oh look it is April
Apr. 1st, 2009 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksHappy feast day of Loki, everybody.
Time for my booklog.
One of my stress reactions is to read more. Even so, this was kind of an insane month, when I look back at it. And I seem to have waxed pretty verbose, too.
In other words, long entry.
Books
19. Vegan Lunchbox, Jennifer McCann. Book version of a very good food blog I follow. Unfortunately, the book lacks many of the virtues of the blog, including the clear easy page layout and the lovely color photography. This compilation certainly helps one to think about menus, about balancing flavors, and about food prep as an indissoluble part of health, but honestly the book veers too far into being an advertisement for itself. Not a keeper cookbook. Go for the web version.
20. Exiles of the Stars, Andre Norton (in the reprint omnibus Moonsinger). I'd read Moon of Three Rings as a child, and I read Flight in Yiktor as an adolescent (our library copy had a really frustrating two pages missing and I have been trying to track down a different copy since), but somehow I had missed this middle book. I have to say, if I'd been imagining a book between the two others I would not have imagined Evil Ancient Egyptian Forerunner Treasure Hunt Express. I mean, this is a perfectly fine book, I just find aspects of it rather inexplicable. Does not go in my mental list of top-tier Norton but does have some pretty and some creepy moments.
21. The Court of the Stone Children, Eleanor Cameron. Oh my. The Mushroom Planet books did nothing to lead me to expect this lovely sunny time-slip domestic fantasy, which reminds me of nothing so much as Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring, which is high praise indeed. Somewhat marred by the sexism of the period, which the author clearly does not agree with but which reads as a far uglier note now than I suspect it did originally; I got outright angry when I suspect I was intended to be annoyed. Highly recommended, especially if you have ever wanted to work in art history or preservation or at a museum.
22. Into the Land of the Unicorns, Bruce Coville. Wow,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu was right when she called this one twee. Coville seems uneasy with a female protagonist and the worldbuilding is sadly conventional. Not remotely his best work. Still, not a total waste of fifteen minutes.
23. Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy, Thomas Beatie. I remember reading the initial article in the Advocate in which Beatie, a transman, disclosed his pregnancy, and thinking that I wished him and his family well. I am not the only person who did, but I seem to have been in a significant minority. In particular, I am ashamed and saddened at the behavior of the gay/lesbian and trans advocacy organizations surrounding this; the groups such as GLAAD seem to have decided that Beatie and his wife had turned into a straight couple and therefore were no longer in need of protection, and the trans groups saw Beatie's pregnancy as a forfeiture of his male gender identity, which-- have none of them read any fucking theory since the eighties? Then, of course, there were serious hoops to be jumped concerning medical care-- at one point a nurse ordered an ultrasound everyone involved already knew to be unnecessary because she had heard somewhere that maybe somebody years ago might have done a study that suggested that testosterone use caused fetal problems in rats (of course Beatie had stopped using testosterone well before the pregnancy)-- and all sorts of legal questions, and Fox fucking News... At any rate, in this memoir Beatie and a co-writer (Beatie is, um, quite evidently not a writer) detail a life of stubbornness, intelligence, and love in the face of abusive and horrific circumstances, leading to an evidently ridiculously good marriage, a stable business, an unshakable self-knowledge and what is clearly going to be besotted fatherhood of his new daughter. I continue to wish him and his family all the best.
24. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book I was not in the mood for when it came out. Not Pratchett's best, but not as bad as I thought it was when I initially bounced off it. This is a Vimes/Watch/Ankh-Morpork politics book; I had some problems with the characterizations of both Carrot and Sergeant Colon in it, as both wound up behaving in ways that seem to me inconsistent with earlier and with later portrayals. It feels, as I also suspected at the time, like Pratchett making a run-up towards less comedy-centered novels, and he's gotten much better at those since.
25. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce. This deserves its own entry. In the meantime, a brief summary: this not perfect but damn fine work is the first book to look at the particular flavor of right-wing Christian fundamentalism known as the Quiverfull movement, who are consciously waging opposition to feminism (on very basic levels) and liberalism in general through memetic war and attempting to outbreed the other side. I find these people very frightening; after all, they quite literally want me dead.
26. Westmark, Lloyd Alexander. Formrissa's book group. Ruritanian YA with some interesting aspects that unfortunately felt rather condensed and suffered the probably-me-specific problem of running very hard into my knowledge of eighteenth-century fiction in general and Voltaire in specific and being close enough to those to evoke them while not actually being quite that. I am looking forward to the second of the trilogy as the groundwork has been laid for a masterpiece if Alexander can do it, and everyone assures me he can.
27. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg. Enjoyable food memoir reminds me rather of early Ruth Reichl, which is high praise. Wizenberg runs a very good food blog (Orangette) and her recipes tend to instantly jump to quite high on my want-to-try list. This book is structured oddly (I do not understand the ordering of chapters) and may be a bit dessert-heavy in terms of recipes, but is an enjoyable and touching read about her father's life and death, her blog and how it led to her marriage, and above all the love of food. Nothing terribly original, but I am a bit of a sucker for this genre.
28. The Yggyssey, Daniel Pinkwater. This sequel to The Neddiad is not as good as its predecessor, but then The Neddiad is far and away the best book Pinkwater has written; The Yggyssey lacks the delirious-love-song-to-Los-Angeles quality that I loved so much in the first. Which is not to say it's a bad book. It's not. It's just far more traditional Pinkwater, which people who like that kind of thing will like. I tend to recommend The Neddiad even to people who hate Pinkwater; not this one. Hopefully the third will stay in L.A., which it looks like it ought. Anyway, this has interdimensional travel, ghost-hunting, inner-city free-climbing, witches, cat people, and a total lack of resemblance to the Odyssey.
29. The First Part Last, Angela Johnson.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc #9. Lyrical and sweet YA about Bobby, a sixteen-year-old struggling with new and single fatherhood. Many things about this book are beautiful and beautifully done: the language, the characters, the emotions. I loved that Bobby's mother is the tough-love one and his father is the softie; I loved that every character, no matter how minor, was complex and three-dimensional. I loved that the book in no way glosses over the work of having a baby. I did not love the plot, what there was of it. It felt to me as though several major events were a bit contrived, especially things involving Nia, the baby's mother. But this was strong and touching enough that I will be looking for more by this author.
30. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. Why yes, it is yet another Discworld spinoff which I have read in two or three-page increments at work when there was nothing going on. This book had a piece of information I hadn't known involving possible explanations of the hunting of the wren, so I suppose it was worthwhile. All else is at an elementary level.
31. Forerunner Foray, Andre Norton. There is a remote possibility that I read this at some time as a child, but I think it far more likely that I read the other two Forerunner books and missed this one. It is a completely respectable one of these, though I would like to reread the second at some point as I have fond memories of it. This one was not best-tier Norton but enjoyable.
32. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany,50books_poc #10. Via papersky's review. Oh. Well. My. The thing is, I read Empire Star, right, years ago, and I bounced off The Fall of the Towers and all the Neveryon stuff, and Babel-17 was fun except that at the time I was a linguistics major and, just, oh dear, and Nova was fun, and unlike ninety percent of everybody I did actually try to read Hogg and made it almost a quarter through before sighing and concluding that this was not going to be interesting to persons whose kink it wasn't, and oh so Not My Kink. And I have a signed copy of The Motion of Light in Water-- in fact, it is signed by Marilyn Hacker as well-- and I have seen multiple pictures of Mr. Delany naked (not just the famous one), and I have sat across a cafeteria lunch table with him and had him tell a whole group of students, gently, some things about his complicated relationship with science fiction. I know him as well as one knows a writer one knows by knowing the writer, not the person (well, there are exceptions; I mean as well as one knows a writer one is not internally on some kind of first-name basis with; I mean not as well as I know Jack Lewis, for example). I had somehow missed this novel. I think I got the title mixed up with 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones', which, I hold, is understandable. I had not known I had not read his greatest novel. This is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. This is the sort of book that renews my faith in both science fiction and the novel. This is a book during which I found myself almost continuously laughing, for no reason except pure and utter delight. This goes on that tiny mental shelf with Perelandra and Engine Summer and Always Coming Home and Burning Your Boats and Wuthering Heights and The Worm Ouroboros and Moonwise and The Female Man. I anticipate rereading it, over the years, with a great and desperate pleasure.
