Dear Lady on the Coast Starlight, It’s February 27, 2020, and you’re on your way home to Sacramento after three days in L.A. Your sister had flown out to California for business, and you joined her, sharing a room at the hip-ish Standard Hotel in We ...
Naomi (with long pandemic hair!) smiling with copies of Kati Standefer's Lightning Flowers The book lists are abbreviated this year, by which I mean they're not annotated. I sprained my left thumb a week ago and was going to forego this annual ritu ...
The astonishing translation by Emily Wilson Last month I posted about my Ursula LeGuin reading project for 2019; here’s the complete list of everything my husband Dan and I read over the past year. We read just two books in common this year: Lauren ...
Some good reading This year, for the first time ever, I read a lot of books by a single author. I decided to try this at the end of 2018, inspired in part by my husband Dan, who often reads multiple books by one person, and also by my friend Christian ...
All I need: green tea, GF donut, riveting book. What a lame blogger I’ve become! This is literally my only post for the year. But I had my reasons, chief of which was a breast cancer diagnosis this spring that proceeded to derail the entire year. I hope ...
Can't lie: I love my Kindle For the eighth consecutive December 31, I’m seeing out the old year by reporting what my husband Dan and I read over the past year. A few comments about this year’s lists: One big change to my reading habits: I started read ...
Chateau de Fontainebleau On the morning of Friday, July 7, the Moscow-Paris Express pulled into Gare de l’Est, and the long train journey that had begun in Vladivostok eleven days before was over. Pretty Parisian courtyard. We were on the 6th floo ...
Yaroslavsky Station, Moscow[/caption]
Tomorrow morning, if all goes well, my friend Chris and I arrive in Paris, and our long train journey from Vladivostok will be over.
We’ve been pretty fortunate on this trip: almost everything has gone well. We’ve stayed healthy; Chris and I are still fast friends after being together night and day for 11 days and over 8300 miles; and even the weather has cooperated, gifting us with mild temperatures and pretty skies whenever we actually had to be outdoors.
But yesterday we were in Moscow, and it was without a doubt the low point of our trip. ... 
Writing on train. (Photo by Chris)[/caption]
It’s Sunday, July 2, as I begin this new entry, and my friend Chris and I are back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, having traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk and spent a day and a half in the town of Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal.
It seems like we’ve been traveling for days, yet we’re not even halfway between Vladivostok and Moscow. We’ll pass that milestone sometime this afternoon.
Akiko didn’t write that many poems about her train trip from Vladivostok to Moscow. But we do know about her Trans-Siberian journey from her account Pari made [パリまで、To Paris], which was published in four installments in the Asahi shimbun newspaper.*
And I’m really struck by the differences between our two journeys. ... 
Sea of Japan at dawn, seen from ferry window[/caption]
I’ve started composing this installment of my travel report aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, late at night, someplace between Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.
I hope in a few days to be able to post something entertaining about this train trip, but tonight I’m going to tell you about the two-day/two-night ferry trip between Japan and Russia. This was the segment that occasioned the most anxiety for me before I set off from landlocked Davis, California. ...