Excerpt from an email I sent Fred a few minutes ago

"I haven't been reading any fiction lately, mostly nonfiction, or nothing. Well that's not true, I read the novel Battle Royaleby Koushun Takami, which kicks more ass that any novel has a right to kick ass. It's a crazy gonzo scifi pulp about Japanese teenagers under fascism in 1997 forced to fight to the death, which is one thing, but its secret weapon is excellent characterization, which is why, at 600 pages it is not at all too long."

Due to cannibalization this post took almost no time at all, though still more time than I thought, owing to time I lost to the tangential task of setting up an Amazon link for which I tried several different versions. Waste of time.