Happiness Is a Warm Goukakyuu No Jutsu

Okay! This took long enough:

Things I Read During 2008: Supplemental

Masashi Kishimoto – Naruto Volumes 3 through 27 (throughout August and September)

I kept meaning to write a big long post on Naruto, but it didn’t end up happening, and was probably never particularly necessary to begin with. Here’s the short version: I fell out of love with Tite Kubo’s Bleach and found myself looking for a replacement, as I apparently need at least one big noisy shōnen fight comic in my life. I’d read the first two volumes of Naruto a long time ago and it didn’t particularly grab me, but it had a good reputation—specifically, it seemed to have avoided the worst of Bleach’s missteps—so I figured I’d see whether it heated up a bit in the later chapters. It did—as you can see, I basically snorted the whole thing through a twenty dollar bill.*

The wherefore of the (abortive) big long Naruto post was that the series does right nearly all the specific things that went disastrously wrong with Bleach, and I kind of wanted to explore that. The differences were really striking, and it seems that one who cares about storytelling should try to understand what makes or breaks a piece of junk food entertainment. How does a silly action comic become satisfying or dissatisfying? How does it acquire or lose moral seriousness?

And that was when I realized I was basically trying to come up with a complete theory of writing craft, so I scrapped the post. Anyway, Naruto is friggin’ awesome, you should totally read it. (You probably already have, but never mind that, I’m trying to play tastemaker here.) And in case anyone’s read both and feels like playing the teen-lit analysis game with me, here’s the compare+contrast in a chopped-down form: ( Under the cut, of course. )

---

And then I read things during November.

Things I Read During November

Neal Stephenson – Anathem (11/9)

Neal Stephenson does secondary world fantasy! Sort of. At least for the first few hundred pages. Then it becomes either science fiction or philosophickal fiction, and half the fun is in figuring out which, so I should probably shut up soon. It was an extremely wonderful book, and if you can enjoy the word games or endure them until the plot gets rolling, you will find it wonderful too.

Sidenote: Not that it’s at issue here, since Anathem comes to a much more conventional wrap-up than his last several have, but I’ve long thought that folk might consider getting off Stephenson’s case about endings. There’s nothing wrong with an abrupt ending, as long as it’s called for, and I’m at a loss as to just what sort of ending a given snarker thinks, say, The Diamond Age ought to have had. (Or maybe I’m just particularly partial to that book’s end.)

(Side-sidenote: Well, Cryptonomicon’s ending was pretty fuckin’ weird, but it only got that way after The Baroque Cycle went into detail about just what kind of gold was hiding in that submarine. Before King Solomon and the Wandering Jew got involved, that ending was fine.)

Sarah Vowell – The Wordy Shipmates (audiobook, 11/15)

Hey, Sarah Vowell has a new book out, you should read/hear it. That’s my review, bye.

(I do have many things to say about it, but my god, I’ve delayed this post long enough already.)

J.R.R. Tolkien – The Two Towers (11/22)

So the story with me and The Lord of the Rings is that Dad read The Hobbit to us when we were very small, and read LOTR to us when we were only slightly less small. I can’t remember our ages, and I’ve had a hard time getting solid estimates from either of the parents, but we were pretty darn little, and it lodged in our hindbrains. (And then we were hungry for more and he moved on to the Tolkien methadone, A.K.A. The Sword of Shannara.) I read The Hobbit for myself several times in elementary or intermediate school, and more than once tried to read LOTR on my own. Alas: Each time, I bounced off The Two Towers.*

Well, and what of it? It’s not an easy book; it’s tense and grim and claustrophobia-inducing, and there’s not a whole lot of crash-bang for an 11-year-old to sink his teeth into. But it sure is beautiful, and I kind of wish I’d had the attention span to keep going. Or that I’d attempted a re-read much sooner.

OH, BY THE WAY: I saw this amazing ad on Penny Arcade or somewhere for this cheese-tastic looking LOTR MMO, and my god. After having soaked in Tolkien’s actual prose lately, it was about the most inappropriate response to the books I could imagine.

_____

* I also tried to read The Silmarillion in intermediate school, with utterly predictable results.

Masashi Kishimoto – Naruto: vol 30 (11/22)

This was one of those volumes where the whole thing was a single fight, and the fight still isn’t actually finished. (Every shōnen manga veteran has seen this before.) Still, like I’ve mentioned, Kishimoto actually makes his endless fight scenes cool and interesting, so I’m okay with it.

As in any good fight scene, it’s all about the character development and plot reveals. We’re still in the 2.5 Years Later aftermath and aren’t 100% clued-in on what the characters are capable of yet, so a lot of this fight is about showing how completely badass Sakura is now. (See above.)

The series has been having an extended conversation about talent versus hard work since pretty much forever, and the time-skip has made it even more central. Considering the nature of most shōnen manga heroes, I’ll be interested to see where Naruto steers that argument.

Things I Read During December

Connie Willis – To Say Nothing of the Dog (12/29, umpteenth re-read)

This is one of my favorite comfort re-reads. When I am stressed out, it is pretty much everything I want from a novel.

Also, it’s just a pretty crackin’ good read in general. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t recommend it highly enough.