Not Before 8:01 am

At around 4:15 pm this afternoon, the delivery folks arrived with the new Harry Potter novel from Amazon Japan. Since we live in the future, we get a head start on the U.S. It's legal for us to have them now.


If you look closely at the sticker on the box, it says that the box cannot be delivered before 8:01 am on July 21. I imagine that means these parcels were idling somewhere waiting for the magical day (no pun intended, trust me) to arrive.

All of this concern over something as trivial as a novel about a boy wizard getting out a little early strikes me as beyond absurd. It strikes me as doubly so when I listen to the book's author bellyaching about how true fans who really, really love the Potterverse will show their faith and wait like good little girls and boys for the officially-sanctioned delivery date before peaking inside the covers. The sense of self-importance behind any author who attaches so much meaning to her work that she gets worked up about it getting out a few days early boggles the mind, particularly when that author isn't the bee's knee's of great authors.

All of this hoopla will be a curious memory after today. Personally, my desire to actually read the book has been considerably dampened by the presence of that ridiculous sticker on the box treating the package as it it were precious and important enough not to be let out too soon. I'm going to read it but not for awhile yet. I think when something which is merely a distraction from life takes on such importance, it's time to re-evaluate priorities.

So, It's Out

Image pinched from Amazon.com's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows page.

There are rumors, inevitably, that the 7th (and possibly final) Harry Potter novel has leaked and is available via a torrent file. Some people are saying the files are an elaborate hoax and others are saying it's the real deal.

Well, folks, I can tell you that it is the real deal or the most amazingly convincing hoax ever (and I'm convinced of the former). While I'm sure that the book's publisher may be wringing its hands and fretting over this, it's really not worth worrying about. The files are a collection of jpegs of the pages of the book taken with a digital camera as the book lies open on a table and someone turns the pages. The pages can't even be read without zooming in massively and are illegible near the spine of the book. No one is going to "read" the book in this fashion and fail to purchase a real book.

The main purpose of this leak isn't to allow people to not buy the book (after all, we're all going to buy it...my husband and I have our pre-order in place already). The point of this is to provide spoilers several days before the official release date. So, this means that spoilers are out there 3 days earlier than they normally would but otherwise means little else. Some people appear to have gone through the painstaking process of attempting to read these eye-straining pictures and plucked out all the most important details (like who dies) and posted them.

If you really care about not being spoiled, you may want to turn your computer off now and don't turn it back on until your pre-ordered copy shows up and you've spent all night reading it. For those of us (raises hand) who think that J.K. Rowling's "hints" lend an extreme irritation factor to reading the books because they make the reader think mainly about who is going to kick it, the spoilers are actually welcome since we can find out who buys the farm and just pay attention to the damn story this time around.

Good Day Books vs. The Blue Parrot (Used Book Shops)

Tokyo residents who are shopping for used English books are likely familiar with "Good Day Books." The shop has been around for about 15 years and has a good selection and decent prices. They will order new books in addition to selling used books. Used books can be traded in for store credit which can then be used to pay (100%) for used books you purchase in the shop (except for the 5% consumption tax) as well as 20% of the price of new books. We've been trading and buying books there for quite some time now and we tend to get 30%-50% of the value of books (closer to 50%) in credit.

Recently, I came across a link to another used book shop called "The Blue Parrot". Since this shop is in Takadanobaba and Good Day Books is in Ebisu (both on the Yamanote line), my husband decided to take a bag of 18 books to both shops and see which gave him the better deal and offered the better shopping experience. Since he has a lot of experience with Good Day Books, he pretty much knows what he would get for the books and which books they were likely to accept and which they'd likely reject so he went to the Blue Parrot first.

The 18 books he took were a mixture of novels, humor books, and a few non-fiction books including one on baseball, a large book on MYST/Riven (the development of the video games) and a few New Age philosophy books. The Blue Parrot agreed to take all of the books and would either pay ¥960 or give ¥2,200 of credit which could be used to buy used books.

