00:12
Alright then, let's try and get back to what we were initially planning to talk about.
Sure, back on task.
That is entirely my fault, but that's okay.
No fault has to be given. It just happened. We enjoyed it.
It just happens. This is a very honest reflection of how things happen in my brain, by the way.
Just very, very scattered-minded. I don't know how I do research.
Anywho, reading.
So I picked up a pretty interesting book. It's Babel by R. F. Kwon.
I have found out that it's not been translated in Japanese yet, but I'm sure it's in the making
because the book itself came out about a couple years ago, and it's a very popular book by,
I think, a pretty popular author also.
So hopefully it's in the making. I think it's really interesting.
You are going to pick it up soon, now that I have pestered you about it.
That's a harsh way to...
No, you're not the first one to do that, but also you didn't pester me.
You were like, look at this cool thing.
And I was like, you know what?
I've had enough people tell me this is a cool thing.
I myself have picked it up before, but just been like, I don't have the time for this.
And so yes, I will be going out of my way to procure that.
And well, this might be an interesting segue into what we initially wanted to talk about.
So I picked this up, again, like you have known about this book for some time.
Multiple people have recommended it to me, maybe since the book came out.
But I have not picked it up because when I found it on a bookstore,
it was this giant, thick-ass book that was like, yep.
One, I don't want to buy this because I knew that I'm leaving this country.
I don't want to have more things to bring home.
And two, it's just like a big-ass book that I knew that I should not start
when I'm writing my thesis, for instance.
And generally speaking, the length of the book is never the factor that deters me, usually.
I know that it is for some people.
03:01
Some people don't want to start a multi-volume series knowing that there are eight other books
that they need to read if they were to get the whole story kind of thing.
My sister is definitely that.
I don't think she even read Harry Potter because she knew that the book doesn't finish in one book.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
So the length of the book never bothered me.
But that time when I was first recommended, it did because I was in the middle of grad school
writing thesis.
And also, I don't know if you felt this way, but during grad school, I always felt this slight
guilt for reading for fun.
I don't know if you did.
I mean, I read for fun anyways, but I used to read a lot more than during grad school
because I felt like I should be reading papers or textbooks, something that's useful to my research.
When reading is a big part of your research activity,
suddenly reading for fun feels like a guilty pleasure.
Yeah, or exhausting.
Oh, that too.
Yeah.
It depends on what stage I think you're at.
But I hear what you're saying.
It's a guilty pleasure in the sense that you can be experiencing guilt even if you might
actually be enjoying it, or the guilt can sort of grow, right?
So yeah.
Yeah.
Ever since I left grad school, though, now, I mean, I'm still doing research, but I suddenly
feel like I'm free to just read for fun.
And I also acquired Kobo, just like a Kindle, the electronic readers, which I think has
definitely made me a more impulsive book buyer because it is so easy to just click,
click, click, and get the new book, and you can start reading immediately, which is a
very dangerous tool for me.
So Babel, I also started kind of impulsively.
Somebody else brought it up again.
I was like, I really got to read that stuff.
Yeah.
And I just looked up, bought it right away, and then started reading it.
And I was like, shit, now I can't stop.
06:00
Oh, no, my time.
Well, the thing is, yes, oh, no, my time.
But I also waste my time doing some other random shit than reading a book.
Like, I mindlessly scroll on internet.
I, like, nap, you know?
Yeah, can we, yeah.
Do you mind if I add on to some of that a little bit?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, I didn't expect you to say nap.
I think nap is probably an effective use of your time, depending on why the nap is coming
on, but yeah, let's, fine.
There's also, there's reasons you might not want the nap versus something else.
But yeah, so this perhaps default of even what I did, right?
Where I was like, well, there's time, right?
And everybody's always focused on the time that it takes.
There's a lot of time that we spend being semi-distracted by other things or distracting
ourselves or, you know, social media is a good example of this, but it doesn't just
have to be social media.
It could also be the fact that you just sort of turn to the side and started, you know,
roaming through the interwebs because something caught your attention.
And you don't actually...
Right, it could be doom scrolling.
Yeah, it could be doom scrolling.
It could be wiki hunting, which is, there's probably other terms for this now.
Yeah, it could also be like a rabbit hunt.
It could just be, yeah, it could be a rabbit hunt.
You'd be going down those rabbit holes and just looking for something because you've
been, which is also fine, right?
I don't, I don't inherently judge any of those things.
Yeah, I should also, yeah, correct myself saying like, I don't, I don't think these
activities are inherently good or bad.
It just...
We could spend a whole time talking about the use of these and how they act as soothing
mechanisms or how they are simply a tool to, you know, kind of get ourselves distracted
for a little bit, right?
From things that are difficult and challenging.
But what it is, is that it doesn't have to be that, right?
It could be something else that you fill that time with.
And a book is an option for that, right?
