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rushthatspeaksI note that I appear to have spent the vast majority of this month reading manga. It didn't feel that way at the time.
Also, I basically didn't reread anything this month, which is kind of weird.
Books:
42. Fall of Light, Nina Kiriki Hoffmann. O holy good god no! Okay, so I quite liked A Fistful of Sky, and this is the direct sequel, and just-- just-- there is not one thing I liked about this book, except the image on the cover, which is only tangentially related. Even the title doesn't make much sense. It is badly proofread, the characters behave in ways that no people ever ever would including Romance Novel people, everyone seems to take the protagonist having magic with aplomb even though they are living in a world in which magic is supposed to be impossible, there are trailing plot threads every damn which way, and, and this is a major, major and, there are HUGE MAJOR HUGE AWFUL issues with sexual consent absolutely all over because of the main character's power to influence other people's minds and the text really does not seem to me to have thought this over on more than an extremely tangential level. (It is not acceptable moral behavior to date-rape a date-rapist, frex. And anything people do under magical hypnosis has not been consented to, how difficult is that to grasp? Sheesh.) It doesn't end, it stops; none of the major issues or problems resolve; the only character I liked in the entire thing is quite evidently meant to be taken as an insufferable bitch. This is a fucking train wreck of a book, and Hoffmann can do better. I cannot understand how this novel was released into the wild in this state. Go reread A Fistful of Sky instead.
43. Daughters of Darkness, L.J. Smith. Upon reading Mely's Night World roundup post, I realized I hadn't read this one either. In fact I think I missed most of the Night World books, which is the problem with an unnumbered series of stand-alones. Anyway, this is fun and awesome and includes non-supernatural people being just as asskicking as supernatural people, a heroine with a brain, and a hero who has actually read a couple of books at some point. Top-tier L.J. Smith.
44. Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris. This book was doing okay until the plot started resolving, at which point I very strongly considered throwing it very hard at the wall, and would have if it hadn't been a store copy. *sigh* Nonononono. Don't know if I can read these anymore, because that? was Homophobic Bullshit, and I just don't want that in my beach reading. Also the end of the book disintegrated into a mass of things happening suddenly without setup or resolution, but by that point I didn't care.
45. Spellbinder. Yet Another L.J. Smith. Good fun, middle-tier.
46. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart. Hmmm. I get what this book was trying to do, but I'm not sure it actually achieved it. Frankie Landau-Banks is at a prep school where a lot of people have more money than sense, and finds out that her boyfriend is in a secret society of the good-ol'-boy's-club sort. Her solution to being left out and disregarded is rather Machiavellian. My problem with this book was that it felt rather thin in some ways: it's true that Frankie sees things primarily in terms of power, systems, and gaming the systems, but I'm not sure the book acknowledges that there are other ways to see things. Nobody in this seems to have real friends. I went to a prep school where a lot of people had more money than sense, and there was a defined and inflexible power structure. The way to deal with it was to totally ignore it, and be yourself as hard as possible in the knowledge that the world changes after high school. It's fair given her family background that Frankie wouldn't know the world changes, but. Also there are no cross-gender interactions, let alone friendships, that are not taken as romantic; they can't just hang out with people. I went to a single-sex school, so I don't know, but is it really like that? And everyone seems to think the things Frankie does are a lot worse than I think they are, but I hang out with MIT people. So. Anyway, this is a fun and interesting little book, thought-provoking though seriously flawed.
47-48. The Chosen and Soulmate, L.J. Smith. These keep on being these, all right. (I really do seem to have mostly stumbled across the good Smith when I was younger; these just aren't as good as, say, Forbidden Game.)
49. Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc #13. This memoir of the deaths of Danticat's father and brother (and of her own pregnancy at about the same time) is very well-written on a sentence and scene level but failed to cohere around itself; she was clearly trying to thematically link and contrast the lives of her family with each other and it didn't work for me at all. As a result, it left me emotionally uninvolved. However, I'm not sorry I read it, because it really does have some fine work in it. I may try some of her fiction, to see if not having to abide by the restraints of what actually happened assists her ability to create emotional effect.
