Reading record 24.5(ish)?

 Okay, so this one didn't quite feel like it had enough meat on its bones to deserve a full number, which means who knows when/how I'll get back up to whole numbers again.  😅

Uh.  Anyway.  The book I just finished was Barbie:  The World Tour by Margot Robbie and Andrew Mukamal.  Which was much less an artbook about the movie Barbie than it was a photo journal of the tour for the premieres of the film, along with information and behind the scenes images about the outfits that Margot Robbie wore for the various public appearances as part of the tour.

Which is probably why whoever had bought it originally sold it to that used store, as they had most likely paid as little attention as I did in buying it.  😅  (But since I got it used, I paid a small enough amount for it that it felt like an appropriate price.)

But it was still an interesting read and had lots of pictures of vintage Barbie outfits and photos of Margot Robbie wearing outfits either recreating those vintage outfits or at least heavily inspired by them.  So it was still interesting, even if it wasn't quite what I thought it was.

In any case, like the movie, it was definitely something that a doll collector like myself got more out of than someone with no history with the dolls would.  (Though the movie stands better on its own than this book would, I think.  Although someone more interested in fashion than I am might like the book without needing an interest in dolls.  Probably?)

Um.

Anyhow.

It is late.  I need to start relaxing my brain or I won't be able to sleep.

Original language:  English

Reading record 23.7(ish)

 Just finished reading the next artbook in the stack, Strange & Eerie Cryptid Creatures by Jessica Feinberg and Daniel Faccio.

I've been supporting Jessica Feinberg's Kickstarters for I don't know how many years now--I have so many oracle decks with her art on them at this point!  Anyway, this was her most recent oracle deck/artbook combo.

The format of the book is pretty standard:  each painting gets an entry with various information about the depicted creature.  Which in this case was cryptids, though in some cases I felt like the chosen being was definitely on the other side of the fuzzy line between cryptid and folklore.  (Things like the barghest, cu-sith, and kappa, for example.)  Despite obvious effort to make it as worldwide as possible, certain regions were under-represented (Asia) and others over-represented (the US, especially West Virginia for some reason), but I think that's because that's just how it is:  there's no way for an artist to change what people all over the world are seeing and thinking they've seen, ya know?

Anyway, significantly more text (and more pages, for that matter!) than the previous artbook, but less than the next one. (I chose this particular decimal point number for it because in a few weeks the next volume of a printed web comic is being released, so that will round it back up to even numbers. 😅)

Original language:  English

IWSG - ack, I forgot!

 

    Argh, I forgot about today's post entirely!

😭😭😭😭😭

That sorta sums up my writing lately.

I've been distracted, forgetful, and unable to focus.

I think it's the heat.

The past three or four days, I've just opened my current project, read over bits of it to remind myself where I am...and then...nothing... 😭

I hope it's just the heat.

Reading record 23.2(ish)

 Maybe only 23.1?  There was almost no text whatsoever. 😭

Anyway, the book I finished reading (looking at?) just now was Legend of Mana - Art of Mana - 30th Anniversary SPECIAL ISSUE.  And yes, that whole thing is apparently the title.  What little text the book had was just image caption by Masaru Oyamada, the producer of the Seiken Densetsu series.

As an art book, it was actually more focused on the remaster/reissue of the game in 2021 than it was on the original release from 1999.  (The 30th Anniversary part must be for the series as a whole...which means at least three different major game series started in 1996, in addition to the two biggest JRPG series starting in...wait, really?  1986?  Dang, that's...I hadn't thought about just how early that really was.  (Though it took three years for the first Final Fantasy to be translated into English and released in the US.)  Back in 1986, I was still playing text-parser-driven adventure games like The Black Cauldron and the early King's Quest and Space Quest games...)  Wait, maybe the earlier book from 2018 was the thirtieth anniversary and that's why this was a "special issue"...?  'Cause there's no way both 2 and 3 would have been on the Super Famicom if the first one came out in 1996--the Playstation had already been out for at least year by 1996!

