New Library Card. Who's This?
Feb. 21st, 2024 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouseI sort of lost my mind when I got my fancy new library card and now I have to go to the library for the second time this week to pick up a veritable ton of books. Since it's What Did You Read Wednesday, I'll go through some of things I've been reading and then list out this massive pile of TBR.
My wife is on the board of the Friends of Ramsey County Libraries and so, every couple of months or so, I get stuck kicking around a library in-person for several hours. (Oh, for those of you who are new to my blog: my wife really doesn't drive. She can? But she prefers not to, thus I play taxi a lot.) Last time I picked up a bunch of books, some of which I enjoyed and a couple of which I bounded out of. Things I enjoyed last week included, Kakukaku Shikajika / Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist’s Journey by Higashimura Akiko. Higashimura-sensei is probably best known for Princess Jellyfish. Blank Canvas is a memoir that focuses on "that one teacher" that I feel like a lot of creatives have had? This is the person who helps you recognize that you do, in fact, have talent and should stick with it. Higashimura-sensei has a very fraught relationship with this teacher, in part, because manga art is, at the time she was coming of age, considered low-brow. Her teacher sees in her a Great Artist. So, it's an interesting series. Particularly, if you like memoir manga and/or manga about manga artists. I ended up reading all 5 volumes.
Ramsey County seems to have a new manga buyer because I've been noticing more and more "classic" manga showing up on the shelves. From 1978, comes the reprint volume of Nonnonba by Mizuki Shigeru. Interestingly enough, this is another fictionalized autobiography/memoir. Mizuki-sensei is much older than Higashimura-sensei, having been born in 1922. Nonnonba takes place in pre-WWII Japan, when Mizuki-sensei is a grade/middle schooler. It's only tangentially about his manga work because it, not unlike Blank Canvas, focuses on an important person in the artist's life, in this case an old woman who filled his imagination with stories of yokai, creatures from Japanese folktales. This one was interesting, but it has some surprise rough bumps, particularly for women readers. Pre-WWII Japan, was not a GREAT place to be a young girl. I was kind of prepared for that, but also kind of not. I was really thrown by the fact that one of Mizuki-sensei's contemporaries was matter-of-factly sold to a geisha house. She's just only old enough to have considered starting school.
Then, I bounced out of a couple. I am a difficult sell for sports manga. I really loved Haikyuu!! (a volleyball manga/anime that should NOT be as compelling as it is, but like its main character, Hinata, it just winds its way into your heart by SHEER FORCE OF WILL and onomatopoeia.) But, most of the time, I'm a typical nerd sneering "huh? Sports ball? I don't get it." So, it's probably not shocking news that I only made it halfway through the first volume of Midori Wataru's Run on Your New Legs, a story about a promising high school soccer star who looses a leg to some horrific accident (not explained in vol. 1) and rediscovers the joys of sporting when an absolutely stalkerish stranger approaches him with offers of an athletic protistic leg. I think the problem with the first volume for me was the lack of TEAM. If I'm going to buy into sports manga, I need shounen team spirit, you know? People pulling together for a lost cause, all that sort of noise.
The other dud for me was My Androgynous Boyfriend by Tomekou. As I told a friend of mine, I don't get stylish people. This is also the problem with being nerdy my whole life. Sports and pretty people with popular Instas = ?? for me. Plus, as far as I could tell by volume 1, the main couple's relationship seems entirely based on "she thinks I'm cute! Yay!" and her thinking, "Cute! Cute! Cute!" every other panel. That's just not really very compelling to me. There's just not a lot THERE. Although, I guess there's a kind of running joke that people keep wanting him to be gay (because he's so pretty, I guess?) and her getting mistaken as having a girlfriend and being "that way." I don't actually get this joke, however. For me "your so GAY!!! Hahahaha!!" stopped being funny in seventh grade when it turned out that maybe, yeah, I am.
That's everything I read last week. Things on my current GIGANTIC to-be-read (in no particular order):
So, I'm off to pick the new books up. I will check-in next Wednesday and let you know how far down the list I got and what I thought of it all. How about you all? Reading anything interesting?
