Reading Thread 2: Pagemasters

PureElegance

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faith wrote:
I read zettai kareshi, forgetting that Watase Yuu's stuff always makes me wanna cry for a few days after reading it.
Now I'm sad.
You should read Watase's "Imadoki" XD I don't think it's a sad one if I remember correctly, but Absolute Boyfriend was a total bummer in the end. Fushigi Yuugi though wasn't a HUGE bummer in the end, but so many of my favorite people died in the meantime that I didn't even care about the ending anymore XD (Who cares about Miaka, really? "TAMAHOME~~~~>__<")

Currently reading:

Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism can Learn from the NFL by Roger L. Martin
http://www.amazon.com/Fixing-Game-Bubbl ... 422171647/

It's really good and easy to read and, on top of all my other readings, it's making me think differently about the purpose of companies, in a good way. He also puts things in simple terms so, as someone who's not THAT great at the lingo yet, it's really good. He also ties in the NFL very well, and as someone who doesn't know much about football, it's been eye-opening. He too goes against the prevailing theory/motto of shareholder value being the #1 important thing for a company, a theory that only came around in the 1980s. Richard asked what book I had in my hand and when he looked at the cover he did a double take and then flipped it over and asked, "What class is this for? *__*"

It's for my "Doing Well by Doing Good" entrepreneurship class!

Coming Up:

Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Capital ... 625271751/

Finished:

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
http://www.amazon.com/Company-History-R ... 004SOVAL2/
It's a great short book about the history of the company, going back to the ancient Sumerian days, to the Romans, to the Chinese, to the British companies, to the American industrialists (my favorites), etc. It was written in 2003 so it's interesting to see how the authors predicted what the next few years would look like. It also goes over how the thinking about the corporate purpose changed and ways companies were managed (like Sloanism.)
It's a good book if you want to know about the history! But if you want more in depth reasons as to why things happened this won't really give you that. So it's a good starting point to see what you're interested in!

The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public by Lynn Stout
http://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value ... 605098132/
I really like this one and it's also short and easy to read and overall I agree with what she says!
 

flowersofnight

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faith wrote:
I read zettai kareshi, forgetting that Watase Yuu's stuff always makes me wanna cry for a few days after reading it.
Now I'm sad.
You should have read something more uplifting like "Cynthia", what can I tell you XD

Finished with volume 1 of "Chin P'ing Mei" here and I'm totally in for the long haul. The only question is whether we should read this for book club or not ::meev::
 

Cerceaux

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Ceres (the manga) was pretty good, but the main love interest guy had the personality of a wooden plank.
I think people got so sad over the robot-boyfriend manga because he was actually nice compared to most guys in shojo who are total assholes.

I recently read "A Girl on the Shore" by Inio Asano, and I didn't like it. ::meev::

This guy is getting a lot of buzz lately, and I'll probably still give "Oyasumi Punpun" a try since it's like his magnum opus, but this one was just teenage angst with lots of really explicit sex.
On the plus side his art style is nice, and he has a talent for drawing messy snot-dripping crying faces.
 

faith

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Hmm maybe he was nice because he wasn't a real guy :lol:
Though the female "best friends" in her stuff aren't usually all that better.
Yeah. I'm probably bummed because Night was such a great character. Eh.

Speaking of Fushigi Yuugi and Ceres and all that, Tamahome was also pretty planky come to think of it...I totally agree PE. Miaka and Tamahome...bleah lol
She seems to specialize in stupid girls and vanilla guys.
They're like the kind of people you want to be together in real life so they'll leave other people alone.
 

PureElegance

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faith wrote:
Though the female "best friends" in her stuff aren't usually all that better.
Yeah. I'm probably bummed because Night was such a great character. Eh.

Speaking of Fushigi Yuugi and Ceres and all that, Tamahome was also pretty planky come to think of it...I totally agree PE. Miaka and Tamahome...bleah lol
She seems to specialize in stupid girls and vanilla guys.
They're like the kind of people you want to be together in real life so they'll leave other people alone.
You should read Imadoki if you haven't already XD I think besides FY that's my favorite Watase series and I don't remember any lame characters in it. I do remember really liking the male lead there and Tanpopo, the main character, was such a nice girl. It's only 5 volumes long too!

Faith, you should see this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWoYYMKNpx8
"Tamahome, tonight make me... make me your bride!"
I'm going to use that on my wedding night ::meev::
I'm loving the cheesy 90s music LOL. NEED MORE SAXOPHONE!
(God, I own the DVDs too and I had a great time watching them with my friend back in elementary school. Maybe I'd have a different opinion of the series now, I wonder!)