I really loved Legend of Mana back on the PS1, but I've never had the nerve to pick up the new version; I know it got a mew translation, and I'm afraid they wimped out and changed all the elemental's names back to the mistranslations and shortened versions they had on the SNES version of Secret of Mana.  Which may sound like a dumb reason to avoid the remaster, but...it was really frustrating playing Trials of Mana and hearing the Japanese voice work saying the proper names and then seeing the butchered SNES versions written on the screen.  Especially since I know the real names better, having played Legend of Mana so many times!

Anyway, this art book was a little disappointing because it was mostly filling in gaps that had been left out of an earlier whole-series art book (of which I was unaware at the time and thus do not have) and focusing on the remastered art that hadn't been made yet during that earlier book.  Also, it has the dippy-looking male player character on the front instead of the awesome-looking female player character.  😭

Oh well.

An expensive chunk of brief nostalgia, I guess.

Original language:  Japanese

Reading Record 23

 So, today I finished reading Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, the first of the City Watch sub-series of Discworld novels.

I read the novel for this month's book club meeting, which is on Saturday, so I'm left wondering if I should maybe not start the next book in the series until after the meeting to keep from accidentally confusing myself.  (I borrowed my brother's copy, ya see, which was a hardback of the "City Watch trilogy" which is pretty dating, since I believe there ended up being somewhere in the region of 6-8 City Watch books altogether.  But anyway it seems silly to return it after only reading one out of the three books within, yeah?)  Anyway, hilariously, this was a book I selected myself for the club to read, but I did so without so much as looking at a summary of what it was about, because I just knew I wanted to have us all read a Discworld novel, I thought the first in a sub-series made for a good jumping-on point, and I wanted it to be one I hadn't read before.  (Which left off the Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax and Death sub-serieses, so...books that actually fit those qualifications were a bit more thin on the ground.)  In any case, my total lack of research into the actual subject matter of this particular novel meant that I was quickly stunned to discover that it was the book that the first point and click adventure game had been (rather loosely) based on!

Obviously, since the game put Rincewind in the lead instead of a whole team of guards, most of it went quite differently, but the novel's final twist was still there, so...yeah, made for an odd experience.  (Though it has been so long since I played that game that I no longer recall if it went into any great detail regarding why that cult wanted to summon a dragon or what happened to the hooded brethren in the end.)  That game was my first exposure to the Discworld universe, so there's something weirdly appropriate, almost poetic even, about me having used this particular book to introduce it to however many others actually read it for the book club.  (Meetings have had varied turnout, based mostly on how many people actually decide to read the book.  If it hadn't turned out to be 800+ pages and I'd selected The Pickwick Papers, it would likely have been an empty house:  most people would have seen the name "Charles Dickens" and scurried away to hide.)

So.

Not really much I feel the need to say about it, ultimately.  It's a work of comedy-fantasy from the late 1980s, so some of it hasn't aged too gracefully, but most of it remains a solidly entertaining read.

I think to fill the time between now and the book club meeting, I'll read the three art-books I've gotten lately.  (One for a video game, one for a movie, and one just a general collection of folklore-adjacent art by an artist whose work I've been following for years.)

Original language:  English, and very British English at that

Reading record 22

 So, last night I finished reading After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz.

This book was a lot.

It's not terribly long, just very intense.

There were actually two things about this book that if I'd noticed them beforehand, I probably wouldn't have bought it. The first, which is more excusable for me to have missed it, is that it's basically in internet formatting:  unindented paragraphs separated by blank lines, a format that I absolutely detest on the printed page, where it sometimes actually gives me a headache.  The second, for which I have no excuse, is that in the list of prizes and awards the book won, the back of the book mentions that it was a "Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction."  Given my stress-related heart palpitations, I would have avoided anything labeled "political fiction" like the plague, but somehow I didn't notice that.

