I Don't Like Guys Like You, Who Lack Telepathy - Things I Read During March

Hmm, looks like I mostly read manga this month.

I also read Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which I'm not going to review because I feel like I said enough about it enough in my bread posts. (In short, it's great... depending on your learning style.)

Okay, here we go –

Takashi Hashiguchi - Yakitate JaPan 1 (3/7), 2 (3/3), 3-4 (3/8)

Too much shouting, not enough story.
Moe-moe sexpots go home!
I actually find myself a little bit charmed by the central conceit, which is that the protagonist has independently re-invented most known types of bread (plus weird twists of his own). But the series also kind of irritates the hell out of me, so I doubt I'll stick with it.
Did I mention the shouting? DID I MENTION THE SHOUTIIIIIIIIING??!?!!!!!!!

In conclusion, destroy all shōnen tournament manga.

Eiji Otuska and Housui Yamazaki - The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vols 4 and 5 (3/3, manga)

More fun times with our favorite underemployed carcass-whisperers! Yes, it's exploitative and gross, but it's also totally awesome. You know you love it! (Or at least you know I love it. Whatever.)

Yellow Tanabe - Kekkaishi 1 (3/5), 3-4 (3/6), 5-8 (3/11), 9-10 (3/19), 11-12 (3/21), 13-15 (3/25) (manga)

This series... is awesome. You should be reading it.

It really works a thing I liked from the earliest few chapters of Bleach, where hunting malevolent spirits is dangerous and exciting, but it's also, y'know, a job. And it has top priority a lot of the time, but if you're going to be doing it for the long haul, you have to balance it with your other interests and obligations and sort of consciously give it a place in your life. Plot eventually shows up to wreck everyone's life, but the fact remains that the main characters have a job to do, and they don't get to go loose-cannon on the bad guys without tempting major consequences.

So anyway, Yoshimori Sumimura and Tokine Yukimura are the current heirs of their respective (rival) families, and the hereditary protectors of a mysterious sacred site called Karasumori. Karasumori has a bad habit of strengthening and growing any monster that wanders into it, so they've been hunting ayakashi every night since they were kids. But inheriting the family responsibility also means inheriting the family abilities: both of them are kekkaishi—barrier users who can distort space to create and destroy protective fields.

Things that are awesome about this series:

Both lead characters have a major rescuer complex, which mutates some of the stock secret supernatural battle manga situations in some really interesting ways, and twists the romantic tension between them in some even more interesting ways. (The end of the Kokuboro arc, OMFG.)
One of Yoshimori's hereditary allies is a demon dog. In the daytime, his spirit lives in a rock. They keep his rock in a doghouse. That's the kind of manga this is.
Complex but coherent metaphysics. (I AM GLARING AT YOU, BLEACH.)
Tricky combat tricks. Not quite Naruto levels of tricky, but, y'know, pretty tricky.
A sense of restraint and a willingness to use small details to tell parts of the story that a lesser comic would spell out explicitly. Like how all the other kekkaishi wear traditional sandals, but Yoshimori wears a sensible pair of modern sneakers. No one ever says anything about it. (In the manga, at least; the slightly dumber anime spends a whole episode on it.) Or how Yoshi has to wear a bandage on his hand at school to hide his mark of succession (which looks like a tattoo on his palm). Or how when the entire battalion of well-designed side characters with sweet-ass abilities shows up, Tanabe just lets them be hardcore when they need to be hardcore, instead of spending five chapters on each of them explaining to us how badass they are. (I mean, we get it, right? Don't be greedy, mangaka; leave some hooks for the fanfic scene!)
Yoshimori is chronically sleep-deprived, naps at school all the time, and has a fairly major caffeine addiction. (Seriously, he's a middle-schooler who's up until the wee hours of the morning every night. Of course he's going to be a zombie during the day.)
The kekkai magic is a wonder of visual design, worldbuilding, and plot control. The school of abilities that the two families use has been optimized for ease of use, broadness of function, and ease of teaching, and the orderly and sensible nature of it is emphasized by the straight lines and cubic prisms that depict its effects. But Hazama-ryu kekkai-jutsu is a conscious refinement of pre-existing abilities; later on in the story, various characters start accessing the older and dirtier forms of that magic, and the visual design of those spells is all rounded zones and jagged lines and fuzzy borders. (And when I say older and dirtier, I mean really nasty: the root of kekkai-jutsu seems to be selectively rejecting certain properties of space, and the purest uncontrolled technique defines an area in which nothing but the user is allowed to exist.)

It is fucking great. The end.

A brief interpolation: I Am Become Slash, Destroyer of Worlds

Okay, so a while back, I was writing this big old post talking about the Kekkaishi anime. In the middle of some paragraphs about how one of my favorite characters went in a bit of a weird direction (what with having none of her chemistry with Yoshimori anymore and getting a much huskier voice than I thought she'd have given how small she is), I had a sudden gnawing doubt and went off to search the web for a second. And yea, verily: Sen Kagemiya is totally a dude.

