« Beat Crusaders | Main | Anime in Urban Space »
December 02, 2004
Meta-book
Ask my wife -- I am obsessive about checking on the status of my book. By that, I mean doing things like looking at its sales rank on Amazon (which seems to fluctuate with wild abandon) and seeing what other people have to say about it (which, so far, hasn't been that much.)
But today I did stumble across a couple of things online about the book. In an entry dating back to August 12th in The Progressive Animation Review, neilworms talks about the book in the context of the entry on Oshii in Senses of Cinema, which he says "lacks the fan-tainted rhetoric" of my book. Not that the book is wholly bad in his eyes: "[I]t is a meticulously researched book that is rough only around the edges and as a whole is a solid analysis of Oshii and his films. The fan oriented rhetoric that Brian refers is using the word depth maybe a bit too much without directly qualifying what depth means and a few other ones I can’t think off the top of my head right now…" Well, I guess it does come across in the book that I am a fan of Oshii's films, and this might even make me blind at times to some of their flaws. I'd need to see some specifics on the "depth" thing, though.
A recent review I found on Mangalocity was more laudatory. It calls the book "an excellent work" and says that "The only major flaw I see in the book is the absence of the man himself, Mamoru Oshii. However this isn't Ruh's fault. He did take a flight to Japan to interview Oshii, only to find that he was ill and unable to participate in the interview." This is why I put that bit in there at the beginning about flying to Tokyo to interview Oshii, only to be thwarted by timing and illness -- I knew that I'd be criticized for not talking with the man himself.
I'm hoping that more reviews appear within the next few months -- my publisher should have sent the book out to a bunch of places, so I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.
Posted by brianruh at December 2, 2004 03:21 PM
Comments
yeah your right I needed to work on that a bit. I'll look through the book when I have some time. I hope I didn't come across as negative, because I really enjoyed your book :).
Posted by: neilworms at December 4, 2004 02:31 PM