Kyoto Animation Announces "Hyouka" TV Anime

The 2001 novel, pictured below, is the first in the koten-bu series, and won an honorable mention in the Kadokawa campus novel contest, mystery horror genre. It centers on Houtarou Oreki, a high schooler who is resistant to getting involved with anything. This changes when he joins the koten-bu club, and is tasked with solving everyday mysteries. What's up with the classroom you can't enter? What about the mysterious book that's always checked out of the library? These puzzles and more—including an incident from 33 years ago involving a female club member's uncle—await in Yonezawa's tale.

Anime-news

Dead Poet Society

My favourite film: Dead Poets Society | Film | guardian.co.uk

There are some films that, if you watch them for the first time at the right age, have the capacity to inspire and embolden you: Dead Poets Society is one such film. It is not a film that it is cool to admit loving. It is uncynical, idealistic and hopeful – not qualities one necessarily associates with film snobs, but what it lacks in critical kudos it has recouped in audience appreciation. It has been voted the greatest school film and it is often cited by viewers as one of the most inspirational films of all time. It certainly inspired me at a time when I most needed it.

Michael W. Klein, Something for Nothing. MIT.

Something for Nothing

Small World. Blue Angel. Wonder Boys. Straight Man. It makes intuitive sense that many academic novels focus on professors of English or other humanities disciplines – “write what you know,” as the saying goes. But the upshot of all those writers writing about writers is that there are a lot fewer writers writing about, say, scientists. Or mathematicians. Or economists.To Michael W. Klein, this dearth looked like an opportunity.

Inside Higher Ed

David Gilmour - The Film Club

The Film Club

David Gilmour is a father as well as a novelist and former film critic. He has written a memoir, “The Film Club,” about his decision to allow his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing. Because it smacked of a plot gimmick from one of the movies Gilmour used to review, I feared the book would be similarly cute and tidy. But it’s a heartfelt portrait of how hard it is to grow up, how hard it is to watch someone grow up and how in the midst of a family’s confusion and ire, there is sometimes nothing so welcome as a movie. NYTimes.com

Chad Harbach, Inside the Whale

Inside the Whale: campus novel

Near the end of Moby-Dick is an indelible description of two boats lost to the White Whale: “The odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Reality rears its ugly, barnacle-encrusted head, and the mind retreats to cheerful thoughts of the ladle, the pewter cups, and the fireside. This tension lies at the heart of Chad Harbach’s Melville-obsessed debut novel, which is also a baseball novel, a campus novel, and a Jonathan Franzen-blurbed publishing event. Fielding’s epigraph is a snippet from fictitious Westish College’s fight song, the sort of thing belted out by punch-ruddied lads of the Old School. The book emanates from a wish peculiar to happy college students: “All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change.”

The Weekly Standard

N. Sampath Kumar - Campus Cola

Campus Cola

is a medical college campus novel with the classic plotlines of adjusting to a new institution..." asiange

Campus Cola -

At forty-three, Hucky’s life is torn apart. He’s jilted (his young lover doesn’t fancy him anymore), jobless (his boss wants him to take a break and recharge), totally messed up, and is battling the blues. Since nostalgia is therapeutic, he decides to pen a book on his fun-drenched salad days at Defcoms, a Bangalore-based medical college that churns out doctors for the armed forces. He recalls a journey pulsating with adventure, ragging, grueling regimen, romance, road trips rustication, dares, foreigner babes, power politics, drug addiction, gang warfare, academic gloominess, comical events, draconian rules, a Zen master, philosophy, God-consciousness and rebellion. What’s more, the delightful campus romp is energised by an eccentric genius, an avid bettor, two brawny dudes, a war cry shouter, a planner of wild schemes (all part of the ‘Maniacs’ gang), and a few mushy lovers who make life unbelievably colourful. Seen through the right prism of seven maverick minds, it’s as psychedelic a journey as the LSD trips Hucky loves. Just when he’ getting numbed again by melancholy, Hucky and Paddy, a nephew he’s shacking up with, drink a death cocktail, meet God, and find their lives racing towards a magical, delightful new beginning.

Gopal Books Publishers

Chetan Bhagat - The Preachy Professor

Chetan Bhagat - The Preachy Professor

Reading a Chetan Bhagat novel used to be considered a non-reader’s approach to reading in my circles. Well, he did start the Light & Hearty Campus Novel revolution with Five Point Someone. Now, with the campus novel market flooding with books selling for profanity or casual humor or just relevance to a reality you’re aware of, you’d think Chetan Bhagat’s novel would lose the charm? No, Sir. Every new book seems like a level-up with this guy. Nothing could I respect more. read