Tamahome also does the Breathy Japanese Man voice there at 2:55. I don't get why that happens, but I see it when men talk in Japanese shows. There was A LOT in the Absolute Boyfriend TV series, which I would suggest if you liked the books. It tweaks the storyline, but overall its the same thing. Night will always be #1.

I think FY is a great series in general (why can't *I* open a book and be transported back to ancient China?), I loved the story, it's set in Ancient China, some parts were incredibly moving, but the two leads were terrible. Everyone else in the story had great storylines and interesting personalities, even NAKAGO was cool. Hotohori, Nuriko, Tasuki, Chichiri, Serious Medic, etc. They were all great characters. But I don't know how Watase managed to make the lead so unsympathetic XD Even when she was being brave and selfless I couldn't take it XD And have everyone fall in love with her and think she's AMAZING on top of that? Oh God.

Hotohori was way too good for her anyway. Don't know what he ever saw in her. Tamahome was the usual teenage guy, but had less personality and was stubborn too. At least he had an interesting backstory, so... Miaka was the worst of them all.

MUGEN E TO HIRAAAKEEEEEE FUSHIGI YUUUUUGIIIIII

Oh, and to make this more literary, Anthropologie has a new clothing line inspired by Virginia Woolf and her sister:
http://www.anthropologie.com/anthro/sea ... virginia#/
 

Cerceaux

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^That clothing collection looks more like arbitrary name-dropping to me...xD

I'm reading "Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches", which starts out with a boy and girl who discover they can switch bodies by kissing. I never bothered with it before because it sounded like typical pervy anime fare, but it's actually pretty funny and clever how they use their power to better their lives (also how the guy initially thinks girls have it easy, and find himself extremely wrong).
They eventually discover other other girls in their school with magic abilities hence the "seven witches" in the title.
I'm sure they'll all eventually end up falling in love with the lead guy in some capacity, but there's more than one male character so I don't think it'll be a complete harem.

Too lazy to read real books lately, zzzzzz....
 

sanctum

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This year I've finally got around to reading The Vampire Chronicles, I'm up to The Queen of the Damned at the moment but I'm not finding it as enjoyable as Interview with the Vampire or The Vampire Lestat.
 

sanctum

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Study for personal interest or for a qualification?

Currently re-reading 'The Kybalion', then re-reading Crowley's 'The Book of Thoth' in preparation for finally getting around to starting his '777' and then on to 'Introduction to Magic' by J. Evola!
 

flowersofnight

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CrystalAmmunition wrote:
Study for personal interest or for a qualification?
Just for my own edification, I don't have a few hundred grand burning a hole in my pocket to study this for real XD

Finished last night:
Les Singularités de la France Antarctique written by André Thevet in 1557. One of the first books about the New World, with early descriptions of the peanut, the pineapple, cashews, tobacco, buffaloes, and so on. The author himself spent most of his time in Brazil (in a short-lived French colony near Rio de Janeiro) sick in bed, so his information was largely collected from French sailors.
 

Wandering_Fox

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Picked up some classics to read on the bus:

Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

I started reading As I Lay Dying in high school but really couldn't get into it. I'm finding it much more palatable now. I feel like I should have read all of these by now, but better late than never!
 

flowersofnight

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Wandering_Fox wrote:
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness bored me intensely. Read at your own risk!

Just finished with volume 4 of "Chin P'ing Mei" here ::gaku:: Things are getting ULTRA INTENSE... ordered the 5th and final volume now @_@

Also finished recently: Nibelung no yubiwa - an adaptation of "Der Ring des Nibelungen" written by Riyoko "Rose of Versailles" Ikeda, with art by one of her long-time assistants. Interesting to see the story in an old-school manga kind of style. Some of the scenes like Brunnhilde's imprisonment were really fantastically done. I think I'll pick up the rest of the series.

Newly arrived today: Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis
Faith can borrow this one when I'm done with it :|
 

Wandering_Fox

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flowersofnight wrote:
Heart of Darkness bored me intensely. Read at your own risk!

Yeah, this is a hard one to get into... I find the story interesting, but the style in which the novella is written is just so pedantic... I feel like this might have been written at the time when authors were paid by the word, and so Mr. Conrad decided to squeeze in as many as he could. Kind of like how he goes into detail about how somebody brought dominoes on board, but nobody played dominoes. Unless this somehow enhances the characters, it just makes the moment come off as superfluous.

