Reminder: I have a poll running over here about pen names and gender, and would love your input, especially if you came here from Twitter or Facebook (in which case just leave an anon comment).

Anyway! More of last year’s reviews: Two books and a 5-volume comic series.

Mitsuru Adachi – Itsumo Misora (in scanlation)

Nov. 24

Years and years ago, I actually bought all five volumes of this in Japanese just because I liked the art, and was able to follow the story up through most of vol. 4. But then I hit the wall when it suddenly changed from a psychic kids sports comic into a pop-stars-and-actors/apocalypse-prevention-squad comic.

That’s still a weird transition, and it didn’t really work for me. I get the feeling this isn’t Adachi’s best work; it certainly wasn’t as good as the stuff in Short Program, and the volume of Cross Game I was poking at was vastly more coherent and engrossing. I think the art was pulling a lot of weight that should have been spread out among the dialogue, plotting, and pace. And I’d forgotten how jarring Adachi’s random (and often creepily underage) cheesecake can get.

Still, though, some fantastic cartooning in there. Wish it’d been attached to a story that worked better. (Yes, okay, fine, I’ll read Cross Game.)

Nora Ephron – Wallflower at the Orgy

Nov. 30

Some of these were really quite wonderful essays, notwithstanding the author’s comments about her former self in the more recent of the two forwards. (She refers to past-Nora as “dippy,” lol. I definitely need to start using that word.) The pieces are… of their time, let’s say, but they remain interesting.

In particular, the Helen Gurley Brown piece is — I don’t even have words for it. (…“mouseburger???”) And it was super weird to read a profile of Ayn Rand from back before her creepy-ass followers took over the government and demolished the economy.

T.A. Pratt – Blood Engines

Dec. 24

I read the prequel to this one back in 2009 and still feel that it was basically useless. But then rushthatspeaks gave the whole series a really glowing review, and since they have generally fantastic taste, I decided to eventually give the series another chance.

Thus, when I went digging through my old files* and discovered an old promo copy of Marla Mason: book one, I went ahead and started reading.

Lo and behold, it totally didn’t suck!

Mind you, it was trashy and infodumpy. And the characters all kind of talk the same. But it had a fully functional plot that surprised me at least once! And it embraced the fact that Cool Badass protagonists are generally murderous asshole criminals and ran with it, without making Marla totally unlikable. And it kept the level of destruction high enough to actually justify everyone’s OMG WE’RE SO HOSED attitude about the proceedings. And things didn’t all turn out inappropriately OK. There were non-traditional solutions. It was fun.

I’m still not convinced we need more than a handful of folk writing this kind of urban fantasy, but this was a decent argument for why Pratt may as well be one of that handful, so ok, cool. Rush claims the second book is an order of magnitude better; I have it showing up at Powell’s in a few days,** and plan to read it someday when I’m brain-fried and want to watch some things go boom.

_____

* Spurred by discovering that someone had finally made device on which it wasn’t painful to read a PDF. That’s what, only 15 years or so after the format became fucking inescapable? Great job, team.

** This post is laggy; I actually already read it.

Martha Wells – The Siren Depths

Dec. 8

Book three of Martha Wells’ TOTALLY EXCELLENT Raksura books. Just as good as the previous two. Look, if you like fantasy shit at all and haven’t read these, you really ought to. Six dollar DRM-free ebooks: one – two – three, bam. They’re on Kindle or whatever too.

So something occurred to me as I was reading this one: the Fell are crypto-vampires. Wells did a thorough enough job at deviating from the template that it took me a long time to figure it out: they don’t suck blood, they eat meat; they’re not undead, they’re living creatures with their own ecology. They don’t transform some victims into copies of themselves, although, well, they sort of try; it’s complicated. Etc. But they do show up looking beautiful and reveal their true nature later. They can influence people’s minds and hypnotize them. Their victims invite them in. And more to the heart of it, they’re intelligent and organized predators, who resemble their victims in a way that very few monsters do, and who can manipulate and toy with their prey’s emotions in a way that more strictly monstrous predators neither can do nor feel driven to.

