Currently Reading (95% Battle Royale, 5% Everything Else)

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist by Michael J. Fox
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The one that I have trouble putting down at the end of the night when I can barely keep my eyes open any longer is Battle Royale.

I watched the movie first. "Actor-redemption" for Tatsuya Fujiwara after hating him (well, not really him, but his character) for four and a half hours during the Death Note films. Anyway. The film version was pretty good, if not somewhat predictable. It was unsettling to see these junior high school students killing eachother, usually without giving it a second thought...But I felt pretty detached from it all. Really, there's only so much you can accomplish in a movie that lasts for less than two hours and features 42 different students in the lineup. How much characterization could there possibly be? That doesn't make it a bad film, it just makes it a bit harder to be drawn into it.

As for the book...Well. Between working during the day and falling asleep at 8:00 the past couple nights, there hasn't been much time to read it (I've only had it since Tuesday). I've just now reached page 100, the beginning of Part 2, with 31 students remaining. (It's worth noting that the novel is over 500 pages.) I've always loved reading. It's so easy to get lost in a good book. This one hasn't let go of my attention for a minute.

What I can say so far, though, is that what the movie lacked in characterization, the book more than makes up for. (For the record, the book came first.) You learn the backgrounds of each student, where they come from, what type of person they were before being thrown into a "game" where the objective is to kill all their classmates and be the lone survivor, the "winner," if you consider murdering your friends and classmates as winning at the end of the day.

It's not a book I could recommend for everyone, because it is pretty detailed, thus making it incredibly disturbing at times. But if you can handle it, it's definitely an interesting novel.