33. Turn Coat, Jim Butcher. The latest of the Dresden Files books is neither my favorite (White Knight remains that) nor my least favorite to date. If you like this sort of thing, you probably already know that this is the sort of thing you like.
34. The Iron Hunt, Marjorie Liu,50books_poc #11. I had pretty much given up on Marjorie Liu, because I loved Tiger Eye but her later stuff was moving farther and farther away from what I liked in that book and into a great deal of angst and complication and spy-stuff of a sort I do not find interesting. I mean for example I very much like Amiri but I could not finish the book about him. Just couldn't. But I saw this one, and was like, well, maybe something that is not Dirk and Steele continuity will not have the problems I have been having there. I am glad I did, because this was solid and really damn enjoyable. I am trying to think of another urban-fantasy-genre-type book where the protagonist has such a steady, interesting, equal, partner-y relationship. He knows all her paranormal stuff! He deals! He is her support system and she is his! I couldn't believe it. Traditionally in this genre most heterosexual relationships make me attempt to mentally block them out. Also fun worldbuilding, pretty demons, awesome line of descent of women of power. I will pick up the next of these.
Graphic Works
18-19. Aya and Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.50books_poc #7-8. Interesting little graphic novels about a group of teenage girls, and their relatives and larger circle of associates, in the capital of Cote d'Ivoire in the late 1970s. The organic storytelling is impressive at introducing and making a large cast distinct and real as people in a very short amount of time. These are domestic books, rhythms-of-daily-life books, with the touch of drama that all teenage girls acquire along the way; humorous, expansive, lovingly rendered. I didn't feel like these did very much or delved very deep, but what they did they did well and enjoyably. Also contained what looks like an extremely good recipe for peanut sauce, which I am looking forward to attempting.
20. Disappearance Diary, Hideo Azuma. The author, a well-known and well-respected manga artist (most famous for inventing lolicon, which was a lot less terrifying and tasteless originally), chronicles the 'missing' periods of his life: two spells of homelessness, during which he simply wandered away from his house, work, and family and lived in various woods (during the second one he got employment as a gas fitter under an assumed name), and one stretch in an alcoholism ward. Azuma's cute and cartoony drawings are deliberately at war with his subject; the beginning of the book states outright that "This book has a positive outlook on life and absolutely no realism will be allowed." He focuses on the logistical and practical realities of survival in his situation, the various places to swipe food and find booze money, the social structure of the ward, the fear of freezing to death in the winter, the way everything becomes less frightening when it is familiar. He is not introspective, but flashback sequences to his life as a manga artist make it clear why he might need to escape. I would have liked to know more about his wife, whose reasons for staying with him are never discussed; I would certainly have liked to know more about things like how he managed to re-establish his career after dropping everything and running not once but twice. But that's not what this book is about, and for what it is about, it's very good.
21. Afterschool Nightmare v.10, Setona Mizushiro. This is one of those series where I was on eggshells the whole way through: will it make me hate it? No, it did not. I think the ending would have done better to have left more unexplained; to close in darkness, like a dream. But what this did it did very well, and I look forward to tearing it to little, little analytical shreds in the post-Utena chapter of Our Manga Book.