Wuthering Heights has a much brisker pace, but man this is depressing! It's like everything that happens makes everybody all the more miserable and then it's all sad times and Kate Bush dancing and swaying through the trees.
 

Cerceaux

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I liked Wuthering Heights but man are the two leads (well Heathcliffe mostly) stubborn assholes. It's weird to me how he often gets romanticized in popular culture because he's so damn unpleasant and angry all the time.
The second part though actually has a somewhat happy resolution but it never makes it into any of the movies.

I'm reading "It" by Stephen King. Somebody on here mentioned it recently and I thought I'd give it another try (I read the first couple chapters years ago by that was all).
 

flowersofnight

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Cerceaux wrote:
It's weird to me how he often gets romanticized in popular culture because he's so damn unpleasant and angry all the time.
Come on, popular culture loves that kind of thing XD
batmobile.jpg
 

PureElegance

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I was eating out and decided to start reading with my Kindle!

I looked at my downloaded books and chose "The Professor" by Charlotte Bronte. It was her first novel, but it was not published during her lifetime because every publishing house rejected it. I'm not sure why, especially because every book of hers was seriously great and every other book was praised while she was alive. It was only published after she died with her husband's permission. She took some parts of "The Professor" and reworked them into the later "Villette" which is supposed to be her best work. She wrote "Jane Eyre" right after "The Professor" so I can't imagine the latter's rejection was due to writing style...

This book is from the first-person POV of a young man named William as he goes through life and eventually becomes a professor, but I'm not sure what happens in the meantime and what his life is like as a professor. It's also only around 140 pages long. I've read two chapters though and I LOVE the way she writes! She just grabs you and I like her simple language. William seems cool so far and he's getting his first job. I think there will be a love story with one of his pupils, but I don't know how it's going to end up.

*wiggles eyebrows suggestively*

Bronte's preface (that she wrote after a ton of rejections) said she wanted to write a story where the protagonist had to earn everything by the sweat of his brow, where no fortunate event would happen to him that would change everything, that sort of thing, not necessarily gloomy though, but it seemed like publishers didn't like that. So she wrote that this book has gone through a lot of struggle.
(Now that I think about Jane DID get a lot of lucky breaks throughout the novel XD).

I can't imagine how she went from The Professor, to Jane Eyre, to Villette, as Villette apparently is the most depressing, heart-wrenching, cynical one, but I guess it was because of her personal circumstances at the time.

I also have to say that reading on the Kindle was so nice! ::squee:: I felt as though I was actually reading a physical book, as weird as it sounds.
 

flowersofnight

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flowersofnight wrote:
Also finished recently: Nibelung no yubiwa - an adaptation of "Der Ring des Nibelungen" written by Riyoko "Rose of Versailles" Ikeda, with art by one of her long-time assistants. Interesting to see the story in an old-school manga kind of style. Some of the scenes like Brunnhilde's imprisonment were really fantastically done. I think I'll pick up the rest of the series.
Read volume 2 of this last night and it's getting interesting - and now it turns out this isn't a straight adaptation of the original work, but it's taking the story in a somewhat different direction. We'll see where exactly this ends up going.

I also started on "Outlaws of the Marsh", but only just started.
 

Wandering_Fox

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Cerceaux wrote:
I'm reading "Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches", which starts out with a boy and girl who discover they can switch bodies by kissing. I never bothered with it before because it sounded like typical pervy anime fare, but it's actually pretty funny and clever how they use their power to better their lives (also how the guy initially thinks girls have it easy, and find himself extremely wrong).
This sounds like a saucy version of Freaky Friday ::meev::

I've been reading... Manuals o_O I have 4 manuals on how to use the Emberton string patches I got for music composition, as well as a slew of mixing and sound production books:
Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio
Logic Pro 9 Training
Logic Pro 9 Advanced Music Production
I can't decide if I should spring for the Logic Pro X edition, because I did update, but I wonder if the old books will work fine for this or not... I might have to just bite the bullet and get it...

Next, I have to get to studying Mental Ray and ZBrush guidebooks for CGI sculpture, 3D Modeling, and animation... I love working with the particle systems in Deconstructing the Elements but it's really time consuming...
 

sanctum

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Re-reading 'Gunsmith Cats', or should I say reading it in the correct order for the first time. I loved reading this one when I was a kid, but was limited by whatever volumes my local library had on hand, so the story was a bit jumbled.

Other than, reading 'Memnoch the Devil' by Anne Rice and Crowley's '777'.
 
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