ploughed thru many manga scanlations but few worthy of note – “boys on the run” by kengo hanazawa much loved tho – acutely embarrassing and painfully funny – the one-off “shark skin man and peach hip girl” by mochizuki minetaro (creator of “dragon head”) also enjoyed – “abara” by tsutomu nifei, like all his books made less sense the more you read but would love to play a video game that looked like this – and read “blankets” by craig thompson just to see what all the fuss is about – it is a good read, tho the religious stuff grated for me – also finally finished russell brand’s “booky wook 2″ – comedy books always a bit of a slog, if not unreadable (rik mayall!)
…in a way brings me to irvine welsh’s “skagboys”, my current bedtime story – a hefty great brick of a book cobbled together from “trainspotting” leftovers – a prequel – picking this up in the bookstore i was actually most taken and sold by the nice fetishistic soft rubber-ish feel to the cover, haha! – i wouldn’t call myself a fan but have read many of his books – mostly quite entertaining – tho always wonder how american and other foreign readers deal with the scottish vernacular – even without having to translate this word by word it’s a bit of a slow read – but around 160 pages in i’m starting to get into it – thatcher era setting always good for me
Irvine Welsh is always hit or miss with me. He can never keep up the pace and I end up being disappointed with a few exceptions. How do foreigners deal with it? For the first few pages its like “WTF” but then you start picking it up and by the end you don’t even notice the difference.
gea* only deals with it well because her primary language is South American, but it’s impossible everyone who speaks true English, i.e., American.
One suspects that the Scots make up their dialect on the fly, being afraid that someone might charge them rent for using an already established language.
Although I’m Brazilian I’ve managed to read Trainspotting this year. The first pages were a little difficult, but as the reading went on I was eager to eat the whole book and finished it within a month. As I teach Portuguese to a scottish woman I used to ask her my doubts, i.e, “likesay” and “ken?” but in general I could infer the meaning. It was fun most of the time.
Welsh and Americans.
Well, they have a glossary of terms in the back of the book with numbered citing the first time a term is printed in the book.
I don’t think he would be nearly as popular here otherwise.