I actually read this book a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been procrastinating over what to write about it. I mean, writing any kind of descriptive text regarding the content of the book seems somewhat fruitless given that pretty much everyone who is reading this is going to be familiar with it anyway. I’m struggling to draw any conclusion beyond “It’s Haruhi in book form”, a statement which is more than a little bit obvious.

The problem is that, even though it’s been a few years since the anime adaptation originally aired, things like the constant references in Lucky Star, the Haruhi-chan series, the shows current re-broadcast and the franchises rabid fanbase, who continue to talk and write about the show regardless of how little news surfaces regarding it, means that, to this day, there’s an overwhelming sense of over-familiarity regarding the content. All of which rather tainted my experience with the book version – the sense of familiarity robs the book of much of it’s interest value. As a result, I found the book to be brief and lacking in substance.

Whilst none of this seems like a particularly valid criticism of the actual book, which is at least fun, it is pretty much the reason I’ve been struggling to write anything about this it. Saying that, my conclusion is that pretty much everyone who reads this blog is going to be in the same situation, making it hard to figure out who, if anyone, I could actually recommend this book to. It doesn’t really help that this book is entirely consisting of the material which was used for the core continuity episodes of the shows first season, meaning that it’s all the exposition and establishment of the setting, and none of the wacky hijinks that is derived from it, and may well have been fun to revisit. It’s the book with the most presence in the anime version, meaning there’s little new here for fans. The second book, The Sigh of Suzumiya Haruhi (well, the Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, since they switched the name order), published later this year, will probably prove the be more interesting, but that’s for the future.

Yen Press put out two versions of the English-language book from the onset, both paperback and hardback variants. I bought the hardback version, the difference being that it has a hard cover (duh!) and the original Japanese cover artwork. The paperback version has a rather plain red cover, choosing not to flout it’s fanboyish origins in an attempt to garner more teen-fiction sales (not that this worked for Tokyopop, despite a number of great titles they published). I’ve not had my hands on the paperback personally, but from what I’ve heard the actual pages are exactly the same between the two – this is really to the detriment of the hardback as opposed to the benefit of the paperback version. The paper is cheaper than I’d normally expect from a hardback book, being a little thin and yellow-tinged. Whilst the sporadic images came out OK, the print on the text is a little less solid in places that I’d like as well. I’m a little disappointed that the hardback didn’t come with a slipcover either – it’s really hard to justify the difference in cost between the two versions of the book when there isn’t a huge advantage to it.

The book does have colour pages, moved to the books rear rather than the front where they’d appear in the Japanese version (and, to be fair, given how spoiler filled these thins tend to be, that’s probably a good thing), and the replication quality of those were fine. There’s also a few pages of the manga version, which I can’t say I’ve read given it’s yet another version of the same thing. The print quality seemed a bit iffy, anyway.