Just because Kamen Rider W's opening song is even more awesome when sung live. :D



I love:

• Kamiki Aya's energy during the song; she makes it even more amazing to listen to. And her voice is so powerful.
• How the lighting is mainly green and purple; the colours of Kamen Rider W's default Cyclone/Joker form.
• How Takuya adds in, "さぁ、お前の罪を数えろ！" at 2:19. Listen to the crowd SCREAM after he says it.
  ("Saa, omae no tsumi wo kazoero!" is Kamen Rider W's catchphrase in the show. It translates to, "Now, count your sins!")

Ooh, look. Another post.

This time, just to update on my reading and the "100 books" goal... which really doesn't look like it'll be fulfilled. Hmm.
Oh well, doesn't mean I have to stop reading. Hahaha.

I have really and truly run out of shelf space. The books are piling up on my room desk now, which I don't really use, since my cousin is using my room, and we all study/work in the upstairs common area, anyway.

My mum remarked to me on Monday:
"Gerri, the books on your table.. reaching the ceiling already, you know."

To which I replied:
"Which is why I keep saying I need more shelf space, what."

But what she's saying is just an exaggeration; they're not reaching the ceiling. They're only halfway there.


Anyway!

The Reading List as of today:
1. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire (completed 28th January)
2. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (compiled in one book), by Lewis Carroll (completed: 16th January)
This is listed as book 2, even though it was finished earlier, because Wicked was started first.

3. After the Quake, by Murakami Haruki (completed: 12th February)
4. I Am Number Four, by Pittacus Lore (completed: 16th February)
5. The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (completed: 18th April)
6. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, by Tsutsui Yasutaka (completed: 28th April)
7. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick (completed: 19th May, while on the plane back from Japan! :D)
8. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keyes (started: 28th April. Still reading. Oops.)
9. Plainsong, by Hosaka Kazushi (completed: 2nd June)

This book was kind of an impulse buy; I remember walking past the Japanese Literature shelf at Kinokuniya and the cover just catching my eye. The cover really is as plain as it looks in the picture - I'm not sure if there're other covers, but this is the one that I have.

The story inside is no grand masterpiece, but a meandering telling of the just-slightly-short-of-mundane life of our protagonist and the friends who randomly stumble into his life and just... stick there. The protagonist is someone not too different from the average person on the street; someone who did reasonably well in school, landed a respectable job, and lives comfortably enough within his means; with no great destiny, and simply going about his life from day-to-day. But those happenings of his day-to-day life do make for a heartwarming story. :)

Give it a try if you have a day when you have nothing to do, and you have the time for a quiet sit-down. :)


10. The Grass is Singing, by Doris Lessing (completed: 31st July)

To be honest, there isn't anything to *like* about this story. How does one like a story about how a person slowly loses oneself in a sucking downward spiral that hits a new low everytime you think they might've already hit rock-bottom?

But even though that's the way it is, it's still oddly compelling; even though you wonder how the characters can carry on the way they are, how everyone can be so blind as to believe in their racist sentiments, and you know that it does not meet a happy end, you're compelled to finish it. At least, I was. Maybe it's partly morbid fascination, and partly a sort of schadenfreude.

It's not a happy story. But it still is a good one.


11. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins (completed: 16th June)
12. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins (completed: 18th June)
13. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins (completed: 23rd June)


Yes, it's the Hunger Games trilogy. I decided to jump on the bandwagon and see what everyone was raving about, since my sister came home with the first book, borrowed from one of her friends, and she seemed to go through them pretty quickly. I was a little curious about the series, since the movie was making such a big thing of it, and since my sister was reading through them so fast, I figured they should be pretty easy reading and that I should be able to get through it even faster.

The story is good; exciting and well-paced, with vivid descriptions (of feelings, sensations, scenery, people, injuries and decimated landscapes all alike). It falls into its cliched moments sometimes - ah, young love and all that - but it's very absorbing.


14. The Good Terrorist, by Doris Lessing (started: 6th August)
I picked another Doris Lessing book off the shelf after finishing The Grass is Singing. I think it was the first thing that I saw when I opened my bookcase, haha.

And yeah, Flowers for Algernon still isn't completed yet. Sigh.
Because that's the bedtime-reading book, and I tend to read a lot of other things on my laptop instead at night, into the wee hours of the morning, by the time I actually crawl into bed, I find I don't have any time for actual bedtime reading. If I did stay up any longer to read in bed, I might not be able to wake up for work.

... Then again, I might still wake up; my brain might carry on sleeping, though. :p

And Flowers for Algernon is written in a diary-entry style that I find kinda difficult to stay with... it bores me a little after a while. But, oh well; shall stick with it - have to finish it now that I've started it, anyway - and maybe things will develop more as it goes on.

Yoohoo~!

Okay. I think I have a lot of err... backdated updating to do. Did that sound like an oxymoron to anyone...? "Backdated updating".. huh.