The shop itself was relatively small and narrow. There were audio books on CD. They carried Stephen Fry's audio versions of Harry Potter novels, for instance, but they were relatively pricey (¥12,000 each). The books were pretty well-organized and one could likely find a book one was looking for if it was in stock. They also carry DVDs of movies though my husband thought most of them were relatively low-priced unpopular titles (around ¥700 each). There were exceptions though. Babylon 5 season 1 on DVD was available used for ¥3,000. If you buy DVDs there, you have to take a good look at formats and region codes though since some of the discs are PAL. The web site for the shop mentions that they also carry CDs but my husband didn't see any.

My husband passed up on selling or trading in books at The Blue Parrot because he was sure he could do better at Good Day Books. Good Day Books refused 4 of the 18 books he took back (the MYST/Riven book, 2 humor books, and Dragonflight) but still gave him ¥5,200 in credit. So, he got more than twice as much credit for 4 fewer books at Good Day Books. The Good Day Books shop is at least twice as big as The Blue Parrot and more comfortable to walk around in and carries a larger selection.

In terms of the advantages for each particular shop, The Blue Parrot offers on-line shopping though the selection doesn't seem very good at this time. When I did a search on "humor" via the on-line shop, no results came up and other types had limited selections. I'm guessing the selection will improve with time. Also, The Blue Parrot carries DVDs and Good Day Books does not. Finally, if you are leaving Japan forever and have no use for store credit, it's better to get a small amount of cash for your books from The Blue Parrot if you are unwilling to go to the trouble of trying to sell them yourself via free ads in publications like Metropolis. Good Day Books doesn't offer cash for your books. If you are remaining in Japan, you're likely better off taking your books to Good Day Books because you get a great deal more credit to apply to future purchases and a larger store to use that credit in.

My husband said he wouldn't make a return trip to The Blue Parrot unless he was thinking of paying cash only for books because of how low the trade in credit he was offered was going to be.

The Long and the Short of It

I've just finished reading Roger Zelazny's Amber series of books and two things have come to mind while I've been reading. One is that J. Michael Straczynski seemingly stole the core concept of the novels for his television series Babylon 5 from this series. The other is that books have gotten a lot longer and movies have gotten shorter since Mr. Zelazny wrote his series of Amber novels.

The way in which movies are edited to run under two hours, with a seemingly preferable running time of 90 minutes, has always annoyed me. There was a time when movies were so lengthy that intermissions were scheduled between a first and second segment while reels were changed. I'm pretty sure that the longer running time for movies in the past was one of the reasons concessions stands were in theaters. If you're there for 3 hours, a pit stop in the middle where you pick up a drink and a snack makes more sense than if you're only around for an hour and a half.

I have read that the nadir of short running times for major movies was marked by Men In Black II at 88 minutes. I believe a minor reason for all the short running times is that movies are now demographically targeted at young males who, supposedly, prefer movies that are short and fast-paced. In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, movies tended to be targeted more toward women. This was back when the audience was determined by who attended most frequently and, at that time, women were more likely to go to movies repeatedly.

Of course, there's a real "chicken and the egg" quality to who is attending movies more often. If you make short action movies which are big on special effects and light on story, more males will go than females. I have to imagine that the audience you cater to (or pander to, if you wish) is the one you're going to attract.

The larger reason movies are so short these days is that it's more profitable for theaters to have short running movies because they can squeeze in more viewings each day. Fewer screens will show a film if its running time is too long and its not part of a proven sequence of blockbuster releases (such as "Lord of the Rings").

In terms of books, I have noted that a lot of what would be considered "pulpier" entertainment has been growing to relatively gargantuan sizes. The Harry Potter, series, for instance, seems to get longer and longer with each new release. I wish I could say that the books getting longer means that we are reading more or more willing to read a denser story but the truth is that it's more of a reflection of the power an author wields once she (or he) has achieved a huge amount of success. J.K. Rowling in particular is not a better author for providing more content. She seriously needs to have her content edited in her last several books but she's powerful enough now to have it her way and there is every likelihood that the fan base, which likely isn't able to scrutinize the quality of a book based on the presentation of the story because they are simply enamored of the characters no matter what they're doing, are happy to get quantity over quality.