50. Beloved, Toni Morrison.50books_poc #14. Actually this is a reread, technically, but I am not thinking of it as one because I read it for class in high school. This was a horrible idea which has prevented me from reading any other Morrison since. I do not think it is a book for high school students, or at any rate not with our teacher, which is saying something because he was brilliant and passionate and made me love Madame Bovary which took some doing, and everyone in my class hated and was confused by Beloved. None more than me. I literally, genuinely, and thoroughly could not parse the book as being written in English. People would talk about things that happened in the book, and I could not figure out where they got them, because I could not distinguish either characters or a plot. I could not track a sentence of it from one end to the other. I was reading Derrida and Eco that year on my own lookout; it was not the denseness of the prose was the problem. The problem was that in high school half the content of the book bounced off me for lack of my having any experiential context to make sense of it and the other half bounced off because it was so inextricably painful that my brain refused to allow it entry, so thoroughly I couldn't even recognize it as painful. Or at any rate this is the conclusion I come to now, looking back on the first read from the end of the second read of this strange, wrenching, deeply and magnificently brilliant novel. This is about how the past never goes away, because it isn't even past. This is about haunting, and being haunted; and about work; and how impossible it can be to live and how hard it can be to die. And the frame of mind it takes to kill something to keep anyone else from killing it: a frame of mind that is I am sure intimately familiar to many, certainly to me, but usually extended only towards one's own works and one's own self, upon hitting bottom: not towards other people, but part of the horror of this book is that that is apparently not such a large step under some circumstances. And this is about Ohio, where the sky does indeed look like that. And, more than anything else, this is a book set where hell and earth are the same place. It is a spectacular achievement. Quite honestly, I still hate it; only now cordially, and with my love. It does what masterpieces are meant to do: it changes the reader.
51. Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. ... in which Carey stretches herself, yay! This is a non-Kushiel-universe book, and it is one of the two best things she's ever written (it has some competition from portions of Kushiel's Avatar). In a legally nonexistent enclave between a warring U.S. and Mexico, an on-the-lam genetically-engineered super-soldier fathers a daughter, and this is the book about her growing up. I like the worldbuilding, the atmosphere, the people, the plotting; I like that ninety percent of the cast are people of color who have agency and kick ass. I thought the end was a little anticlimactic and rushed, but in general this made me very happy and I would like a sequel. It is always good to see a writer not sticking to what they already know they can do.
52. Salt and Silver, Anna Katherine. *waves at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trifles* Above-average paranormal romance set in a remarkably grim world for one of these. Takes the unusual tack of having many of the characters not be nice people at all even a little bit, which works very well. Also the protagonist has seen and enjoyed Cemetery Man, which means I am morally obligated to love her. I would love to see this author try something in a less restrictive genre, as I did rather feel that I knew a good deal of what to expect from the book in advance solely because of its genre, but this is a fine first novel and a worthy read.
53. Time and Mr. Bass, Eleanor Cameron. I am now sincerely wondering why it is The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet that has been accorded classic status when the other things I have read by Cameron, including this direct Mushroom Planet sequel, are much, much better. This one reads kind of like a cross of the original with The Dark is Rising books. No, really. If you want to read about spore people mourning the death of King Arthur in a genuinely moving way, this is your novel.
54. A Spell is Cast, Eleanor Cameron. Perfectly reasonably YA I would have liked better if it had decided to really be either Gothic or fantasy instead of hovering nervously about the edges of both. Suffered for me due to cognitive dissonance caused by it being the only other thing I've ever read that was illustrated by the people who did Elizabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake books, which meant I was always thinking about those and comparing them to this and that is not a fair thing to do to just about any book ever.
55. Savvy, Ingrid Law. Down-home-y YA about a girl in a family where they all get magical powers of exceedingly random sorts on their thirteenth birthdays. Kind of what would happen if you put A Fistful of Sky in a blender with Wilanne Schneider Belden's Frankie!, not that anyone but me seems ever to have read the latter. This-- I can see why it got a Norton nom and it deserved one, but it just never quite came alive for me. No sense of real darkness.