So if you're going to pick something up, make it easier for you to pick up the book
using a Kobo, right?
Using some sort of e-reader, having it next to you.
It's the same idea as like putting a piece of scrap paper or a notebook nearby so that
you start writing things down more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
And that's another thing, like I bought e-readers solely on the basis that I tend to not stay
09:00
in one city for too long and...
Yeah, sure, right, right, right.
I do have a hard time dealing with the books that I accumulate eventually.
What I did for my grad school chunk of books that I collected, I basically just donated
them all to my friends.
Like I just like spread them across my friend group and told them like, yeah, if you don't
want to read it, you can pass it around or, you know, donate to the local library if
you want.
Sure, yeah.
I think you'll like these books.
And then if I had a set of books that like no one would probably enjoy it, like at least
no one that I know, I left it with the local library.
Nice.
But like even in the like, what, five years that I was there for grad school, I did accumulate
it a sizable amount.
And because a lot of them are Japanese books that are not available in a local library,
I ended up giving most of it to my Japanese friends.
Yeah, fair enough.
So then that's when I realized like I need a way to kind of like have easier access to
Japanese books wherever I am.
And that's why I bought the e-reader.
But then and so that I do read manga a lot more kind of carelessly because manga is another
thing where it's like it tends to be multi-volume, like, you know, five to ten volumes at least.
And it takes up a space.
So it's kind of like what I usually, I would need to like really think about what I want
to acquire if it's a physical manga books.
But like with e-readers, I just like go click, click, click, click, click, and then buy
them all in one sitting.
Like, you know what?
This is what I can get with my paycheck.
You know, I have a real paycheck now so I can do it.
And then I just do it, right?
And then it doesn't take a minute.
Like, it's just like I can read the whole thing in one sitting.
And like in terms of like money per minute spent on reading the manga, it's like a very
bad cost performance, but it's still enjoyable.
So I do it.
And but like books kind of works the same way.
And I realized that I do like pick up both Japanese and English books more easily.
And I do want to support local vendors whenever possible.
If I am buying books, but well, there is no local vendors where I am for Japanese books.
And it's also just like easier.
You know, I can just like get the book as soon as I decided who I'm interested.
12:05
So I think eReader really did change like my reading habit because of how easy it is.
Like you said, like how how easily accessible new books are now that it's just like a few
clicks away.
And yeah.
Yeah, the there's something in there to talk about in terms of, you know, supporting local
bookstores or local buying options.
And, you know, one one option is to write get different types of eReaders, but really
the two on the market are Kindle with Amazon and Kobo with Rakuten.
Yeah.
However, I think still at the moment with Rakuten's Kobo, you can do a lot more of like
buying eBooks from elsewhere or like getting them in another way and then uploading them.
It's still pretty tricky.
It's pretty complicated.
I can't share any of that here because some of it's also a gray area, I think, which is
stupid.
But anyway, the point being, yeah, you now have this access, right?
It's easy to pick up.
You can read it.
You can be part of it.
It's, you know, perhaps a notable impact on the adult money that one now has, but it's
also perhaps a worthwhile one, right, because it's something that you can just enjoy and
appreciate.
It's also something more conscientious that you can step into and be like, I want this
thing to be what I'm engaging with right now.
And yeah, I think it's I think it's a great way to approach it.
It definitely helps me to have one.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And I like I like the highlighting function that eReader gives you.
Yeah, because I don't like highlighting physical books.
I don't like even penciling anything in the real book.
Partly because because I reread a lot.
If I like the book, I tend to reread and I don't like being distracted about like, you
know, me previously have thought or like thought was interesting when I'm reading it.
So I don't like seeing my own annotations.
So unless I'm reading textbooks, which is not for fun, never.
So I don't like annotating my books.
Whereas highlights on eBooks is lesser barrier because it doesn't actually damage the book.
And it's actually kind of fun to kind of like go over what I've read once in a while,
like what I've highlighted and like, oh, yeah, these are like very good quotes or like, oh,
15:01
that's what I thought was interesting.
Like, that's kind of fun to look at.
And I realize now that I like highlight more freely in eBooks.
I think it's interesting.
I guess I didn't expect you to mention that the reason you don't mark up hardcover, not
not hardcover, hard copy books, physical copy books, is because you don't want to see your
own annotations, which is not the reason that I anticipated.
And we'll get to that in a second.
I want to just sort of also second the idea of highlighting in the eBook space, though,
because you can sort of just you don't make, say, an annotation.
So you don't see those.
That makes sense to me.
Okay.
And on top of it, I forget how maybe Rakuten's Kobo does this, but usually there's a way to
like scan through your highlights or something.
Exactly.
They list up all of the parts that you highlighted within a book.
Right, right.
So when you're like maybe recommending it to someone and you want to remember what about
it that was interesting, you can quickly look that list up and like remind yourself
what the book was about.
Yep.
So that makes a lot of sense.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time!
