Ikusamonogatari Read:

This was a good book despite being about Hitagi, which is kind of surprising.  I guess Hitagi isn't all bad.  Though you could say the book was really mainly about Shinobu, which would explain why the book was good.  Basically it was a book about how names, how you address people, change your relationship with them.  Or as '100 Waifus' would say, there is magic and power in a name.

Very little happened in the book, which instead relied on jokes and witty exchanges about trivial things to somehow expand into an entire book.  But it was really funny and really witty, so Nisio knows what he's doing.  The book is good enough that it's worth adding Nisio Isin back into my good books hall of fame, at the expense of Isaac Asimov who is once again kicked out.  For now this is the only 'value-added' Bakemonogatari volume, with all the rest getting an anime, but I suspect there will be more volumes in the future and Nisio will climb back up the ranks of my favorite authors.

On a melancholy note, the book constantly talked about how it had to keep changing the story to keep up with new censorship standards.  This could be considered a dark joke and not actually a serious mandate, but jokes are always half-true.  The fact that the author feels he has to contort his story to keep getting published is tragic.  Bakemonogatari is a great work of art and should be allowed to follow the inner genius of the author wherever he wants it to go, without worrying about meaningless things.  I feel No Game No Life and Oreimo were already crippled by censorship, so it's a shame we have to start talking about Bakemonogatari too.  Why can't authors and readers who like their works just be left alone?  Why does anybody else get a say in the matter?

Who exactly has been harmed by the 13th greatest anime ever made?  And does that harm outweigh the good it's done for everybody else?  The millions of fans worldwide?

Meanwhile, Russia has retaken Krinky, Rabotyne, Klisheevka and Bilogorovka, four towns they lost to Ukrainian offensives and then found were incredibly difficult to regain.  The fact that these places which had seemed unconquerable for so long are suddenly falling one after the other shows the Kharkov offensive has been a brilliant success.  Ukraine diverted too many forces north to hold what they had elsewhere and now they're paying the price.  Now Russia just has to take Urozhaine and Nevelske and Ukraine's previous offensive efforts will be completely annulled.  Of course, Russia once held Kherson, Izium and Lyman, so there's still a long ways to go to redress those embarrassments, but step by step everything is headed in the right direction.