Things that happen in bookstores

[rushthatspeaks]

I am all tangled up in an essay for coffeeandink, which is doing the thing that overview-of-writer essays do where you suddenly want to reread everything you can get your hands on by the writer first and then discover that it is buried under the quantities of things your boyfriend is leaving about prior to putting them in boxes (okay, that last may just be me), but it is coming along fairly well considering.

The obvious thing to do, given said piles of stuff, was to go to a bookstore to see if I could add even more stuff to leave around in piles, so I did.

In the manga section, I ran across a pair of twelve-years-old or so boys who were fighting over the last copy of Death Note 4, and happened to mention to one of them that no, the series *is* still running in Japan, and they are not in fact going to be left with, like, five volumes and no plot resolution no matter how cagey Shounen Jump is about the release schedules, so we got talking, and then one of them said A Thing.

Serious question, manga people: what would you tell a twelve-year-old who asked you for recommendations based on the qualifying statement 'Can you find me something else like Death Note? It's almost as good as Yu-Gi-Oh!' (Book types, I'm not entirely certain what kind of quality analogy to insert here, but something along the lines of 'something like Tolkien because he is almost as good as Terry Brooks'.)

I don't think I actually started twitching visibly.

I gave them Qwan and Flame of Recca and Hunter X Hunter. One of them bought volume 1 of Qwan.

B. points out that I should not actually give up on the younger generation in despair, because at that age one does not necessarily distinguish gives-me-pleasure from is-genuinely-good, a state I remember quite well. I am not sure what I'd have made of Death Note at twelve. I think I'd actually have found it very scary, especially since that was well before I got into comics and I still find the shinigami designs Really Icky, but these were obviously media-savvy video-gamer Cartoon-Network-watching twelve-year-olds who weren't at all squicked.

(Mind you, is it healthy not to be freaked out by Death Note on some level?)

Then I went and bought Sara Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered, which is one of the very few books I have ever begun that caused hysterical laughter during the second sentence. Have promised it to myself as reward for untangling the essay.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I definitely did not have good taste in reading material at twelve; it took me quite a bit longer to develop it, in fact. Part of it was just that I would read anything I could get my hands on, which tended to vary pretty widely in quality.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I probably would have recommended Bleach and Naruto, but there really isn't anything else I've come across that's even remotely similar to Death Note-- let alone Yu-Gi-Oh!. Perhaps Monster, which I haven't read yet?

I think a more apt comparison than Brooks and Tolkien, because Brooks, however awful, was ripping off Tolkien and so had a number of surface qualities in common, would be, "Can you find me another writer like Georgette Heyer? She's almost as good as R. L. Stine!"

[larryhammer]

"Can you find me another writer like Georgette Heyer? She's almost as good as R. L. Stine!"

o_O

O_o

...

[octopedingenue]

Er. I've heard that the early "Yu-Gi-Oh!" manga is better than the anime...?

Yeah, never mind.

"Death Note" freaked me out so much with the first chapter six months ago that I've only recently picked it up again to read past it, and I love it now of course, but I'm still intensely creeped out by the well-done polite sociopathic mindgames because I am a total wuss.

The ones you've recced are good choices (wheee "Qwan"!); I might've added "Yu Yu Hakusho" for the yay-tournaments similarity with YGO. "Monster" is the most similar to "Death Note" I've seen in terms of well-done polite sociopathic mindgames with no supernatural pyrotechnics, if you're a mature 12-year-old who likes German history with your mindgames.

I still have problems with my inner 12-year-old as we fight over gives-me-pleasure vs. is-genuinely-good.

[rabidfangurl.livejournal.com]

I was reading Regency novels when I was twelve. In between reading the Redwall series.

[zdenka]

I think I would hand them Kenshin, on general principles. It's a shounen manga and it's good, though I do not claim it is brilliant.