My wife is on the board of the Friends of Ramsey County Libraries and so, every couple of months or so, I get stuck kicking around a library in-person for several hours. (Oh, for those of you who are new to my blog: my wife really doesn't drive. She can? But she prefers not to, thus I play taxi a lot.) Last time I picked up a bunch of books, some of which I enjoyed and a couple of which I bounded out of. Things I enjoyed last week included, Kakukaku Shikajika / Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist’s Journey by Higashimura Akiko. Higashimura-sensei is probably best known for Princess Jellyfish. Blank Canvas is a memoir that focuses on "that one teacher" that I feel like a lot of creatives have had? This is the person who helps you recognize that you do, in fact, have talent and should stick with it. Higashimura-sensei has a very fraught relationship with this teacher, in part, because manga art is, at the time she was coming of age, considered low-brow. Her teacher sees in her a Great Artist. So, it's an interesting series. Particularly, if you like memoir manga and/or manga about manga artists. I ended up reading all 5 volumes.
Ramsey County seems to have a new manga buyer because I've been noticing more and more "classic" manga showing up on the shelves. From 1978, comes the reprint volume of Nonnonba by Mizuki Shigeru. Interestingly enough, this is another fictionalized autobiography/memoir. Mizuki-sensei is much older than Higashimura-sensei, having been born in 1922. Nonnonba takes place in pre-WWII Japan, when Mizuki-sensei is a grade/middle schooler. It's only tangentially about his manga work because it, not unlike Blank Canvas, focuses on an important person in the artist's life, in this case an old woman who filled his imagination with stories of yokai, creatures from Japanese folktales. This one was interesting, but it has some surprise rough bumps, particularly for women readers. Pre-WWII Japan, was not a GREAT place to be a young girl. I was kind of prepared for that, but also kind of not. I was really thrown by the fact that one of Mizuki-sensei's contemporaries was matter-of-factly sold to a geisha house. She's just only old enough to have considered starting school.
Then, I bounced out of a couple. I am a difficult sell for sports manga. I really loved Haikyuu!! (a volleyball manga/anime that should NOT be as compelling as it is, but like its main character, Hinata, it just winds its way into your heart by SHEER FORCE OF WILL and onomatopoeia.) But, most of the time, I'm a typical nerd sneering "huh? Sports ball? I don't get it." So, it's probably not shocking news that I only made it halfway through the first volume of Midori Wataru's Run on Your New Legs, a story about a promising high school soccer star who looses a leg to some horrific accident (not explained in vol. 1) and rediscovers the joys of sporting when an absolutely stalkerish stranger approaches him with offers of an athletic protistic leg. I think the problem with the first volume for me was the lack of TEAM. If I'm going to buy into sports manga, I need shounen team spirit, you know? People pulling together for a lost cause, all that sort of noise.
The other dud for me was My Androgynous Boyfriend by Tomekou. As I told a friend of mine, I don't get stylish people. This is also the problem with being nerdy my whole life. Sports and pretty people with popular Instas = ?? for me. Plus, as far as I could tell by volume 1, the main couple's relationship seems entirely based on "she thinks I'm cute! Yay!" and her thinking, "Cute! Cute! Cute!" every other panel. That's just not really very compelling to me. There's just not a lot THERE. Although, I guess there's a kind of running joke that people keep wanting him to be gay (because he's so pretty, I guess?) and her getting mistaken as having a girlfriend and being "that way." I don't actually get this joke, however. For me "your so GAY!!! Hahahaha!!" stopped being funny in seventh grade when it turned out that maybe, yeah, I am.
That's everything I read last week. Things on my current GIGANTIC to-be-read (in no particular order):
- Red Snow by Katsumta Susumu
- Gogo Monster by Matsumoto Taiyo
- Deserter by Ito Junji
- What Did You Eat Yesterday? (Vol. 20) by Yoshiaga Fumi '
- Last Gender: When We Are Nameless (Vol 1) by Taki Rei
- At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender by Arai Shou
- Jujutsu Kaisen (vols 2-4, because of course someone still has #1) by Akutami Gege
- The Summer Hikaru Died (Vol 1) by Mokumokuren.
- Wandance by Coffee
- Night of the Living Cat (Vol 1) by Hawkman
- PTSD Radio (Vol 1) by Nakayama Masaaki
So, I'm off to pick the new books up. I will check-in next Wednesday and let you know how far down the list I got and what I thought of it all. How about you all? Reading anything interesting?