May your coming year be filled with good read

To put things simply...

Happy New Year to all my readers (and mom who also follow my blog)! I hope that you will have a great year with plenty of amazing books to read!


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On other news... I am quite busy lately working on finishing books. There are just too many Thai books or books that have been translated into Thai (with no available English translation) to read, so I am on a reading crunch time here.



These are a few of books that I have finished. Most are translated Japanese novels, some are Taiwanese.

To top that all, my neighbor just gave me her old books after hearing how much I like to read...



These books are quite old vulnerable so I doubt that I can carry them to US without damaging these old pals... I don't know if I would have times to eat, breath, and finish all of them...

When being the M is a darn good thing...

After witnessing an interesting reaction from a writer towards a bad review of her book, I think it might be ideal if bad writers are all masochists. At least, they would be happy hearing that their books are a piece of crap.

-Your ever faithful reader [back in Thailand for winter break, reading a year worth of Thai books like crazy)

Crappy covers, manly front, emoboy story

I often have an issue with novel covers. I guess that it may be an elitist attitude from studying design (still, I can’t help but wonder. Aren’t those who design the covers suppose to be a designer? Can’t they do better?), so I tend not to / bitch too much...

However, I can’t help but look at some covers and



Since I’m a wannabe writer, I am a bit terrified of ending up with this fate if I ever have the fortune to have my work published. I don’t know if I can bargain to design my own cover (or at least a rough sketch of it) because I am almost a professional designer. Not having to pay for the cover design supposes to be good, right? (I won’t mind doing my cover for free if only that means I can get my way with the design.)

Looking at this cover, I have no idea what the publisher were smoking. Do bad covers sell books better than good ones?



May be most readers are secretly masochist.

One of Thai writers that I know just suffer from this issue (although it wasn’t exactly new to her, as her previous books have suffered the same fate.) The cover isn’t eyes-bleedingly horrible, and it looks kind of good if only it was done 20 years earlier. This cover’s true crime (which, unfortunately, is also the same crime that has been done to countless writers) is that it misleads what the story is about! If I happen not to know the writer or the story before hand, I would have think that I am about to read the story of muscled man wearing loin cloth slaying monsters with phallic symbol and bedding hot chicks.



I absolutely won’t have guessed that the story [called ‘Mysterious Academy: Time Reaper’ in Thai] actually features a pale emo-ish boy, a tough goth princess who is saving the universe, a bisexual vampire whose catchphrase is related to camel, and a sadistic lesbian exorcist. No manly man in loin cloth and slave bitch for you. Imagine the misery of readers who pay good money only not to find manly barbaric men in this book, or the goth fans who miss the opportunity to have just another book about vampires!



Seriously, does misleading target audiences do much good to the business?

-Your ever faithful reader [somewhat back from the dark pit of crunch time)