Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

“Manga fans drawn to Japanese comics”

This just in… SF fans gravitate to science fiction.

I did watch all of Saturday Night Live, with variable attention. I left the room during the monologue. I never pay attention to the music. Most of the sketches were boring or painful to watch. They had a Suze Orman sketch. The best one was about Adam Samberg’s father. I think I spelled his name right.

I watched Honey and Clover Live Action episode 8 after that and finished watching it when I woke up. With non-serial shows, I feel compelled to discuss how good the episode was, but, at least with anime and other Japanese shows I’ve watched, there’s few particularly good or bad episodes. They’re part of a whole. Or something. Anyway, the show itself is based on a manga and it’s about some kids at an art school. It’s held my interest.

My last month total was awesome. Yea, there’s a lot of manga there and some children’s books and YA, but even so, I read a massive amount of books! As I was counting up my year’s total, I was thinking “Man, it’s a shame I probably passed 100 and didn’t mark the occasion.” But then when my math gave me 114, I was like.. wow. So now I need a new goal. I’ll try for 150 by the end of the year.

In other related news, I broke down and bought a book. Even though I completely forgot about the library booksale, I went and bought a book at Borders Express, for full price and everything. Naomi Novik’s 4th in the Temeraire series. And yay for it being in paperback! Though I think the cover is different from the previous three.

Got more books from the library. Picked up ‘The World of Narue’ because it was volume 1 and it said it was “A Sci-Fi hit”. It was a little confusing and disjointed, it seemed to me. Which instantly made me suspicious that there were pages missing. I don’t think that was why it seemed disjointed though. I think it just was. Though, later on, there was a page missing. And, surprise surprise, the guy is nosebleeding on the next page that’s actually there. But I will never get to know exactly why!

And then I get to the end and there’s a bunch of pages missing. Some of them would have been adverts, but I can’t tell how many pages I actually didn’t get to read. :P

Seriously, guys, is a manga-naked chick so exciting that you have to ruin it for everyone borrowing the manga after you? Borrow your parents’ credit card and buy some actual hentai manga if you’re so desperate.

I’m not going to bother reading the rest of this manga anyway. CPM Manga (Central Park Media) apparently doesn’t know how to proofread. There’s an “it’s” that should be “its”, a “loose” that should be “lose”, a Japanese word broken up in the middle of a syllable to run to the next line, and a few other typos and misspellings. I might have lived with one or two, but there were too many and that ‘loose’ was just taking it too far. I HATE ‘loose’ and ‘congradulations’ more than anything!!!!

There’s a library booksale at the end of the month. That’s a lot of reading to do to be able to stick to my plan and buy stuff at the booksale. Not helped by the fact that I started getting books out of the library again.

Books to read before buying new ones: 48
Books to read to reach 100 by 2008: 19

Added a book today without remembering it was a new month. Didn’t do too bad for August, and now I have a good start on September. Gotta love the manga.

Someone had ripped pages out of the manga though. Grrr. (Pervy fanboy top of my list.)

Peeps was good, as was Bloody Jack. I’ll be reading the sequels eventually.

So the other day, I realized I’d bought some Card Captor Sakura manga in English. Why did I do that? I had the bilingual versions of those volumes!!

Then I was digging around, looking for something to read, and found the hardcover version of a book I’d bought about 2 months ago in paperback. Still haven’t read either of those. Why did I do that?!

I also pulled out a Diana Wynne Jones book with the intention of reading it. I opened it up and started and lo and behold, it was the SAME Diana Wynne Jones book I had started to read like 1-2 weeks ago at my parents’. This one was paperback and THAT one was hardcover. Why did I get two copies?!

Since I CLEARLY need to keep better track of the books I’ve acquired and stop buying books I already have, I made myself a new rule.

I must read 50 of my own books before I can buy any more. If they’re gifts, or free, that’s okay. But I can’t buy any more. And reading library books doesn’t count in the 50.

So, I finished one yesterday. That leaves 49 more to go.

In other news, 27 more books to read by the end of the year if I’m to reach 100.

Because some of you (one of you) asked for it. Here’s a followup to the Earthsea/SciFi essay by the same author. And Then Ghibli Screwed Earthsea.

I don’t think Ghibli whitewashed Earthsea. Though they might have made most of them Japanese. It looked to me like all the characters who should’ve been brown had brown hair and brown eyes. Not that I’ve seen the movie or read the books, so my opinion admittedly doesn’t count for as much as it could if I had.

Tried reading Earthsea at one point. Didn’t get into it.

Boo, Tokyopop! The first two volumes of Legal Drug were pretty cool. They have these translucent pages at the front and back of the book that had art on them. Also, the first page or so was in color. As I’m sure it probably was in the original. And, well, I could actually go look, but I don’t feel like it.

But volume 3 has no translucent pages and no color at all. Even though the first page was clearly originally a color page. So, boooo. Same price, but not nearly the same production value going into it.

Volume 3 also seems sort of a divergence from the plots of the earlier volumes. It’s a lot more like a couple of school shows I’ve watched lately — Princess Princess in particular. But that’s not Tokyopop’s doing.

Manglish doesn’t sound like something very cool. But it is pretty cool. And it’s on an MSN site. Weird.

It’s online manga in Japanese, but when you mouse over it, it gives you the English. I’m not very interested in the manga they have up now, but maybe they’ll have something more interesting in the future.

I’ve been watching Gokusen. It’s a live action drama. The first season/series is 12 approximately 1 hour eps. There’s a second series/season I’m just starting to watch.

It takes place at a school. There’s a class of delinquents, some eccentric faculty, and a teacher who lives a double life as the granddaughter of a yakuza head dude.

I don’t know if I can describe it very well or explain how cool it is. But it’s interesting and it’s funny. If you like the type of movies where a teacher turns a bunch of students around, you’ll like it. If you like school shows in general, you’ll like it. If you like live action Japanese stuff, you’ll like it. If you like watching a chick kick some butt, it’s good for that too.