Ladies and gentlemen, The Point of No Return from Phantom of the Opera.

Hello again, everyone. Just thought I'd do a post to let everyone know how I'm doing. By the way, the above song was used in this post because I watched Phantom of the Opera again yesterday. It's kind of becoming an early December tradition of mine to watch that. Anyway, I'd like to start by thanking everyone who offered book suggestions to put on my Christmas List this year. If anyone is interested in what I decided to put down, I went with Carrie by Stephen King, The Count of Monte Cristo and volumes four through six of a little manga series called From the New World. It's actually a pretty decent manga, but I stopped getting it mainly due to economic reasons. And when I found out that the series is going to end in the seventh volume that's coming out soon, I decided that this might be a good shot at catching up.

I almost put down the first two light novel volumes of Sword Art Online, but I got kind of gun-shy when I read a pretty negative review on the Anime News Network site of the most recent volume. Of course it seems like ANN has been pretty negative about SAO in general, from some of the reviews I've seen by them. Plus the light novel volume that was reviewed covered the latter half of the Fairy Dance arc, and I will admit that arc was not all that great. The following observations are spoilers, but one thing I didn't like about that arc was that Asuna had been pretty much reduced to the role of a damsel in distress. Plus the story went off on kind of a tangent when Kirito took a little break from his epic and urgent quest to save the girl he loved when he got involved in the game's politics. Now if he had no choice but to get involved in said politics, like say if that little dispute between the two fairy tribes was somehow actually an obstacle he had to overcome to reach Asuna, that would've been okay. Otherwise, all that bit did was get the story a little off track.

So anyway, I got my list finished and emailed to my dad. So thanks again to everyone who offered suggestions. We'll see if my list bares any fruit. Meanwhile, I ended up getting most of my Christmas shopping done today. One of the places I went to for shopping was this used CD store. I think I found some stuff that my dad will like, though trying to buy them was a little aggravating. There was just one guy at the register, and when it was finally time for me to check out, he turned his attention away from me to this other family who was trying to buy stuff. It was probably fifteen or twenty minutes before I was able to leave the store.

In other news, tonight is when Toonami begins its month of movies. And this night they're stating with another episode of that Hellsing Ultimate series followed by Summer Wars. I could never get into Hellsing Ultimate and I have Summer Wars on DVD. Got it about a year ago during a post-Christmas shopping trip. So tonight chances are I'll probably just pop in the my Summer Wars DVD and watch that. I'd skip all the commercials and wouldn't have to stay up until about 2:30 AM. Anyway, that about wraps it up for this post. I hope everyone else has had a good week so far.