22. Kaze Hikaru v.4, Taeko Watanabe. Borrowing series fromlignota. I have to be in a really odd mood to read these because of knowing the historical ouchiness that is Looming Just Ahead. But man, the Shinsengumi are so awesome. Also I really like contrasting this with Peacemaker Kurogane, as they are pretty much shounen and shoujo versions of the same story: kid who joins Shinsengumi for Personal Reasons, is There During History. Unsurprisingly, I like the shoujo better. This is my personal favorite Okita Souji, and (amazingly enough) is fighting with Rurouni Kenshin for my favorite Saito Hajime. I had thought Kenshin pretty definitive in that direction, but this one is brilliant. On the other hand, I liked the reveal of the haiku-authorship better in Peacemaker, and there are a whole bunch of the upper leadership I liked better in, of all things, Gintama, even though I have seen them in like two volumes of that. Also Sei herself is a tad weepy. But this is in many ways awesome; I love the dealing with the logistics of menstruation and the way that she blocks the issues of being a pretty girl in a group of men by hiding under the issues of being a pretty boy in a group of men.
23. Berserk v.2, Kentaro Miura. Man, Miura can draw demons. I vaguely wonder if he can draw anything else, but I am not actually convinced that existentially it is ever going to matter. The elf's body language actually being androgynous is a nice little feat. It is nice to have this as after all Hellsing is ending so there was going to be a lack of gratuitous testosterone in my reading life. Not that this is Hellsing, even though it shares the characteristic of that series that everyone evil is technically a liquid.
24-25. Pluto v.1-2, Naoki Urasawa. ZOMG awesome. I seriously want to cuddle this version of Astro Boy. Also I like the bit where you can extrapolate an entire issue of Black Jack from one panel showing only his feet. Also worldbuilding! I am very happy with this and looking forward to more.
26-29. Kaze Hikaru v.5-8, Taeko Watanabe. This is a very good series. I also really like the bits at the end where the mangaka is like, here is where I did my research, and here is how impossible some of it was, and here is where Imade my assistants redraw redrew things to make them more accurate, and here is where I threw my hands up in despair. It is one of the best series of extras I have seen.
30. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.33, Akimine Kamijyo. Either I was in totally the wrong mood for this and should have waited, or this was a volume in which there was a lot of milling about and nothing much happened. Or both.
Movie stuff
Nothing in theatres this month. My significant achievement as involves cinema was teaching myself some HTML I didn't know for setup on12films_poc. Which comm did not quite cause me to completely restructure my to-watch list in its first twenty-four hours, but damn close. However, I didn't watch anything at home this month either. I think I was reading instead.
Significant rereads:
A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag and Son of Interflux, Gordon Korman; Valley of Song, Elizabeth Goudge; Moon of Three Rings and Flight in Yiktor, Andre Norton; Spindle's End, Robin McKinley; Beanworld v.1, Larry Marder; most of Kurt Busiek's Astro City; Jingo and the Tiffany Aching books, Terry Pratchett; all of Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity; all of Digger so far, Ursula Vernon; James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips.
Time for my booklog.
One of my stress reactions is to read more. Even so, this was kind of an insane month, when I look back at it. And I seem to have waxed pretty verbose, too.
In other words, long entry.
Books
19. Vegan Lunchbox, Jennifer McCann. Book version of a very good food blog I follow. Unfortunately, the book lacks many of the virtues of the blog, including the clear easy page layout and the lovely color photography. This compilation certainly helps one to think about menus, about balancing flavors, and about food prep as an indissoluble part of health, but honestly the book veers too far into being an advertisement for itself. Not a keeper cookbook. Go for the web version.
20. Exiles of the Stars, Andre Norton (in the reprint omnibus Moonsinger). I'd read Moon of Three Rings as a child, and I read Flight in Yiktor as an adolescent (our library copy had a really frustrating two pages missing and I have been trying to track down a different copy since), but somehow I had missed this middle book. I have to say, if I'd been imagining a book between the two others I would not have imagined Evil Ancient Egyptian Forerunner Treasure Hunt Express. I mean, this is a perfectly fine book, I just find aspects of it rather inexplicable. Does not go in my mental list of top-tier Norton but does have some pretty and some creepy moments.