Graphic Works:
38. 20th Century Boys v.2, Naoki Urasawa. Yay more 20th Century Boys! I want this all to come out, like, immediately. If not sooner. This one is really in some ways an intermediate volume of setup, but I still love it profoundly.
39-40. Berserk, v.3-4, Kentaro Miura. In which Berserk stops being 'that manga that does that one genre with the testosterone really well' and starts being ZOMG AWESOME. Seriously, this is making me INCOHERENTLY HAPPY GRIFFITH GRIFFITH GRIFFITH OMG. If I started trying to list the things this is doing really, really well, I would go on for hours. The way that Miura is using sexual violence is brilliant, and I can't believe I just wrote that sentence, but it is, because it supercharges and complicates the relationship between Griffith and Guts from the first: if they could simply be lovers, everything might be all right, but as it is they are going to be something far stranger, and destroy each other. And a SHONEN WRITER NOTICED AND DID THAT OMG. This manga seriously pushes my gore tolerance (and probably anybody's)(except of course Thrud's-- she is reading this too and does not think the demons have yet achieved vile, which is just as well as I like being able to find the volumes in the bookcase and not under her pillow), and is the one thing I read that is definitively gorier than Hellsing-- and it is gorier than Hellsing by a lot-- but I do not care, it is totally worth it. It is epic and darkly magnificent and clearly only going to get better, because it has latched on to some kind of high fantasy archetype and is just being the best of that that can be possible. I can also already tell that these characters will break my heart, and I don't care about that either. So good. So damn good.
41-42. Fullmetal Alchemist, v.1-2, Hiromu Arakawa. Yes, yes, I know. But the anime was triggery such that I couldn't finish it, and I saw it first, so I was rather reluctant about the manga. Which is a shame because it is better than the anime-- better pacing, better expression work, better plotting. It is for example even more obvious how ridiculously awesome Hawkeye is, and the way that the alchemists have an uneasy relationship with ethics and the military and the conflicts between those is much clearer right from the start. Also I like the art very much; the anime is more conventionally pretty but I find this better-looking. Oh, and I have spent however many years wondering why the slash fandom for this series fixated on Ed and Roy. Well, I still wouldn't go there myself, but I no longer think that this is one of those totally insane fandom things, as I can see it if I squint, which is a major change from the anime. Still trying to decide whether I want to watch Ye Anime Remake. Definitely keeping going with the manga.
43. Berserk v.5, Kentaro Miura. ♥. You know, it's really hard to write someone who is set up to have to be as awesome as Griffith is and actually have them be as awesome as Griffith is. I mean, everyone goes around talking about how awesome Griffith is, but he is still actually that awesome. Traditionally if the entire cast of something starts going on about how amazing somebody is, it is time to start looking around for Mary Sues. Not this time.
44-49. Fullmetal Alchemist v.3-7, Hiromu Arakawa. Yeah, I really like this much better than the anime in just about every way. Pacing! This has so much better pacing! And Greed's people come across better. And the art.
50. Flower of Life v.4, Fumi Yoshinaga. Extremely good conclusion to a ridiculously good series. This volume gently explains to the reader that yes, there has been a plot right there all along before wrapping it up in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying way, with a couple of surprisingly painful touches along the road. This is one of Yoshinaga's best and very high in my list of my favorite manga ever. Highly, highly recommended.
51-54. Fullmetal Alchemist v.8-11, Hiromu Arakawa. I am finding portions of the panel layout slightly visually confusing at times, but this is a very solid series. And I am really enjoying Hawkeye (the thing with Barry was hilarious), and watching Roy be ridiculously badass. Honestly I would like a little more Ed and Al than we are getting, and the Xing stuff feels slightly superfluous. But these are minor quibbles.
