David Chart's Blog

Category: Books

  • Loco in Japan

    A while back, when I wrote an article about racial categories in Japan, I got a response from Baye McNeil, the author of the Loco in Yokohama blog, and the two books that I will be reviewing in this blog post. That response led to me reading his books, which are primarily about his experiences…

  • 2:46: Aftershocks

    I just found out about this book via the Guardian, and I’ve already bought my copy. As the page will tell you, it’s a collection of personal reactions to the March 11th quake from people across the world with some connection to Japan. Most of them were in Japan at the time, and a fair…

  • Complete Adventurer

    This is another Dungeons and Dragons book, containing new classes, prestige classes, feats, skills, equipment, and spells. The book is aimed at characters who have lots of skills, so primarily rogues, with a few sidelights on rangers, bards, and, slightly oddly, druids. It does its job well. The scout, which is a base class, is…

  • Law in Everyday Japan

    This book is a serious legal/anthropological study of the effects of the legal system on various aspects of Japanese society. It was very interesting, in part because I learned a few more details of what the law in Japan actually is. It made me think that I need to find a basic “introduction to Japanese…

  • I Was Right

    A while ago, when writing about the Conan book I had read, I said “Oh my god, it’s Dungeons and Dragons.” A week ago, Wired had an article about Gary Gygax, which included the sentence: “[Gygax] was a fan of the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to capture…

  • Spell Compendium

    Spell Compendium is a book for D&D 3.5. It does what it says on the cover: it’s a big collection of spells, from lots of previous D&D books, revised and updated to deal with problems found after publication. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it. A couple of things struck me. The first,…

  • Daniel Deronda

    Daniel Deronda is George Eliot’s last novel. Middlemarch, also by Eliot, is a strong candidate for my favourite novel, and it’s certainly in the top five. It’s generally agreed to be the best of her works, and I think I agree. Nevertheless, Daniel Deronda was very good. There are two main stories, both concerned primarily…

  • Changeling: The Lost

    Changeling was the 2007 game for White Wolf’s World of Darkness. It was, I gather, a rather larger hit than the publishers expected, which is always nice when it happens. This is a contrast to their last attempt at Changelings. Changeling: The Dreaming could be (slightly unfairly) described as “hippies fight librarians”. Changeling: The Lost…

  • The Happiness Hypothesis

    This book is about happiness. It’s based in psychology, and draws on both ancient philosophies and modern empirical findings to discuss what makes people happy. Most of what the author comes up with are things I already do, which might explain why I’m happy. It’s a very interesting book, with a couple of things that…

  • The Third Chimpanzee

    The Third Chimpanzee was Jared Diamond’s first book. It’s all about the human animal, and the likely evolutionary background to some of our behaviour, and the likely consequences of some of the rest of it. It’s well written, entertaining, and as far as I can tell would have been accurate when it was written, so…