Tadoku One-Day One-Book Challenge

As I noted on Twitter earlier today, I am going to give myself a challenge for Tadoku: read one book in one day, starting from whenever I wake up to whenever I sleep.

For my purposes, I’ve chosen 「日治時期臺灣的社會領導階層」or (as my best translation) “Social Leader Hierarchy in Japanese Colonial Taiwan” by 吳文星。There’s a number of reasons for selecting this book, primarily it is a required reading for a class I have, but also of interest and I am also taking a class with the author as well (different class than the one that requires it as reading).

The author, I will note, is one of the generation in Taiwan that can speak fluent Japanese and Taiwanese, semi-fluent Mandarin, and bits of English. They were the ones who grew up under Japanese-occupied Taiwan, learned Taiwanese from their parents, received formal Japanese education from the colonial schools, and had to learn Mandarin when Chiang Kai-shek came over with other immigrants from mainland China, while experiencing English from that short period where the U.S. maintained military bases and a small hamlet of servicemen and their families in Taiwan.

To me, this time period is just insanely fascinating.

That said, my goal is to finish this book, all 315 pages of it (excluding footnotes, charts, tables, etc., which would otherwise put it at 351), in a single day. I have a new reading method I want to try out as well, so once it is over I will write up a post about the results, the method, and if I’d ever do something so insane again.