55-58. Berserk v.6-9, Kentaro Miura. ♥ ♥ ♥ Oh, evil evil epic high fantasy manga, where have you been all my life? Never leave me again. Please continue to shower me with layered plot structure (symbolism! which does not suck! in a relatively subtle way! in manga! whee!), developed characters, an interesting underlying philosophical argument, a surprisingly light sense of humor (you can't tell me the truly stupid names of the enemy platoons aren't that stupid on purpose), and the mere existence of Griffith. Seriously at this point I don't think Griffith even needs to do anything to continue being this awesome. You could have him stand there for like an entire volume and look inscrutable and the entire cast and Thrud and I would assume that he had taken over the world offscreen using only the power of his subconscious. Speaking of which, am anticipating beginning to have problems removing relevant volumes of manga from Thrud's person and/or pillow. I haven't seen her this happy about something not by Tezuka or Urasawa in years. A note to persons who may be considering reading this manga: still the goriest thing I read by a factor of seventy-leven, and significant sequences of (necessary, plot-justified) extreme sexual nastiness. Find a non-shrink-wrapped copy of the first volume and read the first three pages. If that squicks you, well, that's an adequate representation.
59-62. Fullmetal Alchemist v.12-15, Hiromu Arakawa. Okay, I take back what I said about the Xing stuff. Well, about everyone except the girl with the panda, who can GO AWAY NOW. Ed = awesome. Roy = awesome. Ishbal genocide = depressing as hell gaaaaaahhhh. Manga = fairly awesome.
Movie:
The Thief of Bagdad, 1940, dir. by committee including Michael Powell, produced by Alexander Korda, who would probably rise from the grave to destroy me if I did not mention that fact to you given the size and placement of his producer's credit. Home. Oh hey Criterion just put this out on DVD, so you all know. I am ill and was feeling tired and bored and terrible and wanted to watch something new to me that was guaranteed not to depress me or shock me overmuch or make me feel worse. People had been telling me repeatedly that this was one of the greatest family movies of all time. Well, what do you know, it is. Things I liked about this, besides everything, include the colors (yay three-strip Technicolor!), Sabu, and that while the girl didn't get to do much she was clearly at least trying to have control of her own life. Also you can see the influence of the visuals clear down to things like Okami (hiii, statue-climbing-giant-spider-fight I had to play from behind the couch). Great music, too. One might be able to argue that this is Orientalist, but it was made in 1940. None of the characters are supposed to be white, and Sabu and Rex Ingram basically steal the movie between them; I did not actively want to throw things.lignota, teenybuffalo, have you seen this? If not, do so immediately.
Also, I basically didn't reread anything this month, which is kind of weird.
Books:
42. Fall of Light, Nina Kiriki Hoffmann. O holy good god no! Okay, so I quite liked A Fistful of Sky, and this is the direct sequel, and just-- just-- there is not one thing I liked about this book, except the image on the cover, which is only tangentially related. Even the title doesn't make much sense. It is badly proofread, the characters behave in ways that no people ever ever would including Romance Novel people, everyone seems to take the protagonist having magic with aplomb even though they are living in a world in which magic is supposed to be impossible, there are trailing plot threads every damn which way, and, and this is a major, major and, there are HUGE MAJOR HUGE AWFUL issues with sexual consent absolutely all over because of the main character's power to influence other people's minds and the text really does not seem to me to have thought this over on more than an extremely tangential level. (It is not acceptable moral behavior to date-rape a date-rapist, frex. And anything people do under magical hypnosis has not been consented to, how difficult is that to grasp? Sheesh.) It doesn't end, it stops; none of the major issues or problems resolve; the only character I liked in the entire thing is quite evidently meant to be taken as an insufferable bitch. This is a fucking train wreck of a book, and Hoffmann can do better. I cannot understand how this novel was released into the wild in this state. Go reread A Fistful of Sky instead.
43. Daughters of Darkness, L.J. Smith. Upon reading Mely's Night World roundup post, I realized I hadn't read this one either. In fact I think I missed most of the Night World books, which is the problem with an unnumbered series of stand-alones. Anyway, this is fun and awesome and includes non-supernatural people being just as asskicking as supernatural people, a heroine with a brain, and a hero who has actually read a couple of books at some point. Top-tier L.J. Smith.
44. Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris. This book was doing okay until the plot started resolving, at which point I very strongly considered throwing it very hard at the wall, and would have if it hadn't been a store copy. *sigh* Nonononono. Don't know if I can read these anymore, because that? was Homophobic Bullshit, and I just don't want that in my beach reading. Also the end of the book disintegrated into a mass of things happening suddenly without setup or resolution, but by that point I didn't care.
