Ouran High School Host Club Vol 1-10

Everytime I pass by a bookstore, I would always vist the manga shelf (or shelves) to see if there's anything that might interest me. Usually I would only see a few volumes available per series. And frustratingly, volume one seems to be always missing. Despite these reasons, I still keep checking, hoping that I'll find something I like.

Yesterday, I got lucky. I found volumes 1 to 6 of Vampire Knight and volumes 1 to 10 or Ouran High School Host Club. I decided to go for the Ouran volumes because I was in the mood for something funny (I bought all ten books). Good thing that since the manga titles were from a Singaporean publisher (Chuang Yi), each volume just costs about half the price of a usual manga title published in the US. In addition to that, all volumes had a 20% discount! It looked like the planets were lining up in my favor! :-)

Here's a short summary of the Ouran series:

Haruhi Fujioka is a scholarship student at Ouran High School, a fictional school located in Bunkyō, Tokyo. Because of the superlative cost of the school uniform, Haruhi resorts to wearing long slacks, polo shirts and vests. Combined with her large glasses and tousled short hair, Haruhi's look causes her to be confused for a boy.

Looking for a quiet place to study, Haruhi stumbles upon the Third Music Room, the working place of the Ouran Host Club, a group of six attractive male students (Takashi Morinozuka, called "Mori"; Mitsukuni Haninozuka, called "Hunny"; twins Kaoru and Hikaru Hitachiin; Tamaki Suou, and Kyoya Ootori) who spend their time charming and entertaining the school's girls for profit. During their first meeting, Haruhi accidentally knocks over and break a vase valued at ¥8,000,000, estimated to be US$80,000.

In order to pay off the large debt, Haruhi is employed as the club's "dog" and constantly ordered to do menial tasks like serving food or cleaning up. The Club president, without knowing she is really a girl, promotes Haruhi to "host" as soon as he discovers her potential. Even after the truth comes out in the Club, Haruhi continues the charade and is allowed to pay off the rest of her debt working as a host; in order to accomplish this, Haruhi conceals her true identity/gender from the customers.

The only unfortunate thing about this is that it looks like I won't be buying any more mangas for about a month or so. I've got to watch it or I might spend all my money on manga. Hehe.