Last post of the year–state of the workload, review links, and a recommendation
Amid all the uncertainties of the glamorous freelance life, it’s good to know one thing: if I adapt a fanbook, there’s a 75% chance of it happening over Christmas. This time three years ago I was doing my very first adaptation, the Fruits Basket Fan Book – Cat-; two years ago I was adapting the Genshiken Official Book; and now I’m working on the second Fruits Basket fanbook. (Sometime in between I adapted the second Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle Character Guide, but clearly that was an anomaly.)
Add in the fact that fanbooks are a lot of work, that it’s the holiday season (and we have a friend visiting for said holidays), and that I have another assignment pending which probably wants a very quick turnaround, and once again my review copy backlog is being neglected. There’s a lot of stuff in that stack that I’m dying to read–the new Sand Chronicles, which I can’t crack open until I get at least two more reviews written!–but right now I’m mostly hunkering down and banking on getting as many written as possible come January.
I’ve still been holding steady at roughly one review a week, though, so here’s what I’ve been talking about lately:
Beast Master vol. 1 (B-)
Butterflies, Flowers vol. 1 (B+)
Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden vol. 9 (B+)
High School Debut vol. 12 (A-)
Rasetsu vol. 2 (B+)
I’ve also been squeezing in a bit of non-review reading, which (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere) recently included reading vol. 1-6 of Yotsuba&!. Vol. 7 is winging its way here via Amazon, and I can’t wait to get it. I keep thinking of new people to recommend it to. Other people have been taking care of reviewing it on MangaLife, so I’m glad to see it represented over there. This series is definitely on my to-buy list, despite the library graciously offering to lend it to me any time I want.
A Radical Interpretation of the Text 