Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

With extra time on my hands, I’ve been getting some reading done. When my thoughts turned to the more purely ebook-focused lending program my city’s library makes available, I browsed through the categories I’d set it to focus on some time ago and had one title catch my eye. Once I’d looked a little further into Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, I was further intrigued by recognising it was by Keith Houston, mentioned in the cover image to be the author of Shady Characters. I’d found a copy of that book in the remaindered and reduced-priced section of a bookstore years ago and been amused by its histories of punctuation marks notable and not so notable; if this newer history of pocket calculators was as interesting it would seem worth reading.
( Summing things up )

Pointed through my RSS reader to the latest winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for “worst opening sentences,” one of my first thoughts was the amused realisation it was still running after more than four decades. Not quite as long ago, but back in high school, I’d bought at last some of the little paperbacks collecting earlier entries.

Reading through those latest winners, I did get to wondering about the “Lyttle Lytton” contest organized by the multi-talented Adam Cadre. Despite my own weakness for assembling complicated sentences, I’d found rewards in Cadre’s more rigorous limit on words per sentence. A quick search revealed that contest was also running more than two decades after it had begun, and its own winners for this year were available.

In some fashion or another I became aware of a “light novel” named Qualia the Purple translated from Japanese, but long enough ago I don’t quite remember the specifics. I do have the impression some brought up Last and First Idol while mentioning this new release, which would have got my attention. There was also a bit of “positive recommendations that tried not to give too much away,” which I suppose always has me wondering if I just wind up being vague. Still, when I did get around to picking up the novel at last from where I’d had a copy waiting, I read it with growing interest.
( What do you see? )

It took me a while to sort out just where to order a copy of the tenth (regular) volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. When I received that copy, I just happened to have started reading a different translated “light novel,” and that one pretty much in courteous nibbles. Those nibbles chewed through it in the end, though, and I went on to the latest instalment of a series the pieces of which fit together in a different way than with the other light novels I follow, but well enough in their own way for me to look forward to it.
( It's a trip )

Never having got around to unsubscribing from promotional emails from the Kennedy Space Center visitor’s centre, I happened to see a notice about a new book about the astronauts hired in 1978 to begin restaffing NASA in preparation for space shuttle launches. I looked up the ebook version of Meredith Babgy’s The New Guys without quite being ready to commit to buying it. Then, I happened to see a hardcover copy in the bookstore. That just managed to turn my thoughts to having just read a different book on space through my library’s ebook lending service (Stephen Walker’s Beyond, which is about Yuri Gagarin). When I looked up The New Guys, it was there too.
( In and out of orbit )

After extracting the tenth Eighty-Six novel from my almost depleted pile of that translated series, I was a bit surprised by its cover and the back-cover blurb, surprised to the point of starting to wonder if I just might build a post about it after having read seven volumes of the series while supposing “it’s not good to push yourself to type out and share an opinion about everything.” My interest in the story continues to outweigh any possible objections about “this translated prose is tough to get through”; in the war against artificial intelligence weapons that have run amok and evaded their shutdown timers through ghoulish means, the main characters who survived the first novel have gone from nation to nation in “a world not our own,” pulling off dangerous missions, edging towards the possibility of winning the war, and managing some character development along the way. The tenth volume looked to return to the grimmer circumstances of the original novel and fill in the backstory of one of the most important characters, the ace-of-aces mecha pilot Shin. I did get to thinking about the series looking to do something more with a concept it had left behind early on; I suppose in retrospect there could have been the perpetual question of “when you have to weigh your own ideas against new ideas from the original author...”
( The first circumstances )

Another collection of short stories holding off the resolution to another cliffhanger didn’t diminish my interest in getting around to the ninth regular volume of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels. As for one of the reasons I’m interested in this particular series, starting into it I did glance at its credit page, only to notice the translation credit had changed to Jennifer Ward. That left me wondering for a few pages before I’d decided the prose still read about as well as the previous volumes had. Later on, remembering a comment or two about how an editor can be as important as a translator in turning “translated text” into “readable prose,” I found the editor’s name of Anna Powers and checked back to see she’d worked on the previous instalment. (When I went all the way back to the first volume, though, there was no editor credit.)
( Twists and turns )

After reading a biography of Howard Kazanjian at last, I moved on with rather less hesitation to another title I’d bookmarked from my library’s multimedia service. Steve Alpert’s Sharing A House With the Never-Ending Man was about having worked for Studio Ghibli to help sell its animated features outside of Japan. A good many anecdotes are packed into the book, but it didn’t span quite as much time as I’d thought it might: while its cover illustration is of the character Alpert voiced in The Wind Rises from just the last decade, the narrative runs more or less up to Spirited Away winning its awards. Tales of the tribulations in trying to keep Princess Mononoke from being cut or just jazzed up with more sound effects for the sake of selling it to American audiences do have their own impact, but there are no passed-along stories of just what had happened, or what hadn’t happened because of what had happened before, in the years before Alpert was hired by the studio. (I did recall how I’d managed to see Princess Mononoke during that initial release in a tiny theatre that was part of a downtown multiplex, if also certain online complaints afterwards that not enough or just the wrong things had been done to promote the movie back then.)

The “never-ending man” Hayao Miyazaki does seem to get a decent amount of attention, including comments how he begins his films not knowing how they’ll end, which causes overwork near the end. That unfortunately gets me thinking of all the worried comments about general overwork in the animation industry in Japan, but the book didn’t mention a lot beyond Ghibli there, even if there were moments involving American animation studios that nowadays no longer exist or at least aren’t making “hand-drawn animation” of the kind still being worked on elsewhere in the world. Just as many moments seem to stick in the mind where Alpert’s in the same room as powerful or celebrity-famous and therefore somehow “not quite normal” people, however. I did ponder one moment where people working on Princess Mononoke’s dub told Alpert how much they admire Ghibli’s work and he reacted with “so they’ve seen the movies I haven’t helped legitimately sell, then?” In any case, seeing a news item the book was part of a new “Humble Bundle” was a bit of a nudge towards setting my thoughts on it down.

After quite a while thinking about it, I asked for the “compact edition” of the “Star Wars Archives” book retelling the story of the making of the three oldest movies in the franchise for a Christmas present. I then took six months getting around to mentioning that here, but one other thing did get in the way too. As I picked my way through the Archives (reading it with just a little awkwardness after discovering part of the endpapers is extended and folded around to “make the closed volume more solid” or something), I did happen on a notice of a brief publisher sale on its follow-up, which told the story of the making of the George Lucas trilogy for which I couldn’t tell myself “oh, I’ve already got J.W. Rinzler’s making-of books; I don’t need another expensive, hard-to-handle tome.” Deciding not to wait on the off chance of another “compact edition,” I ordered the “1999-2005” Archives.
( Coffee table book or coffee table? )

When I picked up the eighth regular volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki from where I’d had it waiting, it was with a bit of a “now to get to something I ought to like” feeling. Having just finished the thirteenth regular (and, as I understand, the penultimate) volume of My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, As I Expected reading one nibble at a time might have complicated things. Just what accounts for my different levels of engagement with these two translated-from-Japanese “light novel” series does leave me grappling with uneasy uncertainties; the best I could hope for, I suppose, was that this new book would wash them away for the moment.
( Some things are now given away )