21. The Court of the Stone Children, Eleanor Cameron. Oh my. The Mushroom Planet books did nothing to lead me to expect this lovely sunny time-slip domestic fantasy, which reminds me of nothing so much as Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring, which is high praise indeed. Somewhat marred by the sexism of the period, which the author clearly does not agree with but which reads as a far uglier note now than I suspect it did originally; I got outright angry when I suspect I was intended to be annoyed. Highly recommended, especially if you have ever wanted to work in art history or preservation or at a museum.
22. Into the Land of the Unicorns, Bruce Coville. Wow,
kate_nepveu was right when she called this one twee. Coville seems uneasy with a female protagonist and the worldbuilding is sadly conventional. Not remotely his best work. Still, not a total waste of fifteen minutes.23. Labor of Love: The Story of One Man's Extraordinary Pregnancy, Thomas Beatie. I remember reading the initial article in the Advocate in which Beatie, a transman, disclosed his pregnancy, and thinking that I wished him and his family well. I am not the only person who did, but I seem to have been in a significant minority. In particular, I am ashamed and saddened at the behavior of the gay/lesbian and trans advocacy organizations surrounding this; the groups such as GLAAD seem to have decided that Beatie and his wife had turned into a straight couple and therefore were no longer in need of protection, and the trans groups saw Beatie's pregnancy as a forfeiture of his male gender identity, which-- have none of them read any fucking theory since the eighties? Then, of course, there were serious hoops to be jumped concerning medical care-- at one point a nurse ordered an ultrasound everyone involved already knew to be unnecessary because she had heard somewhere that maybe somebody years ago might have done a study that suggested that testosterone use caused fetal problems in rats (of course Beatie had stopped using testosterone well before the pregnancy)-- and all sorts of legal questions, and Fox fucking News... At any rate, in this memoir Beatie and a co-writer (Beatie is, um, quite evidently not a writer) detail a life of stubbornness, intelligence, and love in the face of abusive and horrific circumstances, leading to an evidently ridiculously good marriage, a stable business, an unshakable self-knowledge and what is clearly going to be besotted fatherhood of his new daughter. I continue to wish him and his family all the best.
24. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett. A Discworld book I was not in the mood for when it came out. Not Pratchett's best, but not as bad as I thought it was when I initially bounced off it. This is a Vimes/Watch/Ankh-Morpork politics book; I had some problems with the characterizations of both Carrot and Sergeant Colon in it, as both wound up behaving in ways that seem to me inconsistent with earlier and with later portrayals. It feels, as I also suspected at the time, like Pratchett making a run-up towards less comedy-centered novels, and he's gotten much better at those since.
25. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce. This deserves its own entry. In the meantime, a brief summary: this not perfect but damn fine work is the first book to look at the particular flavor of right-wing Christian fundamentalism known as the Quiverfull movement, who are consciously waging opposition to feminism (on very basic levels) and liberalism in general through memetic war and attempting to outbreed the other side. I find these people very frightening; after all, they quite literally want me dead.
26. Westmark, Lloyd Alexander. For
mrissa's book group. Ruritanian YA with some interesting aspects that unfortunately felt rather condensed and suffered the probably-me-specific problem of running very hard into my knowledge of eighteenth-century fiction in general and Voltaire in specific and being close enough to those to evoke them while not actually being quite that. I am looking forward to the second of the trilogy as the groundwork has been laid for a masterpiece if Alexander can do it, and everyone assures me he can.27. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg. Enjoyable food memoir reminds me rather of early Ruth Reichl, which is high praise. Wizenberg runs a very good food blog (Orangette) and her recipes tend to instantly jump to quite high on my want-to-try list. This book is structured oddly (I do not understand the ordering of chapters) and may be a bit dessert-heavy in terms of recipes, but is an enjoyable and touching read about her father's life and death, her blog and how it led to her marriage, and above all the love of food. Nothing terribly original, but I am a bit of a sucker for this genre.