And by divorcing vampiric nature from its home genre, Wells gets to… well wait, she actually gets two things. First is that the Fell have their gloves off — they aren’t rare, they don’t have any vestigial folkloric weaknesses, and they destroy and eat whole civilizations because they feel like it. The second is that she can get straight to the interesting vampire problems. To wit: are they people? And if so, does it even matter? And if it doesn’t matter, what does that say about being a person?

Because they don’t seem capable of remorse or compassion. They can’t be reasoned with; they’ll stop at nothing to kill and eat you, and will say anything that might get them what they want. They’re intelligent, though. And they seem to have genuine emotions and interior lives, sometimes, but they also know how to imitate emotions to manipulate their prey, so who can really tell if they actually feel anything? And yet. They seem so like us, sometimes; surely there’s something in there, right? And meantime, while we’ve been equivocating about this, they’ve eaten your family, and are smiling and telling you they didn’t mean it. They’re a whole species of Carcer from Night Watch.

And it’s even trickier in these books, because there’s already a certain confusion regarding who’s people; there are dozens if not hundreds of intelligent species on this planet, and plenty of them have no way of communicating with each other, and it probably gets hard to tell warfare from predation sometimes.

Anyway, those questions have been sticking with me, as have some lingering thoughts about the relationship between Arbora and Aeriat. But as always with Wells, the real show is her excellent character writing, and wow I had a great time with it. Moon in particular has benefited a lot from the series lasting for a few books. In the first, when you were still getting used to the bizarre world situation, he was spending a lot of his time functioning as reader surrogate. In the last two books, now that the rules are established and he can move around a lot more fluently, it’s become more apparent how badly psychologically damaged he really is (which in turn has shed a lot of light on how he was acting in the first book). And in spite of all that, he’s really likable! He’s brave and altruistic and a hard worker, and if he acts like a complete dumbass sometimes, well, it’s nothing a decade of therapy wouldn’t fix.

Jade spends a lot of time absent from this book, but she’s very much present by contrast with the queens from the other court, who make it obvious how lucky Moon got with her. (Malachite is awesome as hell, but JESUS.)

To make cock-ale, take ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better, parboil the cock, flea him and stamp him in a stone mortar til his bones are broken (you must craw and gut him when you flea him), then put the cock into two quarts of sack, and put to it three pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves: put all these into a canvas bag, and a little before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel. In a week or nine days' time bottle it up, fill the bottles to just above the neck, and give it the time to ripen as other ale.

Yeah, I’m gonna split this up into like three posts and present it all out of order. Here’s the mostly comics edition:

Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata – Death Note vol. 1

February 6

Yeah, everyone’s heard of this one, right? Bright young psychopath finds magical artifact that lets him kill anyone, decides to cleanse the world, then finds himself in a duel of wits with a nameless detective who may or may not be smarter than him but is certainly crafty as hell; meanwhile, the second-string grim reaper who “lost” the killer notebook eggs said young psychopath on.

I’m really enjoying this, and I think I’ll grab the rest from the library. The bargain one strikes, if one wants to run a story where nearly everyone in the world is a redshirt, is that the cat-and-mouse has to be legitimately fascinating, and so far this series looks startlingly able to cash that check.

Terry Pratchett – Witches Abroad

“Hey, do we already have this one?” I asked Schwern. He paused and blinked. “It’s 35¢. Who cares.” The Title Wave on 55% off day, everybody.

Anyway, this is an upper-mid-tier Discworld book, and that is about all needs saying about it, other than that it’s a witches book and I’ve been jonesing for some Granny Weatherwax.