45. Spellbinder. Yet Another L.J. Smith. Good fun, middle-tier.
46. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart. Hmmm. I get what this book was trying to do, but I'm not sure it actually achieved it. Frankie Landau-Banks is at a prep school where a lot of people have more money than sense, and finds out that her boyfriend is in a secret society of the good-ol'-boy's-club sort. Her solution to being left out and disregarded is rather Machiavellian. My problem with this book was that it felt rather thin in some ways: it's true that Frankie sees things primarily in terms of power, systems, and gaming the systems, but I'm not sure the book acknowledges that there are other ways to see things. Nobody in this seems to have real friends. I went to a prep school where a lot of people had more money than sense, and there was a defined and inflexible power structure. The way to deal with it was to totally ignore it, and be yourself as hard as possible in the knowledge that the world changes after high school. It's fair given her family background that Frankie wouldn't know the world changes, but. Also there are no cross-gender interactions, let alone friendships, that are not taken as romantic; they can't just hang out with people. I went to a single-sex school, so I don't know, but is it really like that? And everyone seems to think the things Frankie does are a lot worse than I think they are, but I hang out with MIT people. So. Anyway, this is a fun and interesting little book, thought-provoking though seriously flawed.
47-48. The Chosen and Soulmate, L.J. Smith. These keep on being these, all right. (I really do seem to have mostly stumbled across the good Smith when I was younger; these just aren't as good as, say, Forbidden Game.)
49. Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat.
50books_poc #13. This memoir of the deaths of Danticat's father and brother (and of her own pregnancy at about the same time) is very well-written on a sentence and scene level but failed to cohere around itself; she was clearly trying to thematically link and contrast the lives of her family with each other and it didn't work for me at all. As a result, it left me emotionally uninvolved. However, I'm not sorry I read it, because it really does have some fine work in it. I may try some of her fiction, to see if not having to abide by the restraints of what actually happened assists her ability to create emotional effect.50. Beloved, Toni Morrison.
50books_poc #14. Actually this is a reread, technically, but I am not thinking of it as one because I read it for class in high school. This was a horrible idea which has prevented me from reading any other Morrison since. I do not think it is a book for high school students, or at any rate not with our teacher, which is saying something because he was brilliant and passionate and made me love Madame Bovary which took some doing, and everyone in my class hated and was confused by Beloved. None more than me. I literally, genuinely, and thoroughly could not parse the book as being written in English. People would talk about things that happened in the book, and I could not figure out where they got them, because I could not distinguish either characters or a plot. I could not track a sentence of it from one end to the other. I was reading Derrida and Eco that year on my own lookout; it was not the denseness of the prose was the problem. The problem was that in high school half the content of the book bounced off me for lack of my having any experiential context to make sense of it and the other half bounced off because it was so inextricably painful that my brain refused to allow it entry, so thoroughly I couldn't even recognize it as painful. Or at any rate this is the conclusion I come to now, looking back on the first read from the end of the second read of this strange, wrenching, deeply and magnificently brilliant novel. This is about how the past never goes away, because it isn't even past. This is about haunting, and being haunted; and about work; and how impossible it can be to live and how hard it can be to die. And the frame of mind it takes to kill something to keep anyone else from killing it: a frame of mind that is I am sure intimately familiar to many, certainly to me, but usually extended only towards one's own works and one's own self, upon hitting bottom: not towards other people, but part of the horror of this book is that that is apparently not such a large step under some circumstances. And this is about Ohio, where the sky does indeed look like that. And, more than anything else, this is a book set where hell and earth are the same place. It is a spectacular achievement. Quite honestly, I still hate it; only now cordially, and with my love. It does what masterpieces are meant to do: it changes the reader.51. Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey. ... in which Carey stretches herself, yay! This is a non-Kushiel-universe book, and it is one of the two best things she's ever written (it has some competition from portions of Kushiel's Avatar). In a legally nonexistent enclave between a warring U.S. and Mexico, an on-the-lam genetically-engineered super-soldier fathers a daughter, and this is the book about her growing up. I like the worldbuilding, the atmosphere, the people, the plotting; I like that ninety percent of the cast are people of color who have agency and kick ass. I thought the end was a little anticlimactic and rushed, but in general this made me very happy and I would like a sequel. It is always good to see a writer not sticking to what they already know they can do.
