Kodansha

Well, now that I’m mostly moved into a new apartment, I’ve had some more time to read. Part of my newfound free time has gone into resuming my study of Japanese, as well as my usual mix of film and anime, but on the literary front here’s what I’ve been up to:

I finally, finally finished Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. For the patient reader, the narrator’s frequent asides, long descriptions, and multitude of characters and plot threads can be quite entertaining. I enjoyed them for a couple hundred pages, but as the book dragged on and on I began losing interest. By the halfway point, I really only cared about Pip’s relationship with Estella, and that’s partly because I can identify a little with his feelings in a hopeless, one-sided romance.

While browsing around Amazon the other day, I saw a recommendation for Akira Club, which I hadn’t heard of before. Since I like the Akira film and loved the comic, though, I figured I’d check it out.

The book collects Otomo Katsuhiro’s preliminary sketches, promotional art, title pages, and other odds and ends from the Akira comic, along with a couple things for the film adaptation, with many short comments from Otomo. Kodansha originally plublished this in Japan in 1995, and Dark Horse released it in the United States in 2007.