Strange Pictures by Uketsu

It’s been a while since reading a book that’s so good that despite your heavy-set eyes trying to close shop for the night, you keep on reading.

About a month and a half ago before writing this, I took a break from my street photography and stopped into the bookstore mostly to cool myself down.

I’m usually browsing in the fiction / classical literature section but this time I felt like browsing through the Mystery Section to maybe find a book that'll help switch up on my bias towards what I usually read.

Mystery novels read so smoothly. The books start with a problem (murder, kidnapping, spying etc.) and through this curiosity gap you can’t help but keep on reading until all issues have been resolved. Mystery writers are great at keeping your attention for 2-300 pages that you would rather spend time with their book than check what’s on TV or check what’s the notification on your phone.

I have read very little mystery / thrillers. Most of my books on my shelf are filled mostly with the classics. Reading takes more time than the other forms of entertainment that you could do in your free time. So if I’m going to read anything, I want to make sure it’s the best of the best that’s ever written. But because those kinds of books require a lot of thinking and deeper themes, the reward you get from it feels so slow, if any at all. That’s kind of why I start a book but never end up finishing it.

So as I’m moving my eyes up and down the mystery section, taking a book off the shelf and reading the back cover, these seem much more fun than what I’m reading.

That’s when I come upon a book spine that’s a bright apple green color titled Strange Pictures by Uketsu. The book cover had a minimalist design with four drawings on the cover. The inner flap explained that this is a unique novel using these drawings by the victims to reveal answers to the mystery.

The book starts with a four-page prologue of a professor analyzing a young girl’s innocent-looking drawing with her students. The professor then reveals that this young girl murdered her mother and with this drawing they analyze through the smudges and shapes of certain objects in the drawing might help reveal the psyche of the girl maybe giving some clues why she murdered her mother.

I had an afternoon nap last night, went to the movies and wasn’t sleepy enough to turn off the lights just yet, I picture up Strange Pictures and what started out as reading a couple of pages ended up seeing that I was on page 52. I could’ve sworn that I was only reading for 15 minutes and when I looked at my alarm clock it was already 3am.

The book is divided into four chapters all separate incidences. The first chapter that I completed late last night revolved around two college friends who come upon a mysterious blog post with illustrations by his wife who is now deceased.

The start of the chapter begins when the university classmate shows him the blog and he reads it later that night he thinks about how early 2000’s everyone was blogging and used it in different ways (journal entries, essays, DIY instructions etc.) and now with social media, blogging is very few now as everyone is posting on social media.

Blogging on personal websites have now been migrated over to blogging on public spaces such Tumblr (in the early days), Medium, Substack, X.

It makes more sense to write on social media platforms because since they are in a public space, people can easily find you, it’s easier to subscribe and with the metrics it’s easier to find trending posts and popular writers based on the numbers. It’s like living in the city where it’s easier to network with other people and cross-pollinate ideas because you’re living on the shared digital space.

Whereas writing a blog on a website now is an outdated practice. People have to make the effort to go to your website like taking a plane to get to an island.

But I do enjoy this slower process of blogging directly on my own site than posting anywhere else. There’s no numbers involved and I feel that I’m writing more purely (even if the writing is bad) and that’s probably the best way to start writing before you get numbers and metrics involved. Cause I think people that write on social media sites are so driven by the metrics that they’ll write stuff that’s currently trending rather than write about niche topics.

Writing on a quiet island that is my website helps prevent me from writing clickbaity content.