Apparently, about six months ago some circle did the OCR and proofreading for the first four Rune Soldier novels. I had done the first two chapters of book one myself, to get them into a readable state, but it was slow going, so I never got around to finishing. Now I can run them through my scripts and read them at a reasonable speed.

(and in case anyone’s wondering what happened to my progress on the AsoIku novels, I just got busy with the pre-holiday work, the trip to Japan, helping some new friends study for the JLPT, etc, and haven’t picked them back up again yet. I’m near the end of book 11, and I definitely want to reach the revelations about Aoi’s family, which are perhaps the most significant things coming up soon. I’m hoping that the side stories that were included with the Blu-ray discs are eventually collected into a book, but otherwise, it looks like book14 is the end of the series, with an awful lot left unexplained)

In an unrelated note, my mom gave me a copy of the English edition of 1Q84, and I read it over the weekend. Short take: a plus-sized Charles de Lint novel, with Tokyo replacing Newford. I think de Lint would have done it better, and in about half as many pages, but I still enjoyed it. There were a few places where Jay Rubin’s emphasis on precise translation produced phrases no American novelist would choose, but there was already so much about the book that screamed “originally in Japanese” that it didn’t bother me.

No, seriously, that’s the title of this novel:

Yes, that’s Akihabara underneath her, which means the camera shops just tripled the price on all telephoto lenses.

[first novel, came out about a month ago, turned up as a “people who liked Hashire, ute! also liked…”]

The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI” (although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-update”. I had originally thought the problem was with the version available in the Mac App Store (which, thanks to Apple, is much, much older), but no, the direct download from Amazon does it as well.

Basically, if I open the app and it asks me to accept terms and service, I know that it just wiped out my account credentials, and I’ll have to delete:

~/Library/Application Support/Kindle
~/Library/Preferences/com.amazon.*

then deregister it on the web site, launch the app, register it again, and then re-download everything (painfully slowly, thanks to the poor UI).

I note that no one ever responds to people who have this problem on the Kindle support forums, and the last response I got to a direct email report was “gosh, we’re sorry; I’ve forwarded your message to the team!”.

[Update: and again! This time when I finished re-downloading everything, I made a tarball of the known good copy. Next time it blows up, I’ll have a before/after to send them. Grrr.]

The Rick Brant adventure novels are scarce and tend to be priced for collectors. I hadn’t realized until just now, however, that nearly half of them have fallen into the public domain and are available through Project Gutenberg. Cleaned-up versions are also available at Manybooks.

I’m pleased that this includes the first one I read, The Egyptian Cat Mystery, which does an excellent job of introducing the real science of SETI, unlike, say, every other boy’s adventure novel I’ve ever seen that dealt with aliens. Why? Wikipedia says, “During the 1960s, Goodwin served as Special Assistant to the Administrator of NASA…”

One of the oddest limitations of the Kindle is that you need to jailbreak it to change the screensaver images. There’s a small set of images supplied by Amazon, some nice, some hideous, and you’re stuck with them. Replacing them is probably the single most common reason for Kindle-hacking.

I could use images from my collection of Naughty Novel Cover Art, but people have a tendency to pick up your Kindle and turn it on, and even limiting the selection to safe-for-work images still leaves it a bit spicy.

So, I went digging through my shelves for Paperbacks That Have Known The Touch Of A Lover. That is, battered old books that someone, not necessarily me, made extensive use of. I quickly assembled a stack about three feet high, and whittled it down to some particularly interesting ones. Boosting the contrast and brightness about 25% before downsampling to 16-color grayscale produces decent results, and I’m sure I’ll expand the collection over time.

Small color versions of the current set below:

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Because I bought a Kindle, your recommendation system now fills the first several pages of results with random ebooks that either I already own in print, or else are not even plausibly related to anything I’ve ever purchased, owned, or searched for.

"Hey, you need to fill your Kindle with books! This is a book! It has a cover and a title page and words inside! You like words, right? Of course you do!"

Here’s one of the least stupid suggestions:

Because I bought Cooks Illustrated’s Italian Favorites, I really, really want to read about a monster-hunter who’s in over her head.

Other Kindle-fied “recommendations” include one called Blink, subtitled “The power of thinking without thinking”, because I own Beard on Food.

I can’t blame it all on the Kindle, though; that 750GB laptop drive I just bought led to a recommendation for a Gillette single-blade disposable razor. And there are some actual relevant recommendations, such as Shogun because I bought Exploring Kyoto, and James Beard’s New Fish Cookery because of the aforementioned Beard On Food.

And I really can’t complain about the DVD of Xanadu, recommended because my wishlist contains the Flash Gordon Blu-ray release. That’s just common sense.

…will use a random set of book covers downloaded from Amazon Japan’s “dirty stories for men” collection. Not the trendy manga/anime-style covers, but the more realistic airbrushed cheesecake style many of them use.

For instance:

The title of this little gem, もっちり熟尻, breaks down into a current slang term for “firm texture”, followed by a kanji meaning ripen or mature, followed by the kanji for buttocks, translatable quite effectively as Firm Ripe Ass. This is not the least subtle title I’ve seen; that award would probably go to ごっくんOL (mouseover for NSFW translation).

[side note: I’ve noticed a lot of invented-word kanji combos in genre titles, and I suspect many of them are wordplay. In this case, 熟尻 might be read as jukkou, which when written 熟考 means “deliberation”]

Other covers I’ve liked in this genre include Wife-play, Temptation Paradise, My Aunt and Me, and Welcome to Honeyfun Island. I’m not terribly interested in the books, mind you, but I do like the cover art. [Update: and another, Saucy Sister-in-law (literally “with extra sauce”, usually used when ordering beef bowls).]

Not all of the artists working on these books are equal, of course. Welcome to the Honey Garden is a poor sister to Honeyfun Island’s main attraction, and Beloved Kindergarten Teacher isn’t as well-drawn as The Naughty Kindergarten Teacher, but there are a lot of these books available (as I first discovered here and later here), many with quite pleasant covers that are considerably classier than this vintage American example:

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What if Roger Zelazny wrote a hard-boiled murder mystery, and no one knew about it for more than thirty-five years? Well, now you can buy it on Amazon…

It’s been out since last February, but it didn’t make it onto my recommendations list until a few weeks ago. And, of course, I’d never have gone looking in that genre.

How is it? Not bad. It was a complete manuscript, but it’s got some rough spots, as if he planned to go back and work it over again, but then moved on to something else. Their best guess puts it right around the same time as Nine Princes in Amber, and I can see some similarities (stylistically, that is) to the opening section on Earth, before Corwin recovers his memory.