Similarly, other highly successful authors can either write huge books or string out one story for a series of books in a manner that less successful authors cannot. Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series is a good example of such a thing. The story went on and on and on and some of the books were rather spotty in terms of the value of their stories in the overall arc. The only reason the series was completed (or possibly the only reason it wasn't a trilogy instead of spanning 7 novels) is that Stephen King was the author. While I liked the series, I thought it could use a good prune and would have been much better for eliminating most of some of the content. For what its worth, I think Mr. King himself realizes this and knows that the series is flawed. However, I'd still recommend reading all of the books. They're not the standard Stephen King horror far and he really is a good writer.

Both the fact that books are lengthening and movies are getting shorter are a reflection of power and money at play more so than anything positive or negative about people changing their desires or habits. It's rather sad on both fronts when art is distorted by market forces in this fashion but I guess its unsurprising in an age when so much energy is focused like a laser on milking every last dollar out of the consumer.

What I'm Reading 3

This should actually be called "what I'm re-reading" because this is a book I read long ago but had since forgotten the content for the most part. And, to be perfectly honest, it should be "what I've just read" since I rarely post about a book until I've finished it.

Most people know the Monty Python troop mainly for their performances so it's easy to forget that they are all writers as well. They wrote their own sketches and movies. All of them have also gone on to write books about a variety of topics. I can't say that I've ever been especially drawn to most of their works beyond the T.V. series and movies (with a few exceptions) but my husband picked up Hemingway's Chair by Michael Palin a very long time ago.

When I initially read it, I thought it was quite good and now I like it even more. It's a novel about a postal worker who is a passionate fan of Hemingway. For those who possess as little fondness for Hemingway as me, I'm happy to say that the book has little to do with him and much more to do with the unremarkable lives of people in a quiet little town that can quickly become quite remarkable. It's also about finding depth under the surface of fussy little people.

Since this is Michael Palin, it's all served up with warm and subtle humor and a good deal of charm. If you've ever seen any of his travel series (which I highly recommend) or read the companion books for them, you'll have witnessed the same tone in which the story is delivered. One of the ways in which his humor works is offering up an situation which you've read in several dozen other books and pairing it with an unexpected reaction. For instance, as the main character's date prepares to meet him, she thinks about a former date:

"The other evening they'd been together down by the beach huts and he'd run his fingers very gently over her face, paying special attention to her lips. Elaine was curious to know where he'd learnt this, but didn't like to ask. She had concluded that it must have been from a magazine, or one of his books. She hadn't liked it much, as the tips of his fingers smelt of postal adhesive."

Hemingway's Chair is a light read but very well-written. You'll come away with an appreciation for how good Palin is with words and a feeling that he's a very intelligent person. It'd be an excellent book to take along on a long train or airplane ride. If you're in Japan, you can pick it up from Amazon Japan here.

Note that my copy has a different cover than the current printing. I'm guessing this is because the early copy had a cut-out on the post box on the cover (which allows Palin's eyes to show through from his picture on the inside page) and such covers are more expensive to produce than a normal cover.

Textbook Speak

As I've mentioned before, one of my students is studying Criminal Justice at a college on a military base. She's taking a class in Juvenile Justice and has the same sort of textbook that you use at most colleges. It's extremely difficult for her to understand in large part because of the specialized vocabulary but that's not the hardest part for her. She can look up random words and get translations.

The harder part for her is that she has issues de-scrambling the sort of language that textbook writers feel obliged to use. Sometimes, the grammar in the sentences is contorted such that you have to read it more than once to understand the point. This is often the case even for native speakers. One of the sentences which she had particular difficulty with was something which said something along the lines of 'a framework from which to study (a topic)'. I can't recall the rest of the sentence, unfortunately, but it was clear that the way in which the sentence was written was awkward (though grammatically correct) in order to avoid the use of "I" or "we".

When I was in college, I remember specifically being told that one was never to use "I" or "we" in academic writing. I don't know why that was the case but, to this day, when I write anything, it's in the back of my mind that I should try to avoid using such types of sentences.

