Arctangential

I finished the final volume of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes last night. It was a really good collection, and I’m glad I bought it, despite the price. It was really interesting to watch his ideas grow and mature, like seeing how the concept of Calvinball started as a joke on misunderstanding football and ended up as a central theme of many later strips and arcs. It was also really interesting to see him grow as an artist, to win battles with publishers to allow him to explore his art in more creative ways (particularly in the Sunday strips), and then ultimately to fall into repetition and cynicism before finally ending the strip. It was also a really well published and laid out collection. I’d recommend it to anyone with the means.

Here’s my stats (again, counting these pages as 1/2):

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342 pp)
5. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 2 – 1-20-08 (240 pp)
6. Hari Kunzru – Transmission – 1-27-08 (276 pp)
7. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 3 – 1-30-08 (240 pp)

Totals:

Books: 7
Pages: 1845

At this rate, it will be an 84 book year. Maybe I should aim for 100 instead. Maybe I should also try to buy fewer than 84 books this year. (Yeah, right!)

I finished Hari Kunzru’s Transmission Sunday night. I hadn’t originally planned to read this book, but I found myself out and about one day without my normal book, so I had to buy this in order that I would not find myself bookless for overlong. I didn’t have a lot of choice in what to buy; the only bookstore near my office is a Japanese bookseller, and while they have a lot of stock, it’s mostly not in English. I found one relatively small section of fiction written, in English, by Asian authors — it was mostly stuff like Amy Tan. This book looked kind of interesting though, and was about the right length, so I picked it up.

Did I make the right decision or what. This book is wonderful. It’s about alienation: specifically alienation in society, alienation from the Earth and alienation from oneself. It follows three main characters as they struggle with their own kinds of alienation, and how they all manage to reconnect with what they’d been missing through a single, nearly apocalyptic, act of transmission. I also really liked the structure of the book. The first 7/8 or so are labeled “signal” and tell a reasonably straightforward narrative ending in a more or less traditional climax. But then the last 1/8 of the book is called “noise” and documents the legends which have grown from the events we’ve just witnessed. The information we have form knowing the “truth” of those events also allows us to glean some interesting information from those legends, and to separate the fact from the fiction. It was a really fun book. I’m certainly going to pick up his other one.

So my stats now are:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342 pp)
5. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 2 – 1-20-08 (240 pp)
6. Hari Kunzru – Transmission – 1-27-08 (276 pp)

Totals:

Books: 5
Pages: 1605

Oh, and I almost forgot: the prose in this book is also great. Here’s a passage from near the beginning:

Anyone on foot in suburban California is on of four thing: poor, foreign, mentally ill or jogging. This person, whose thin frame was almost lost inside a grubby Oakland Raiders shirt, was moving too slowly to be a jogger. He appeared edgy, dispossessed. Defeat radiated from him like sweat. If the soccer moms zipping by in their SUVs registered him at all, it was as a blur of dark skin, a minor danger signal flashing past on their periphery. To the walking man the soccer moms were more cosmological than human, gleaming projectiles that dopplered past him in a rush of noise and dioxins, as alien and indifferent as stars.

It’s a double update today; I did some reading while I was away from the computer. On Saturday night, I finished World War Z by Max Brooks, a fictional story of a global zombie war told in the form of interviews with survivors. It’s a great book. It’s clear that the author has thought a lot about every possible aspect of this zombie war — how it’d get started, how it’d spread, how people would react to it initially, how they’d defend themselves, how they’d fight back and how they’d feel once it’s over. The book is basically brilliant on all bases. Big recommendation.

On Sunday night, I finished the second volume of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes. Very great stuff, but of course you already knew that. As before, since this is cartoons, I’m counting is as half pages.

Current stats:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)
4. Max Brooks – World War Z – 1-19-08 (342 pp)
5. Bill Watterson – The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Vol. 2 – 1-20-08 (240 pp)

Totals:

Books: 5
Pages: 1329

I finished W. Michael Gear’s The Warriors of Spider yesterday evening. This is the first book of a trilogy, so I’m not going to pass full judgment yet, but it’s not as compelling as some of his other work so far. Kind of space opera / noble savage kind of stuff. Enh.

Stats so far:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)
3. W. Michael Gear – The Warriors of Spider – 1-16-08 (367 pp)

Totals:

Books: 3
Pages: 747

I am 5 days ahead of the pace. Yipee.

I had two interesting subtitle experiences recently.

The first was while watching a making-of documentary about Wong Kar Wai’s movie, In the Mood for Love. (Which is, for the record, amazingly good.) (And also I got for only $15 at Half Price Books which is a great deal for a 2-disc Criterion edition movie.) (Anyhow.) On this documentary they’re interviewing on of the actors in the piece, who happened also to be the prop master. In an interview he says (or rather, he said some stuff in Chinese and the subtitles read):

“I was the prop master. That means that I am in charge of all the props.”

My second encounter was in Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. This movie was in Japanese and the following exchange occurred (paraphrased):

“You’ll want to see a gun dealer.”
“What’s that?”
“A person who sells guns.”

Both of these examples serve to illustrate the difficulty in translating idiom and slang. I’m sure in Chinese, the term for “prop manager” in no way inherently tells you that it’s a person who manages props, and similarly the Japanese term for a gun dealer gives no clues to its actual meaning. However, there’s no other option open to the translator when translating these terms, and then the next few lines are unavoidably confusing. For an example in English, the head electrician on a movie set is known as the “gaffer”; his head assistant is called the “best boy”. If someone were to translate that previous sentence into another language, you can surely see how a similar piece of confusion may arise.

I actually just remembered another example, that I noticed as a young child watching some black & white Japanese monster movie on Sunday afternoon TV one day. I forget the name of the movie (some internet searching leads to believe that it may have been Son of Godzilla, but I can’t be sure), but it was about a group of Japanese scientists on an island filled with giant insects. At one point, while observing some giant mantises, one scientist says to the other (again, paraphrased):

“Johnson’s been calling them ‘giant mantises’. He came up with that term by combining the words ‘giant’ and ‘mantis’.”
“That Johnson’s a whiz with language!”

The memory’s stuck with me because it seemed so strange to me at the time, but of course I understand now what was going on.

I was paying for something this morning, and I grabbed a $20 from my wallet. Scribbled one on end in ball point pen was: “Happy Birthday Mom”. I wish I’d kept the bill and taken a picture of it.

I finished my second book of 2008 yesterday morning (very early). It was quite good. It’s The Big Book of Bad by Jonathan Vankin, one in a series of “Big Books” published by Paradox Press in the late 90’s. I bought my first Big Book, if I recall correctly, at a small general store by the side of I-70 in Colorado while on a road trip from California to Massachusetts. I think it was The Big Book of the Unexplained. I have 17 Big Books now, which I think is all of them. They’re all really interesting, although I didn’t like The Big Book of Martyrs nearly as much as the others.

Because this book is a graphic novel, I’m only counting its pages as 1/2. I’m going all Calvinball on this project, yo.

Current stats:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)
2. Jonathan Vankin – The Big Book of Bad – 1-7-08 (93 pp)

Totals:

Books: 2
Pages: 380

I’ll probably have to start putting those behind a cut at some point.

I finished the first book of the year this morning: Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. It was really good. I recommend it to everyone. I actually read about 100 pages of it before the year began, so I’m not counting those pages, but since that was only slightly more than 25% of the book, I am still going to count it as one book for 2008.

My stats look like this now:

1. Neil Gaiman – Anansi Boys – 1-6-08 (287 pp)

Totals:

Books: 1
Pages: 287

Not super exciting, I know. We’ll see where things go.