I have this thought about how Weatherwax and Sam Vimes are the twin moral cores of Discworld and how it’s their integrity that lets them accomplish the impossible, but Vimes has tended to dominate lately because Pratchett has doubled down on the irreversible societal and technological changes in the latter-day books. And while Vimes’s morality is firm and unyielding on the street level, his inability to really process the big picture at speed means that he can be wielded as a tool by someone who wants to change the world and is clever enough to run him along a track where his interests don’t collide with their own. (Which is pretty much only Vetinari, on this planet. None of the various people who have been almost as smart as Vetinari have really understood how to completely suborn someone whose morality is the opposite of their own. Which is why Vetinari always wins.) Whereas Weatherwax can’t participate in that kind of book, both because she grasps the big picture with a sort of horrid fluency and thus just can’t be used like that, and also because she’s fundamentally opposed to title-case Changing the World, which is the purpose Vimes often seems to find himself being used for.

It’s not a very complete thought, though. Probably got some holes in it.

Yellow Tanabe – Kekkaishi vols. 30 and 31

(???)

Wow, Yoshimori’s mom is scary. She’s clearly modeled on Ranma’s mom, but takes the archetype in a bit of a different direction. That thing with the shikigami was a seriously cold move, though.

I’m not sure how I feel about the whole ethics question of sealing away REDACTED. He’s really creepy, though. “I know you like war, right?”

The shadow organization betrays a really grim view of what it means to be special-but-not-quite-special-enough. All the way from the rank and file up to the top.

Takeshi Konomi – Prince of Tennis, vol. 1

(???)

A perfectly well done genre-lockstep sports manga, which… come to think of it, I don’t know why I thought I might like this. I won’t read any more of it, but I choose to believe that the cast later has to play the Enfield Tennis Academy over the course of like twenty volumes and Michael Pemulis doses what’s-his-face with LSD, and that one girl accidentally watches five of James Orin Incandenza’s movies in the break room and gets scarred for life.

Emi Lenox – Emitown, vol. 1

(???)

Easy to read even in a scattered mental state. This is a good diary comic! By not aiming for a strip-worthy moment from each day, it avoids glibness; by summarizing liberally and generally avoiding capturing other peoples’ voices, it avoids a sense of story, which leaves it feeling more honest than many of its ilk. The anti-story rhythm establishes a sense of time really effectively. And the coy abstractions (army cats, Ocean Girl, whiteheart/blackheart) actually work for me really well, as a way to put emotional state on the page while maintaining a certain distance. And of course the art is fantastic.

C. Spike Trotman and Diana Nock – Poorcraft: The Funnybook Fundamentals of Living Well on Less

June 19

Of Kickstarter fame. This was exactly what it says it is! It’s quite well done, and I think most of the advice is good. But to be honest, this isn’t the point in my life when it would have had the most value, and I already knew most of this by now.

But like I said, it’s well done. I may find myself passing this on the next time I get invited to someone’s graduation.

Yellow Tanabe – Kekkaishi vol. 32

June 24

Ah, now it comes out. Karasumori spoilers omitted.

Y’know, I’m still not 100% sure I get the Shadow Organization plot. Like, I know what’s going on, to the extent that one can, but I’m not sure I get why that’s supposed to be a good story. The motivations of the main players are so vague, and so are the things everyone meant the Organization to DO for them. Like, the Night Troops are the only part that really makes sense to me; other than that, it’s like, why does your project exist, dudes? What the hell are you doing?

Often, that whole plot seems to’ve come from a different story entirely. The themes it’s dealing with just aren’t very relevant to the core cast, and neither are the pressures that are making it warp and collapse. I dunno, I have a loose theory that it wasn’t meant to go quite like this, and got out of hand when Tanabe needed an external antagonist after the Kokuboro was dealt with. Perils of serialization, and all that.

Book post time? BELIEVE IT.

Ok. Right. Haven’t done this in a while, so let’s just take it slow. Deep breath. WHOOF.

Things Which I Both A: Read in the Last Year-Plus-Change and B: Remembered to Write Something Down About

All I could do doing those three days was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.