They said it’s a grand masterpiece of world literature, majestically rigging together a beautiful tapestry of world culture and languages. I think it’s more like a health hazard just waiting to shatter your foot if you accidentally drop it. At over 1500 pages, it manages to both overwhelm and bore you with its underdeveloped, forgettable characters and convoluted plot. Seriously, I’d like to know what substances the authors were on when they decided their book need not 10 not 20 but 96382 characters, as if readers could possibly keep track of all that. The plot is also a mess and their idea of a plot twist include things like Han unification and the interaction of combining marks with ligatures that only superfans drool over. For the rest of us, avoid this book at all costs!
Yes, seriously, it’s a book from 2003 that contains every single Unicode character at that time. Yep, all 96382 of them. At least half of the book is just endless grids of CJK characters, the vast majority of which probably haven’t been used ever since a scribe made a typo in 200 BCE. (Hmm maybe this is a sign that CJK characters should be abolished but that’s a topic for a different controversial blog post.) OK, I’ll admit that not all the characters are boring. For some of the greatest hits of CJK weirdness, check out the kStrange property.
If you’re interested, this book is also officially available as a bunch of PDFs that includes a 33 MB list of all Unicode characters in its full glory. A few years ago, I also made a website with every single Unicode character, which may crash your browser. Or actually, you should probably check out this much better Unicode Map that someone else made which won’t crash your browser, although it only contains the BMP and not the entirety of Unicode.
Lastly, I ran my photo through Google image translate and I guess it’s garbage in, garbage out!