52. Salt and Silver, Anna Katherine. *waves at
trifles* Above-average paranormal romance set in a remarkably grim world for one of these. Takes the unusual tack of having many of the characters not be nice people at all even a little bit, which works very well. Also the protagonist has seen and enjoyed Cemetery Man, which means I am morally obligated to love her. I would love to see this author try something in a less restrictive genre, as I did rather feel that I knew a good deal of what to expect from the book in advance solely because of its genre, but this is a fine first novel and a worthy read.53. Time and Mr. Bass, Eleanor Cameron. I am now sincerely wondering why it is The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet that has been accorded classic status when the other things I have read by Cameron, including this direct Mushroom Planet sequel, are much, much better. This one reads kind of like a cross of the original with The Dark is Rising books. No, really. If you want to read about spore people mourning the death of King Arthur in a genuinely moving way, this is your novel.
54. A Spell is Cast, Eleanor Cameron. Perfectly reasonably YA I would have liked better if it had decided to really be either Gothic or fantasy instead of hovering nervously about the edges of both. Suffered for me due to cognitive dissonance caused by it being the only other thing I've ever read that was illustrated by the people who did Elizabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake books, which meant I was always thinking about those and comparing them to this and that is not a fair thing to do to just about any book ever.
55. Savvy, Ingrid Law. Down-home-y YA about a girl in a family where they all get magical powers of exceedingly random sorts on their thirteenth birthdays. Kind of what would happen if you put A Fistful of Sky in a blender with Wilanne Schneider Belden's Frankie!, not that anyone but me seems ever to have read the latter. This-- I can see why it got a Norton nom and it deserved one, but it just never quite came alive for me. No sense of real darkness.
Graphic Works:
38. 20th Century Boys v.2, Naoki Urasawa. Yay more 20th Century Boys! I want this all to come out, like, immediately. If not sooner. This one is really in some ways an intermediate volume of setup, but I still love it profoundly.
39-40. Berserk, v.3-4, Kentaro Miura. In which Berserk stops being 'that manga that does that one genre with the testosterone really well' and starts being ZOMG AWESOME. Seriously, this is making me INCOHERENTLY HAPPY GRIFFITH GRIFFITH GRIFFITH OMG. If I started trying to list the things this is doing really, really well, I would go on for hours. The way that Miura is using sexual violence is brilliant, and I can't believe I just wrote that sentence, but it is, because it supercharges and complicates the relationship between Griffith and Guts from the first: if they could simply be lovers, everything might be all right, but as it is they are going to be something far stranger, and destroy each other. And a SHONEN WRITER NOTICED AND DID THAT OMG. This manga seriously pushes my gore tolerance (and probably anybody's)(except of course Thrud's-- she is reading this too and does not think the demons have yet achieved vile, which is just as well as I like being able to find the volumes in the bookcase and not under her pillow), and is the one thing I read that is definitively gorier than Hellsing-- and it is gorier than Hellsing by a lot-- but I do not care, it is totally worth it. It is epic and darkly magnificent and clearly only going to get better, because it has latched on to some kind of high fantasy archetype and is just being the best of that that can be possible. I can also already tell that these characters will break my heart, and I don't care about that either. So good. So damn good.
41-42. Fullmetal Alchemist, v.1-2, Hiromu Arakawa. Yes, yes, I know. But the anime was triggery such that I couldn't finish it, and I saw it first, so I was rather reluctant about the manga. Which is a shame because it is better than the anime-- better pacing, better expression work, better plotting. It is for example even more obvious how ridiculously awesome Hawkeye is, and the way that the alchemists have an uneasy relationship with ethics and the military and the conflicts between those is much clearer right from the start. Also I like the art very much; the anime is more conventionally pretty but I find this better-looking. Oh, and I have spent however many years wondering why the slash fandom for this series fixated on Ed and Roy. Well, I still wouldn't go there myself, but I no longer think that this is one of those totally insane fandom things, as I can see it if I squint, which is a major change from the anime. Still trying to decide whether I want to watch Ye Anime Remake. Definitely keeping going with the manga.
