aware and really, really interesting; Garner has an extremely bare narrative style that leaves it to the reader to pull the meaning out of what’s happening or being said 100% of the time and never does any direct exposition, which is something I’ve never encountered before and found fascinating to read. (Though this did make a fairly pivotal paragraph in the ending borderline incomprehensible to me; I reread it about three times and then went and read a paper and some blog posts about the ending, which confirmed that I’d parsed the overall gist of the finale correctly but didn’t address those particular lines. I’m assuming the idea here is that ( spoilers )

Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami
The Rat series #3. The love interest from the previous book does finally get a name in this one, god, small mercies. That being said, for a book literally titled Dance Dance Dance Murakami’s protagonist spends a truly excessive amount of time aimlessly spinning his wheels; honestly kind of a slog, though it had its moments with the two main characters besides the narrator (the moody twelve-year-old girl with the neglectful celebrity parents and ( spoilers )

Overall my verdict on this one was that it’s kind of a mess, the resolution with the romance at the end felt really hackneyed + not compelling at all after the build-up with the Sheep Man.

The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed
Finally posted the rest of my language notes. I liked the ending culminating in ( spoilerish )

Yu-Gi-Oh, Kazuki Takahashi (everything up until Millennium World, which I haven’t finished yet)
Reread for the first time since grade school because that’s just the kind of year I’m having, this series remains absolutely deranged and a delight, enjoyed it a lot. Reading it as an adult one really does get the feeling that Atem came out of his 3000 years of imprisonment inside the Millennium Puzzle absolutely feral and proceeded to totally overdo it with punishing Yugi’s various bullies with shadow games, oml. ( cut for length )