28. The Yggyssey, Daniel Pinkwater. This sequel to The Neddiad is not as good as its predecessor, but then The Neddiad is far and away the best book Pinkwater has written; The Yggyssey lacks the delirious-love-song-to-Los-Angeles quality that I loved so much in the first. Which is not to say it's a bad book. It's not. It's just far more traditional Pinkwater, which people who like that kind of thing will like. I tend to recommend The Neddiad even to people who hate Pinkwater; not this one. Hopefully the third will stay in L.A., which it looks like it ought. Anyway, this has interdimensional travel, ghost-hunting, inner-city free-climbing, witches, cat people, and a total lack of resemblance to the Odyssey.
29. The First Part Last, Angela Johnson.
50books_poc #9. Lyrical and sweet YA about Bobby, a sixteen-year-old struggling with new and single fatherhood. Many things about this book are beautiful and beautifully done: the language, the characters, the emotions. I loved that Bobby's mother is the tough-love one and his father is the softie; I loved that every character, no matter how minor, was complex and three-dimensional. I loved that the book in no way glosses over the work of having a baby. I did not love the plot, what there was of it. It felt to me as though several major events were a bit contrived, especially things involving Nia, the baby's mother. But this was strong and touching enough that I will be looking for more by this author.30. The Folklore of Discworld, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson. Why yes, it is yet another Discworld spinoff which I have read in two or three-page increments at work when there was nothing going on. This book had a piece of information I hadn't known involving possible explanations of the hunting of the wren, so I suppose it was worthwhile. All else is at an elementary level.
31. Forerunner Foray, Andre Norton. There is a remote possibility that I read this at some time as a child, but I think it far more likely that I read the other two Forerunner books and missed this one. It is a completely respectable one of these, though I would like to reread the second at some point as I have fond memories of it. This one was not best-tier Norton but enjoyable.
32. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany,
50books_poc #10. Via papersky's review. Oh. Well. My. The thing is, I read Empire Star, right, years ago, and I bounced off The Fall of the Towers and all the Neveryon stuff, and Babel-17 was fun except that at the time I was a linguistics major and, just, oh dear, and Nova was fun, and unlike ninety percent of everybody I did actually try to read Hogg and made it almost a quarter through before sighing and concluding that this was not going to be interesting to persons whose kink it wasn't, and oh so Not My Kink. And I have a signed copy of The Motion of Light in Water-- in fact, it is signed by Marilyn Hacker as well-- and I have seen multiple pictures of Mr. Delany naked (not just the famous one), and I have sat across a cafeteria lunch table with him and had him tell a whole group of students, gently, some things about his complicated relationship with science fiction. I know him as well as one knows a writer one knows by knowing the writer, not the person (well, there are exceptions; I mean as well as one knows a writer one is not internally on some kind of first-name basis with; I mean not as well as I know Jack Lewis, for example). I had somehow missed this novel. I think I got the title mixed up with 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones', which, I hold, is understandable. I had not known I had not read his greatest novel. This is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. This is the sort of book that renews my faith in both science fiction and the novel. This is a book during which I found myself almost continuously laughing, for no reason except pure and utter delight. This goes on that tiny mental shelf with Perelandra and Engine Summer and Always Coming Home and Burning Your Boats and Wuthering Heights and The Worm Ouroboros and Moonwise and The Female Man. I anticipate rereading it, over the years, with a great and desperate pleasure.33. Turn Coat, Jim Butcher. The latest of the Dresden Files books is neither my favorite (White Knight remains that) nor my least favorite to date. If you like this sort of thing, you probably already know that this is the sort of thing you like.