Besides the tendency of textbooks to use contorted grammatical structures, they also seem to go out of their way to use uncommon vocabulary. I'm no slouch in the vocabulary department and my husband is even less of a slouch than me but the book I'm currently reading, Adaptation and Human Behavior, often has us both clicking our way over to dictionary.com. I'm reading this book, incidentally, as a nice little palate cleanser between novels though the number of $20 words is really clogging up the mental pipes as I try to slog through the book.

I'm not talking about jargon. In fact, I understand the jargon pretty well having studied psychology and appreciate the need to use a word like "phenotype" because it saves the writer from using multiple words to describe "body type" and it fits in with the phenotypical body descriptions (ectomorphic, mesomorphic, endomorphic) aka somatotypes. Now, wasn't that far more confusing than saying body types which tend to be thin, muscular, and fat?

At any rate, I don't take issue with this type of jargon because I know that the ideas underlying them are more sophisticated than "thin"," fat", and "muscular". In some cases, using simpler words undermines the meaning the writing is trying to get across. In other cases, however, it seems to have little to do with conveying words which carry more depth of meaning than more commonly-used vocabulary. For instance, what is the point of using a word like "adduce" instead of "cited"? There is no added nuance carried by "adduce" over "cite". It's just a less commonly-used word.

I'm never sure if academics sit down with a thesaurus and find new and uncommon words in an attempt to appear more sophisticated or to use words that are less common to spice up their dry content, or if they use these words because their exposure to vocabulary is extraordinary. Either way, for both my student and I, this is sometimes a pain in the ass.

What I'm Reading 2

Previously, I posted that I was reading my husband's first novel-length Harry Potter fan fiction story. I actually tore my way through the other two stories in short order despite their great length. In my opinion, his writing matured remarkably from book to book with the last one written pretty much ending up as a viable novel in terms of pacing and writing style. The final book, Phoenix Intuition, was by far my favorite because the story was compelling and the pace excellent.

Ironically, the book that I liked the most was the one that the fans who read his stories on Fiction Alley (a Harry Potter fan fiction repository) liked the least. I found this somewhat curious but upon further reflection decided that it's likely that I don't read these stories with the same hopes and expectations as a fan fiction reader. I approach the books as, well, books. The average fan fiction reader is looking to vicariously experience the character's reality. They like extended scenes where the characters talk to each other and banter. I just want the story to move along.

Since finishing his Harry Potter stories (and frankly wishing there were more but not wanting to surrender my time with him to allow him to write another even if he was inclined to do so), I started reading the first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series, Dragonflight. This is a very popular and, I believe, classic fantasy series which my sister has read before. In fact, I think we picked up a used copy at Good Day Books on her recommendation.

I've nearly finished the book and, while I'm generally pleased with the "world" in which the story takes place, there are some elements that I'm rather unhappy with. Before I go about complaining, I have to admit that I'm a very harsh critic as a reader. It takes a lot to make me happy with a book and my poor husband frequently is subjected to my whining about this or that in whatever book I'm reading. That's probably why I have tended in the past to stick to non-fiction for the most part. Non-fiction can be boring or repetitive but you don't have to worry about story pacing, structure, depth or characterizations.

With Dragonflight, I was immediately turned off by the romance novel characterizations of the main male and female characters. I'm not keen on the tall, slender, long-haired, often secretly powerful heroine who is cold and calculating but eventually warms to the muscular, powerful, and strong man who pursues her. The characters do develop a bit but they never get too far above the characters you see on the cover of bodice-rippers.

If you dislike the main characters, you're pretty much left with the story and the story is pretty thin because this is the first book of a trilogy and it isn't carried very far. The basic story, which I won't spoil, is about a world where dragons are used to fight a recurrent problem that could destory the planet. There's some political infighting and a cultural overview of the society. There's also some interesting science-fiction-style development. I'm guessing the better part of the story is reserved for the remaining two novels and the first was used to establish the framework of the world and the characters.

At this point, I have to decide if the story is compelling enough to push me to move on to the next book in the series. I haven't quite made the decision yet but I'm thinking that I'll at least give something different a try before I consider reading the next Dragonriders of Pern book.