As usual, I feel that the back of the book still somehow managed to misrepresent the contents.  One of the central sentences of the blurb on the back says "Through a series of cascading vignettes, the intertwined lives of real feminists at the turn of the twentieth century are mesmerizingly reimagined" followed by a list of a few of the most notable of them.  (Which honestly probably shouldn't have listed Josephine Baker, since she basically just passes through the narrative in a single chapter.  But she's one of the only non-white people in the book, which is presumably why the back of the book was so eager to mention her.)  What it didn't mention--despite that the title of the book made it blatantly obvious--was that the vast majority of the real women depicted were not merely "feminists" but also lesbians/sapphics/whatever-other-name-you-can-come-up-with-for-women-who-love-women.  That reluctance on the part of the novel's own marketing is appalling.

Anyway.  As I said, this book was a lot.  It covers from about the 1880s or so (early chapters jump around in time a bit, and/or give dates that are more symbolic than anything else) to 1928, ending with the publication of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.  (Which is one of those novels where I loved the film adaptation, and so I am left wondering if reading the book would ruin the film for me, or if the deeper understanding would make it even better.)  That was not a pleasant time to live in, especially for women, and even more so for women who loved women, so a lot of what happens in the novel is distressing.

I don't usually read literary fiction, being someone who mostly prefers to read for escapism, so it's hard for me to know how to react to this book.  It was amazing, a real experience, and I'm not sorry I read it, but I didn't actually enjoy reading it.  But enjoyment was definitely never the point.

Original language:  English (but it contains a lot of quotes that the author translated out of French and Italian)

Reading Record 21

 So, this morning I finished reading How To Fake It In Society by KJ Charles.  Which part of me feels I ought to look at as a "guilty pleasure" and part of me is like "no, why should I feel guilty?"

Anyway.  Funny(ish) story about the impulse buy for this one.  There was a table that was half covered in Bridgerton novels, and half covered in similar period romances.  Spotting this one out of the corner of my eye, I was immediately struck by the question "wait, is that two men?"  And then I noticed the name of the author and knew that yes, it most emphatically was two men.  And of course I ended up buying both of the KJ Charles novels that were on that table.  🤣  Because I've read an earlier series of her novels that were sort of Victorian urban fantasy, I suppose is the way to describe them.  Absolutely adored them at the time, though I feel somewhat senile (despite only being 51) as I admit that I no longer quite recall the titles, except that they had to do with magpies.

In any case, this one had no fantasy elements, which makes it less like my "usual thing," but it was still delightful.  Heavily researched, and with a firm eye on being period-appropriate (to the extent that the author's note at the end included a strong defense of the use of the period-accurate spelling of "kanguroo" instead of the modern "kangaroo") but without making the characters stiff or too alien to modern sensibilities.  And I'm tempted to pick up a copy of the research book with all the info about the history of paints and colors, because just what was incorporated into this novel (the lead had earned his living making paints before suddenly becoming rich) was already fascinating, and it was necessarily just a fragment!

One thing I should say is that the title doesn't really fit the novel.  While it's hard to classify truly which of the deuteragonists is the actual "lead," the narrative does slightly lean more on the side of Titus, who is thrust into Society against his will when he suddenly becomes wealthy, but he isn't "faking" it as just trying to "survive" it.  If the narrative had leaned more on Nico's side, then the title would be more apt.  I mean, it's a great title, it's just a little off for the actual contents of the book.

A minor quibble, to be sure.  Because there really isn't any other kind to be had.  Maybe it's not "deep" or "meaningful," but I am not someone who demands that of her reading.  I wanted a pleasant story where the romantic leads are of the same sex, and that is what I got.  I even got a mini-lesson in some of the crazy things pigments used to be made of, in the bargain.  (Though I did already know about orpiment, because that featured at one point in The Apothecary Diaries.)

Original language:  English