Incoherent Thoughts

An interesting thing happened just now. Remember the order I placed at Amazon.co.jp? Well, no wonder the shipping&handling was so expensive.
I was just on my way to buy some food when I got a call from some courier service, saying I had a package from Japan. =D; A special delivery of mail? In Finland? From Japan? In three days? Wow. I shall wonder about that cost no more. (usually I pick a rather cheap option of promised delivery in a week or two and sometimes no tracking even. My games usually cost me around two or three euros in shipping&handling)
Although I'd still prefer if there was a cheaper option available. I couldn't see any other option in the order form, and even the FAQ stated just that one price for international orders. Will just have to make sure to order more stuff in one order in the future. 4,000 yen, really now... x__X

So, what did I order? Two books in the Final Fantasy XI novel series of course. I looked at the French version offerings at Amazon.fr, and noticed that they'd apparently changed the fifth part's release date to...last December. And that it wasn't available at all other than from non-Amazon sellers, and they only shipped within France. So I got bored of this eternal question of what language I should buy the series in and just switched to Japanese.
Although to be honest, I did skip the fifth and sixth parts of the series in the vain hope that I can get them in French sometime soon. You see, there are several different storylines within the series. Parts 4-6 are of one group (and are in fact a trilogy within the series, Sword of Protection Books I-III), and parts 1-3 and 7 are of another. Even though time passes between books 3 and 7 (and one of the group's members appears in 4-6) I figured it should still be understandable enough even if I skip books 5 and 6 for now.
...the only problem is that part 8 starts another trilogy of the second group, the one that appeared in parts 4-6. Oops. Forgot to take that into consideration when ordering these books. =D;;

Talking of the series, its latest part, Happy Gift (..yes, it's really called that. Well, ハッピー­ギフト, but that's the same thing), was released on the 29th of March. It's the 25th part in the series...

Anyway, I'm not too certain how I'll do with reading these books. I've never tried reading something as long as a whole book in Japanese before. It somehow doesn't bode well that I had to resort to a dictionary just to understand the title of the 7th book, 遥かなる翼... I mean, I was familiar with both words, I just didn't know what 'haruka' was in kanji, and didn't remember what 'tsubasa' was (trust me, I can remember it now). Even in the title of the 8th book, 騎士の誇りI, I had to consult a dictionary before understanding the last word (hokori/pride). This does not bode well at all...
I guess I should think of it as a good thing. More practice is always good, right? =D;