What I'm Reading

Logo pinched from BlogD but at least it's not hotlinked!

This is more of a guilty admission than anything else. It's not because I feel guilty for reading what I'm reading but because it's taken me so long to read the book I'm currently working on for reasons that aren't especially flattering to me. My husband wrote 3 novel-length Harry Potter 'fan fiction' stories quite awhile ago which have been enthusiastically received by many readers both through my brother-in-law's blog (from which they can be downloaded) and a Harry Potter fan site called Fiction Alley.

While my husband was writing these, we had some conflicts early on in the process because I offered him input which he rejected and the subsequent arguing left a lingering sense of anxiety when it came to his stories. I also have to admit that he put a tremendous amount of time in them, sometimes at my expense and that resentment of our lost time together was attached to the stories as well.

Much time has since passed and I've finally separated all the emotional baggage from the experience of reading the books and am about 90% through his first story. I'm enjoying the story very much and, as many readers have done, I'm losing sleep trying to finish the story.

My husband's stories were written before Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and two of them take place in year 6 and year 7 of Harry's time at Hogwarts. I can't say much about the second or third books though as I have't gotten to them yet. I can say that a lot of the things J.K. Rowling does which are irritating are absent in his stories albeit at the expense of advancing the maturity of the characters beyond their chronological years in some cases. However, it's a small price to pay for the lack of abject stupidity and one-dimensional character behavior you see in some of her books. If you are a big Harry Potter fan and can open your mind to an 'alternate history' version of the series, you'll enjoy the stories very much. I recommend you download them from BlogD and treat yourself to his work. And I'm not just saying that because he's my husband. You can read the Fiction Alley feedback on his stories to see other perspectives.

Shopping for English Books

One thing I realized about my blogging is that I need to get into the habit of taking my camera with me every time I leave the house. Unfortunately, I haven't progressed from having the thought to performing the action. Until I do, I'm not going to show much more than static "result" shots.

Anyway, today, my husband and I made a trip to the best used book shop in Tokyo, Good Day Books. The main reason for us doing this was that we have about 50 books that I wanted to get rid of. We couldn't take them all at once but we loaded up our backpacks and headed to Ebisu. At Good Day Books, they will give you store credit for books you bring in though they won't accept just any book. In fact, they didn't take about 1/3 of the books we brought in because they already had them or they deemed them "too old". They will keep books you bring in that they won't accept but they won't give you credit for them so you don't have to lug them home if you don't want to.

If you have credit, you can buy used books for 100% credit. The only cash you have to pay is the sales tax. Used books without credit sell for relatively reasonable prices. I don't know what formula they use but the only book I bought which was not a textbook was Adaptation and Human Behavior which sells for $35.95 new on Amazon and the price at Good Day Books was 2,100 yen. Considering the mark-up on English books at new book shops like Kinokuniya and the fact that this book costs 4,841 yen on Amazon Japan, it's a pretty good deal. Books don't exactly suffer much of a drop in utility if they're used.

If you want to buy new books, you can ask them to order titles for you and use 20% of your credit toward the purchase price though I don't know what they charge for the exchange rate so it may or may not be a bargain. You can request that they look out for specific titles using a form on their web site if you want them to keep an eye out for a used copy. Since you aren't obliged to buy books you request, there's no harm in asking.

We weren't all that interested in acquiring more new books as we already have too many but we did want to investigate getting some teaching materials for my private lessons as well as for my husband to use at the school he works at. His school allows teachers to use any materials they like and has a rather limited library. Getting the books on credit is a bit like getting them free so we don't have to spend our cash on materials we're not being reimbursed for. It's more of an opportunity lost to buy other books in the future. Since the credit slips have an expiration date, we'd probably have to make an effort to use them up at some point if we didn't use them on texts.

It was a pretty nice time out because the weather was pleasant and there are places to sit outside of Ebisu station at the exit near the store. There are very limited amounts of public seating around Tokyo so we took advantage of the chance to hang out and have some Subway after shopping. Since it was breezy, the smokers were a lot less of a problem than usual which was a bonus.