Things that happen in bookstores
Mar. 4th, 2006 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI am all tangled up in an essay for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
