10:12 BS 8.0 Ok, I suppose after a near hypo crept up on just as I was doing a last scan before bed & after dinner hours ago 23:18 BS 4.4 & had salted caramel fudge.
A Very Good Morning to you all & have a Wonderful Day!
🙂
Finished off Shogun yesterday & I’m a bit disappointed by the anticlimactic, quiet ending episode 10 compared to the WOW! of a penultimate episode 9! I found it slow going as, for authenticity, most of it is in Japanese which meant a LOT of ver fast reading subtitles: Japanese is very compact; English is very “wordy”, if that is a word! I had to get back into the swing of hearing Japanese again & needed to rewind a LOT just so I could finish reading the subtitles! Got faster at it yesterday! Thankfully the podcast accompanying each episode is in English.
I first came across James Clavell’s series of books about The Far East in the 80’s when the books about Hong Kong “Tai Pan” & “Noble House” were shown on the BBC of American productions with an early role for former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan in “Noble House”. Which lead me to the books.

And the books set in Japan “Shogun” & “Gai Jin”.
I remember watching the BBC’s own production of Shogun in 1980 starring Richard Chamberlain &, of course, read the book too but, in a odd case of only remembering I read & watched it & how brilliant they both were, I couldn’t remember anything else: it was like that for me when I read “Far From The Madding Crowd” also, in the 80’s; it took watching it again 30/40 years later, the Carey Mulligan film, to remind me of the plot! ONCE I started re reading the book, not everything was in the film, the memories came back of how funny it was & things slotted into place of “Ah! So that’s were I remembered that from!”
I suppose my teens in the 80’s was my formative reading years & I read an AWFUL LOT REALLY FAST: learnt a LOT of vocabulary too that ACTUALLY physically looking up words in the dictionary makes the definitions stick in my head; always read books back then with a dictionary to hand! Kindle has really changed that & you just have to keep pressing a word to look it up instantly in the dictionary!
🙄
There are quite a few, when I think about it, books that I know I read in the 80’s but, other than remembering they’re great books, I don’t remember the plots! Maybe Sherlock Holmes is right & you only have so many memory files & unimportant or unused memories get overwritten!

The BBC production of the bang up to date 21st century “Sherlock” where Dr. Watson is shocked that Sherlock doesn’t know that The Earth goes around The Sun: unimportant info to Sherlock that he overwrote; according to Watson with the many types of cigar and cigarette ash!
I have the James Clavell books on kindle for quite some time now & did re read the HK books a few years ago. I may go back & re read Shogun at some point later this year: the memories are there; it’s just hasn’t been used in YEARS!