34. The Iron Hunt, Marjorie Liu,
50books_poc #11. I had pretty much given up on Marjorie Liu, because I loved Tiger Eye but her later stuff was moving farther and farther away from what I liked in that book and into a great deal of angst and complication and spy-stuff of a sort I do not find interesting. I mean for example I very much like Amiri but I could not finish the book about him. Just couldn't. But I saw this one, and was like, well, maybe something that is not Dirk and Steele continuity will not have the problems I have been having there. I am glad I did, because this was solid and really damn enjoyable. I am trying to think of another urban-fantasy-genre-type book where the protagonist has such a steady, interesting, equal, partner-y relationship. He knows all her paranormal stuff! He deals! He is her support system and she is his! I couldn't believe it. Traditionally in this genre most heterosexual relationships make me attempt to mentally block them out. Also fun worldbuilding, pretty demons, awesome line of descent of women of power. I will pick up the next of these. Graphic Works
18-19. Aya and Aya of Yop City, Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie.
50books_poc #7-8. Interesting little graphic novels about a group of teenage girls, and their relatives and larger circle of associates, in the capital of Cote d'Ivoire in the late 1970s. The organic storytelling is impressive at introducing and making a large cast distinct and real as people in a very short amount of time. These are domestic books, rhythms-of-daily-life books, with the touch of drama that all teenage girls acquire along the way; humorous, expansive, lovingly rendered. I didn't feel like these did very much or delved very deep, but what they did they did well and enjoyably. Also contained what looks like an extremely good recipe for peanut sauce, which I am looking forward to attempting.20. Disappearance Diary, Hideo Azuma. The author, a well-known and well-respected manga artist (most famous for inventing lolicon, which was a lot less terrifying and tasteless originally), chronicles the 'missing' periods of his life: two spells of homelessness, during which he simply wandered away from his house, work, and family and lived in various woods (during the second one he got employment as a gas fitter under an assumed name), and one stretch in an alcoholism ward. Azuma's cute and cartoony drawings are deliberately at war with his subject; the beginning of the book states outright that "This book has a positive outlook on life and absolutely no realism will be allowed." He focuses on the logistical and practical realities of survival in his situation, the various places to swipe food and find booze money, the social structure of the ward, the fear of freezing to death in the winter, the way everything becomes less frightening when it is familiar. He is not introspective, but flashback sequences to his life as a manga artist make it clear why he might need to escape. I would have liked to know more about his wife, whose reasons for staying with him are never discussed; I would certainly have liked to know more about things like how he managed to re-establish his career after dropping everything and running not once but twice. But that's not what this book is about, and for what it is about, it's very good.
21. Afterschool Nightmare v.10, Setona Mizushiro. This is one of those series where I was on eggshells the whole way through: will it make me hate it? No, it did not. I think the ending would have done better to have left more unexplained; to close in darkness, like a dream. But what this did it did very well, and I look forward to tearing it to little, little analytical shreds in the post-Utena chapter of Our Manga Book.
22. Kaze Hikaru v.4, Taeko Watanabe. Borrowing series from
lignota. I have to be in a really odd mood to read these because of knowing the historical ouchiness that is Looming Just Ahead. But man, the Shinsengumi are so awesome. Also I really like contrasting this with Peacemaker Kurogane, as they are pretty much shounen and shoujo versions of the same story: kid who joins Shinsengumi for Personal Reasons, is There During History. Unsurprisingly, I like the shoujo better. This is my personal favorite Okita Souji, and (amazingly enough) is fighting with Rurouni Kenshin for my favorite Saito Hajime. I had thought Kenshin pretty definitive in that direction, but this one is brilliant. On the other hand, I liked the reveal of the haiku-authorship better in Peacemaker, and there are a whole bunch of the upper leadership I liked better in, of all things, Gintama, even though I have seen them in like two volumes of that. Also Sei herself is a tad weepy. But this is in many ways awesome; I love the dealing with the logistics of menstruation and the way that she blocks the issues of being a pretty girl in a group of men by hiding under the issues of being a pretty boy in a group of men. 23. Berserk v.2, Kentaro Miura. Man, Miura can draw demons. I vaguely wonder if he can draw anything else, but I am not actually convinced that existentially it is ever going to matter. The elf's body language actually being androgynous is a nice little feat. It is nice to have this as after all Hellsing is ending so there was going to be a lack of gratuitous testosterone in my reading life. Not that this is Hellsing, even though it shares the characteristic of that series that everyone evil is technically a liquid.