(This is not my fault, by the way, because the translation team was inconsistent with their pronoun use for his first several appearances.)

Anyway, I guess this means that I suddenly have a favorite slash pairing, because I totally loved:

The fraught situation from the end of the Kokuboro arc where Sen sort of took Tokine's place in Yoshimori's protector neurosis
- (And Tokine's reaction to Yoshimori abandoning her back at the ranch! And Sen's reaction to her reaction!)
The way Sen was obviously sort of obsessed with both Yoshimori and Gen, but Yoshimori was very much all-business with Sen
Sen's irritation with being rescued by Yoshimori
Sen's need to be useful once rescued
The way Sen played up his apparent ability to mind-read in order to creep Yoshi out
The way Sen (like Gen) got all flustered after being complimented by Yoshimori
And, of course, Sen jumping in front of Kaguro's blade to buy Yoshimori enough time to rev up his Zekkai. And the unexpected results thereof.

That's right, world: bring on the gay. Yes, Yoshimori and Tokine are obviously meant to be, but you're not tellin' me there's nothing up between him and Sen.

Yuki Urushibara - Mushishi vol. 1 (3/12)

This is an episodic series about a wandering... fixer? Basically, it's a continuous set of very low-key quasi-horror stories in a setting that resembles old Japan. (Unsure about eras; my history is shaky. Not Warring States.) A dude named Ginko wanders the land plying his trade as a Mushi-shi; he helps people (usually) and seeks to increase his own knowledge about the ancient and bizarre Mushi, pseudo-plants and pseudo-animals that predate everything we think of as "life."

Very atmospheric and bittersweet-pastoral. It's creepy, but also somehow peaceful. Recommended.

Gene Luen Yang - American Born Chinese (3/14, comic) (50books_poc: 1)

I read the first half or so of ABC when it was being serialized on Modern Tales and had been meaning to get back to it. And it's a book now, so here we are!

I've got something of a humiliation squick, and this is largely a story about shame and humiliation. It's also a story about the internalized effects of systemic racism, and though it ends on a moderately joyful note, much of it made me sorrowful and sick at heart. So, tough read. Worthy one, though. Yang's cartooning technique is blindingly great, and the... central plot twist? central structural twist? ...is a masterful trick of storytelling. I didn't see it coming, at least.

On Jesus: Yang is devoutly Catholic. I am not. I've read two other comics of his, and there always seems to be some point where Christianity jumps up out of the bushes and says "OH HAY HAI THERE," which discomfits me every time. I'm completely accustomed to reading explicitly Christian themes in mimetic fiction, but for some reason, bringing them into fantasy worlds, even urban fantasy, weirds me out big time. (Note that I said Christian themes; for some reason, I'm totally okay with bringing Christian mythology into worlds that don't universally abide by a Christian morality. I cannot explain this to you.)

That's obviously a personal thing of mine rather than something wrong with the book, but it's important enough to me that I can't properly review the book without mentioning it. Anyway, what threw me here was a reworking of the Journey to the West in which the Monkey King et al are apparently bringing gifts for the infant Christ instead of retrieving a Buddhist sutra. It's weird, and it chucked me out of the story for a while, and then there's fallout from that later on that continued to be weird for me.

(Also, since I have cultural appropriation on the mind lately, that part is a good example of how cultural authority and authenticity matter: as a Chinese-American Catholic, Yang's using and remixing elements of his own identity here, but if a white author had repurposed the Journey to the West like that, it may have ended up sketchy as hell.)

Norihiro Yagi - Claymore vol. 1 (3/21), 2 (didn't finish)

Forget it, I can't read this.

rachelmanija recommended Claymore as a big, burly shonen fight comic with a largely female core cast, which sounded pretty damn appealing. That's mostly what it seems to be, but I really cannot stand the art style—the vast majority of the characters look like they have severe Down Syndrome, and it's just too distracting. Also, the dialogue is completely uninteresting, and the characters are largely blank to me. 100% not my style. Dammit.

Margaret Atwood - Happy Endings (3/26, short story)

I haven't anything to say about this. It's good, though! And short!

And I read like two things during April, because my brain was fried:

Yellow Tanabe - Kekkaishi vol. 16 (4/12)

New arc! Interesting developments! Etc.

Elizabeth Weyland Barber - Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years (4/26)

I came across this book in someone's (I think it may have been Jo Walton's) list of fuel for SF/F worldbuilding. It seemed interesting! And besides, I knew shit-all about the fiber arts, which suddenly seemed like a major oversight in my education.

The book is light on the big fancy theses and heavy on the fascinating details and unexpected connections. It's basically a history of textile technology, and given the importance of cloth and string in the history of civilization, Barber is able to ride that horse to some very interesting places. Highly recommended.

Roadrunner Twice

Werewolf Boys and Girls, You Are All Right By Me