43. Berserk v.5, Kentaro Miura. ♥. You know, it's really hard to write someone who is set up to have to be as awesome as Griffith is and actually have them be as awesome as Griffith is. I mean, everyone goes around talking about how awesome Griffith is, but he is still actually that awesome. Traditionally if the entire cast of something starts going on about how amazing somebody is, it is time to start looking around for Mary Sues. Not this time.
44-49. Fullmetal Alchemist v.3-7, Hiromu Arakawa. Yeah, I really like this much better than the anime in just about every way. Pacing! This has so much better pacing! And Greed's people come across better. And the art.
50. Flower of Life v.4, Fumi Yoshinaga. Extremely good conclusion to a ridiculously good series. This volume gently explains to the reader that yes, there has been a plot right there all along before wrapping it up in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying way, with a couple of surprisingly painful touches along the road. This is one of Yoshinaga's best and very high in my list of my favorite manga ever. Highly, highly recommended.
51-54. Fullmetal Alchemist v.8-11, Hiromu Arakawa. I am finding portions of the panel layout slightly visually confusing at times, but this is a very solid series. And I am really enjoying Hawkeye (the thing with Barry was hilarious), and watching Roy be ridiculously badass. Honestly I would like a little more Ed and Al than we are getting, and the Xing stuff feels slightly superfluous. But these are minor quibbles.
55-58. Berserk v.6-9, Kentaro Miura. ♥ ♥ ♥ Oh, evil evil epic high fantasy manga, where have you been all my life? Never leave me again. Please continue to shower me with layered plot structure (symbolism! which does not suck! in a relatively subtle way! in manga! whee!), developed characters, an interesting underlying philosophical argument, a surprisingly light sense of humor (you can't tell me the truly stupid names of the enemy platoons aren't that stupid on purpose), and the mere existence of Griffith. Seriously at this point I don't think Griffith even needs to do anything to continue being this awesome. You could have him stand there for like an entire volume and look inscrutable and the entire cast and Thrud and I would assume that he had taken over the world offscreen using only the power of his subconscious. Speaking of which, am anticipating beginning to have problems removing relevant volumes of manga from Thrud's person and/or pillow. I haven't seen her this happy about something not by Tezuka or Urasawa in years. A note to persons who may be considering reading this manga: still the goriest thing I read by a factor of seventy-leven, and significant sequences of (necessary, plot-justified) extreme sexual nastiness. Find a non-shrink-wrapped copy of the first volume and read the first three pages. If that squicks you, well, that's an adequate representation.
59-62. Fullmetal Alchemist v.12-15, Hiromu Arakawa. Okay, I take back what I said about the Xing stuff. Well, about everyone except the girl with the panda, who can GO AWAY NOW. Ed = awesome. Roy = awesome. Ishbal genocide = depressing as hell gaaaaaahhhh. Manga = fairly awesome.
Movie:
The Thief of Bagdad, 1940, dir. by committee including Michael Powell, produced by Alexander Korda, who would probably rise from the grave to destroy me if I did not mention that fact to you given the size and placement of his producer's credit. Home. Oh hey Criterion just put this out on DVD, so you all know. I am ill and was feeling tired and bored and terrible and wanted to watch something new to me that was guaranteed not to depress me or shock me overmuch or make me feel worse. People had been telling me repeatedly that this was one of the greatest family movies of all time. Well, what do you know, it is. Things I liked about this, besides everything, include the colors (yay three-strip Technicolor!), Sabu, and that while the girl didn't get to do much she was clearly at least trying to have control of her own life. Also you can see the influence of the visuals clear down to things like Okami (hiii, statue-climbing-giant-spider-fight I had to play from behind the couch). Great music, too. One might be able to argue that this is Orientalist, but it was made in 1940. None of the characters are supposed to be white, and Sabu and Rex Ingram basically steal the movie between them; I did not actively want to throw things.
lignota, teenybuffalo, have you seen this? If not, do so immediately.