24-25. Pluto v.1-2, Naoki Urasawa. ZOMG awesome. I seriously want to cuddle this version of Astro Boy. Also I like the bit where you can extrapolate an entire issue of Black Jack from one panel showing only his feet. Also worldbuilding! I am very happy with this and looking forward to more.
26-29. Kaze Hikaru v.5-8, Taeko Watanabe. This is a very good series. I also really like the bits at the end where the mangaka is like, here is where I did my research, and here is how impossible some of it was, and here is where I
30. Samurai Deeper Kyo v.33, Akimine Kamijyo. Either I was in totally the wrong mood for this and should have waited, or this was a volume in which there was a lot of milling about and nothing much happened. Or both.
Movie stuff
Nothing in theatres this month. My significant achievement as involves cinema was teaching myself some HTML I didn't know for setup on
12films_poc. Which comm did not quite cause me to completely restructure my to-watch list in its first twenty-four hours, but damn close. However, I didn't watch anything at home this month either. I think I was reading instead.Significant rereads:
A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag and Son of Interflux, Gordon Korman; Valley of Song, Elizabeth Goudge; Moon of Three Rings and Flight in Yiktor, Andre Norton; Spindle's End, Robin McKinley; Beanworld v.1, Larry Marder; most of Kurt Busiek's Astro City; Jingo and the Tiffany Aching books, Terry Pratchett; all of Narbonic, Shaenon Garrity; all of Digger so far, Ursula Vernon; James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:29 am (UTC)And I am honored to be on that shelf.
Nine
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:48 pm (UTC)That Tiptree bio is one of The Great Biographies, though I have to be feeling quite stable to read it. I really really devoutly hope Phillips edits a volume of Tiptree's correspondence. We all need that.
Your book is one of the ones that has changed my life in more ways than I can explain or think of, really.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 01:11 pm (UTC)I anticipate that my May will be busy reading as we re-vamp and move the library to a larger room.
Delany: I'm scared to read more Delany after what "Babel-17" did to the inside of my head. I should get over it.
25. Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce. I should probably read this. I've been reading iMonk and Andrew Sullivan lately, but after having read "Jesusland" I don't know how much more of this kind of "theology" I can, or should, take. I feel like I have a duty to read it to understand where these people went wrong and try to help them, but I don't know how to do so.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:53 pm (UTC)Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand is seriously one of the best things I have ever read. So good it's scary.
I need to make a longer entry on Quiverfull. It was actually very good at explaining where these people went wrong, theologically as well as socially; the one quibble I have about the entire book is that it explains the current theology they have and then says that they got it from principles derived from the Puritans, and I was like, yes, they did, but they also totally misunderstood the Puritans and got a lot of the history totally wrong and I'd appreciate an acknowledgement of that. But I suppose a present-day social historian may not want to emphasize a historiographic view.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 01:15 pm (UTC)When I looked at my bookshelves to see if I could do 50 old books PoC for my re-read posts on Tor.com (I have so far done 10) I figured I could as long as everyone was happy with lots and lots of Delany.
Incidentally and just because you didn't mention it -- you have read Triton?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:56 pm (UTC)Stars in My Pocket is so good that I am glad I didn't come across it younger as I am not sure I could have appreciated it, oddly enough.
I have read Triton, but it was years and years ago in my early feminist awakening in late high school, when I went right through the list of books Joanna Russ discusses in her essays about feminist utopias. I may have been too young for that; it has that feel when I think about it. I should reread it.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 07:57 pm (UTC)Brevity is the soul of concision
Date: 2009-04-01 04:39 pm (UTC)Re: Brevity is the soul of concision
Date: 2009-04-01 08:02 pm (UTC)*has Cat-Whiskered Girl envy* I've never been to Poughkeepsie, though I did visit Vassar when I was looking at colleges. So that should be really interesting.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 08:03 pm (UTC)Which other things?
no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 05:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-01 08:05 pm (UTC)