I'm about halfway through Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth (author of Day of the Jackal). It's flat out fascinating - a complete manual of how to overthrow a small African dictatorship, going into insane levels of detail over every facet of such an operation. For research the author met with mercenaries and arms dealers, posing as an interested party in throwing a coup of New Guinea. The balls on this guy.
There's a movie with Christopher Walken that's also pretty good, though it's less interested in the actual mechanics of throwing a coup.
I have been translating Five Star Monogatari: Traffics 3... slowly.
How do you pick what series to translate?
Because nobody else is doing it and I want to know who John met and why they got attacked, and why artbook 6 has Sopp and Lachesis helping Minogshia and Palsuet is in a NSUA uniform. I want to know wtf is going on and the internet is giving me no answers so my only choice is to plow through it and learn how to read japanese.
Everyone dropped FSS when Nagano went on hiatus for a decade and then came back and said Gothicmade was now just part of the canon.
I guess I don't read a lot of manga so I don't have any context. Do you read a lot in Japanese, then say "Hey, I bet some English audience would like this?"
Pretend like you're talking to your dad.
Uh, no.
This is my first attempt at forcing myself to learn to read it, although like any gaijin who's watched it for decades I've picked up enough spoken to follow a conversation.
SInce the coof hit I picked up the Genki 1 2 books (the nominal "standard" for introductory japanese for english speakers) and have been leaning on google to deal with the kanji.