12 posts tagged “books”
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is a superb book; I have found it indispensable to my work and my personal pursuits. But I avoided reading it for years, because of its title.
After five weeks and five days, my order finally came in at Kinokuniya. The reviewers on Amazon were right: this book is thick. It's almost approaching a Xenogears Perfect Works amount of information. It even includes an I.P.D. Reyvateil card game, which makes me wish I could buy another copy for popping the cards out and playing.
The cover art (in the embarrassingly cheap gradient style) is up at Tower of the Hand, and the supposed but probably conjectural release date is September 30, my birthday!
When I was in the hospital in 2003 to have surgery on my lung, I asked Piroko and her friend to go pick up a fantasy book I'd seen mentioned in a Slashdot comment a while back: George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Four books later, I find it hard to even give any other fantasy series a chance. In fact, when I was in the mood to read fantasy again, I spent some time checking out potentially enjoyable series, got frustrated, and just ended up starting Martin's series over again. I just started the third book, A Storm of Swords, last night.
I just about finished entering page counts for my outline of finished books. There are a couple of missing numbers, actually, and I'm sure there are some books I've read about and forgotten, but this pretty-complete list puts my total number of read book pages at 46,807.
Next I'll calculate how many pages of comics, hours of games, and hours of TV shows I've enjoyed.
It was a great Christmas-time in Chicago. I saw my whole family, ate tons of delicious foods, and gave and received a bunch of presents. I feel loved; check out this haul:
- Five clammbon-related ceedees, from myself.
- Pick Me Up, a kind of kids' encyclopedia. Katy got me this because I was staring at its hep graphic design (including 3D cover by eBoy) for so long at the store.
- Katy had my name for the gift exchange, and she went all-out:
- $65 in iTunes gift cards, combining the card from Katy and the one in my stocking.
- Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage.
- Ostrich slippers. I asked for ridiculous animal slippers; Katy really came through.
- From Mom & Dad:
- Eats, Shoots, and Leaves 2007 Calendar.
- The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geofferey K. Pullum.
- Word Origins And How We Know Them by Anatoly Liberman.
- The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
- A nice Pierre Cardin suitcase that Joe & Mindy were going to throw out because it was so beat up. It's still the nicest suitcase I've ever owned. Maybe I can get it cleaned up.
- The Seafarers of Catan from Ann. We're going to have some intense Settlers sessions when Jules and hachi are here.
- A big pack of choco-covered mocha beans from Kodos. People keep giving me stuff without warning! I'll have to counter with some New Year's zons or something.
So I've got a lot of products on my mind these days, and I just got my bonus today. What should I buy? Who deserves my attention when I'm in the mood to be entertained?
In the order I think of them:
Utawarerumono: A 4-year old Leaf PC game cleaned up, fitted with a new tactics system by Flight-Plan, and ported to PS2. It looks like it could be good, but how many tactical RPGs do I need? And how many medieval fantasy worlds do I want to task myself with keeping track of?
Summon Night: I bought Swordcraft Story, the first English-localized title in this venerable series from Flight-Plan, on a whim. I just thought it was dang cool to find such stuff on the shelf in my home country. I still haven't even put it in the DS yet. Again, how many tactical RPGs do I need?
Atelier Series: I'm looking forward to Atelier Lise on the DS, but I have pretty much stalled out on finishing Grand Fantasm. I still love GUST.
Ar tonelico: I think I'd rather just play this again than try most games on my to-play list. I'm quite ready for GUST to announce part 2.
Fire Emblem: Serious, high-grade tactical RPGs from Intelligent Systems, the guys who invented the genre. I found Path of Radiance this weekend for $20 brand new, and I couldn't resist. Should I even bother with the quirky, stylish ones from Nippon1 and Flight-Plan?
Yggdra Union: More quirky and stylish tactical RPGs, this time from Sting. Do I need them? Who knows?
Riviera: While I'm considering Yggdra Union, why not its predecessor, too.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: This visual novel is intriguing and it has become quite a phenomenon. I'd like to get through it, but it seems hard enough to decipher for native speakers of the language, let alone me.
12 Kingdoms: Not a game, but the novels. I'm reading them now, but do I need to? Should I get into another medieval fantasy world that's barely distinguishable from all the others?
Melty Blood: A PS2 port of a NAOMI arcade port of a tuned revision of a PC doujin fighting game based on a PC doujin visual novel. It looks fantastic, and I'm ready for a new 2D fighting game, but I'm afraid I'd be a bit late to the whole Tsukihime party after all this time, and I am not sure I could convince Jon B to play it seriously with me.
Okay, there's my psyche-dump for Japanese pop-culture products. I guess I'll just stick to my "buy them all, try them all, and stick with them as long as you are honestly interested" method. It's all just keeping me entertained between major milestone playing experiences like Sakura Taisen or Xenogears.
At some point in Chicago, though, I also picked up the first Twelve Kingdoms book (in two volumes), after having seen a few episodes of the anime with Hiroko. She went on to watch them all as quickly as she could, and I fell asleep, so I never saw the whole series. But there in the bookstore, I must have been feeling that awful overwhelming feeling I still get at Kinokuniya, that there is so much stuff out there that I could be getting into, but that I don't know where to begin. I felt cool for knowing about one of the novel series there and bought it.
I'm still trying to remind myself that it's not my job to find and buy all of the cool new stuff that comes out; it's the creators' job to find me, whether right away or much later. In this case, I had heard about the anime, checked it out, and liked it enough to pay money for the books. That's how it's supposed to work: for some external reason or another I hear about a work, then I may or may not end up getting into it. I need to quit stressing out thinking that I need to seek this stuff out.
Anyway, the books were quite above my reading level back then, but now I think I can tackle them. I think they'll be just the thing for me right now; I'm quite in the mood for something not quite pure pop and not quite pure snooty literature; I want to level up my Japanese skill some more, and, uh, this is the most disorganized post. I'm reading a book I bought a long time ago, and I think it's going to be pretty good.
I'm pretty glad I switched to Vox from Hatena Diary. It's quite a bit closer to what I want in a bloggy type of blog.
Apple's Genius Bar replaced my MacBook's discolored topcase today, and it seems that a new keyboard and trackpad came with it. The keys and mouse button feel just a bit different than they did before. I had to rearrange all of the keys from Qwerty to Dvorak again.
I finished Stumbling on Happiness and dove right into my next book.
Stumbling on Happiness was informative and nice to read, but it was too unnecessarily whimsical in a kind of random way I don't think I appreciated as much as I was supposed to.
Tomorrow I'm driving down to Portland to see Richard Dawkins! Woop!