I haven't properly blogged since before I left for Japan in May!

But for now, just to let off some pent-up energy (I'm caffeinated and slightly twitchy :D), let me introduce you to my newest obsession: Kamen Rider W! (Also known/ read as "Kamen Rider Double")

Okay, technically, this was the 2009 Kamen Rider series; it was airing alongside the second half of Shinkenger, after Kamen Rider Decade finished its run. Except... I was only interested in Shinkenger then, and I wasn't particularly drawn to Decade. Inoue Masahiro might have done a far too good job portraying the standoffish protagonist. :p

So I kinda paid no attention to W (Double) as well.

So how the heck have I come around to it only now?

Well, sometime last month, I stumbled across some clips on YouTube; Peacemaker Kurogane actually had a stage play! And, playing Okita Souji - Hamao Kyousuke!

He does a really good job of it too; he generally does good interpretations of characters he plays, really rising to the occasion when he's acting, so it's really funny that in real life, he's just kind of... blur. LOL. But it's somewhat lovable. Haha.

And then, that reminded me of Goseiger (the Sentai series which replaced Shinkenger after it ended), which Hamao acted in, and which I never finished watching... So I thought maybe I'd go finish watching it.

I had the long weekend to burn, after all... Hari Raya holiday on Sunday meant PH-in-lieu on Monday, and then I took Tuesday off. Wahaha.

Now, the thing is, Sentai and Kamen Rider series always air back-to-back, in a one-hour slot, and there's usually a very brief teaser for both shows at the beginning of the hour, showing snippets of that week's episodes and what to expect. Sentai usually runs first in this hourly slot, so in all my Goseiger (and some Shinkenger downloads), there're teasers of the W episodes that aired alongside Goseiger.

And they sounded quite interesting, so I got... tempted. Into watching W. And now I'm just... hooked. Haha.

First thing that drew me in: I'm not a particularly big Kamen Rider fan (apart from watching Masked Rider when I was er... much younger), but I don't think there've been many (or any) Kamen Rider series where the Rider is made up of two people.

Which is why Kamen Rider W (Double) is named the way it is; this series' Rider requires two people to transform to "make" the Rider, and when transformed, there're basically two minds in one body - Hidari (which literally means "left" in Japanese) Shoutarou is the Rider's left side, and Philip - this younger boy who doesn't seem to have much in the way of a personal history - is the right.

Oh, the myriad ways in which this means that things can go wrong... after all, as Philip says, "The two of us are a single detective." I'm sure that means that if either of them were incapacitated somehow, neither would be able to transform. Interesting. XD

During the non-serious and "daily-life" moments of the series so far (I'm only up to episode 14 at the moment), I love the comic timing, and the way that Kiriyama Renn (Shoutarou) and Suda Masaki (Philip) portray their characters just makes the series so FUN. :D

And okay, one of the things I love best so far is really Philip's character.

He reminds me a little of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory; they both don't really care much for other people (apart from a very select few), and are quite absorbed in books and knowledge and research. But although Sheldon is still extremely entertaining in all his intellectual snobbery, Philip, by comparison...

.... is fucking awesome. :D

Sheldon is an eccentric know-it-all, but Philip *could* actually technically know *everything* as long as he wanted to and had the time to look it up.

Because Philip seems to have been born with an ability to access the Earth's memories; which looks a bit like him appearing in a bright white, non-space, filled with thousands upon thousands of bookshelves full of books. I suppose there's a reason why he calls it the "Planetary Bookshelf".
It's also a bit like how I imagine my dream library to be, except with actual walls, made of dark wood, with soft carpets and sofas and muted yellow lighting. XD

At his whim, and using keywords, he looks through all this to find information he needs, and the bookshelves and books basically shuffle around him and disappear if they are deemed redundant in any "search".





I think the above two gifs are from someone's Tumblr... Pretty much the visual representation of Philip's brain doing a Google search.

And the bulldog clips in his hair. Adorkable. Haha. :D

And the opening song! "W-B-X", which stands for "W-Boiled Extreme". Yeah, "Double-Boiled Extreme" sounds kinda silly, but it's a reference to the show. Shoutarou actually runs a private investigation agency, with Philip's help, and likes to think of himself as a real man's man, a "hard-boiled detective". Philip and Akiko (one of the side characters) just think he's "half-boiled" instead. Which gets his goat everytime. XD

Love how it starts with the muted trumpet, giving it a sound that's reminiscent of black-and-white detective films, and I love the way Kamiki Aya and Takuya voices overlay each other in the chorus.


In particular, I like these lines in the chorus:
"W-B-X
2人のBody＆Soul ひとつに (他に無いさOnlyつまり相乗り)
W-B-X
最高のパートナー 出逢う時 奇跡おこる (So we can make it)"

"W-B-X
The bodies and souls of two become one (I will ride with only you and no other)
W-B-X
When I meet the best partner, a miracle will happen (So we can make it)"