Crazy, crazy, crazy day. I wanted to link one thing, though, and that is my review of est em’s Red Blinds the Foolish that was posted at Manga Recon today. Several months ago, I reviewed est em’s earlier work, Seduce Me After the Show, here in my blog, and went on and on about how far superior I thought it was to most yaoi manga. And while not all the stories in Red Blinds the Foolish live up to the strength of that volume as a whole, the title story is, in my opinion, her strongest yet.

Even if you think you’d never be interested in reading a volume of yaoi manga, please give this review the opportunity to try to convince you why you might read this one.

One more thing, I’ve started here a page indexing all my reviews over at Manga Recon. Now that I’m posting news items and press releases there as well, I think it’s harder to pick out the reviews from my author page over there. So there it is! Later!

We’re snowed in again (sigh) but I was prepared at least, and brought work home with me yesterday. After a long morning of work, I thought I’d take a break. Probably I should have worked on the review I have due this week, but instead, I finally picked up volume 5 of Yotsuba&!, which I’d been holding off on since it’s the last one until forever (or something like that).

I swear, there is nothing that can make a person happier than a volume of Yotsuba&! There is truly nothing more delightful in this world.

And so I present a List of Awesomeness in Yotusba&! Volume 5:
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Oh Monday. How I wish you were Friday. I have one review in today’s Manga Minis at Manga Recon, for volumes 2 & 3 of Go!Comi’s Ultimate Venus. It is a silly, silly series that I enjoyed quite a bit more than expected. This initially led to a rambling post musing on the futility of assigning grades in reviews, but it sort of pushed itself into a corner so I’ve given it up for now. Instead, here are a few random links to things I’ve enjoyed recently:

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I’m mostly recovered from illness, though I still want to sleep too much. My review wrestling is over, though, at least for the moment! That review I was having so much trouble with has gone up, for Vertical’s The Blade of the Courtesans in today’s Otaku Bookshelf column and Manga Recon.

The Blade of the Courtesans is a Japanese historical novel set in at the beginning of the Edo period by author Keiichiro Ryu. The book was nominated for a Naoki Award in Japan, but I found it incredibly difficult to review mainly because, to be perfectly honest, I really disliked it. You can find out why by reading the review, but… yeah. I try really hard to write balanced, objective reviews for Manga Recon, much more so than I do here where I figure it’s my place to talk about how things affect me personally. This time, though, it was really hard. Not that I had to scrape to find good things about the book to discuss. It does have good points. But the less good points were really difficult for me to get around, particularly those concerning the roles of women in the story.

Now that I’ve finished the review, I’ll be interested to look around online and see what other people thought. I really respect Vertical and what they put out there, so it actually quite pained me to grade this as I did. I wonder if other people would agree with my assessment, or if I’m just too picky about the wrong things. I guess I’ll find out!

I’m battling illness and stabbing blindly at a difficult review, so just a little link-blogging from me today!

First of all, I keep re-reading Ed Sizemore’s review of Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century Boys and find myself desperately wanting to read the manga. This has shot straight to the top of my to-buy list. Ed’s reviews are always very much from the heart, and it’s obvious how much he enjoyed this manga. Example number 100,000,347 of How Reviews Sell Manga.

Speaking of reviews selling manga, check out Michelle’s recent review of classic shojo manga A,A’. Made me want to buy that too!

At Manga Recon’s recent roundtable, the bunch of us talked about our hopes and fears for film adaptations of manga. I piped up in favor of adapting shorter, less-popular series that could grab someone other than the usual action flick crowd. Not that I expect that will ever, ever happen.

So, has everyone been following the conversation about manga at Hooded Utilitarian? I’ve avoided dwelling on it too much, because I keep getting angry, but one point rings true. I haven’t ever been able to get deep into western comics, and one of the reasons, I think, is that I find them visually overwhelming. So aside from the inaccurate (and insulting) aspect of the argument that simple = simplistic, I think there is something to the fact that I am a manga reader at least in part because the art is easier for me to follow. That is not the only reason by far, nor is it the biggest reason (which is actually that I find the stories being told in manga much more to my taste), but it is definitely a factor.

ETA: Of course I realize now that most of what I just said there has already been said much more eloquently and with less vitriol by Brigid Alverson.

Okay, gotta go. Be sure to check out Deanna’s post from earlier today!

Thank you all for the warm reception to my introductory post! It was great to read the comments and discussions. Ed and Grace, I’ll definitely have to post my thoughts about Ranma ½ when I read more volumes. And Jun is definitely tempting me toward Boys Over Flowers. My library does not have Basara or One Thousand and One Nights so I’ll have to be on the lookout for used volumes.

I also have a question for everyone. I’m considering going to Sakuracon here in Seattle this April. It will be my first anime-con so I am interested to hear if you have any advice or opinions about this particular convention or anime-conventions in general.

As promised, I’ve returned to talk about Life Volumes 1-8, Canon, and Seimaden Volumes 1-10. Of the series I have started this year, there have been some standouts, like Life and Only the Ring Finger Knows (which I’m going to save for my next post). And then there are the series I just have to shrug my shoulders over and even find myself giggling about inappropriately, like Canon and Seimaden. Spoilers after the jump if you have not read these series

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First things first, Monday means manga minis at Manga Recon, and I have one review there, for the second volume of Lay Mitsuki’s Yggdrasil from publisher Go!Comi. It’s one of those titles that could end up being incredibly good and packed with meaning, but it’s hard to tell at this point. Now on to the main topic.

Something I chose for a quick read yesterday evening, was volume 1 of Matsuri Hino’s Captive Hearts, a collection of three manga short stories (the first of which I believe will be continued) about love, or more accurately, obsession. I dug into Captive Hearts without having read anything about it, though if I’d actually paid attention to the cover art, which features a couple donned in wedding attire and chains, I might have been less surprised about the content.
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So yesterday, on a bit of a whim, Paul and I decided to drive out to Cambridge (a good hour and forty minutes away) to go to the little Japan area at Porter Square, primarily to shop in the Japanese market they have there, though we ended up browsing other stores as well. I had no idea such a place existed, actually, until Paul found it online. What a lucky find!

At the market, we picked up lots of food, including snacks. My favorite find was their spicy tuna & mayo onigiri. If this is what convenience store onigiri tastes like in Japan, I can understand why everyone is always eating it. This is something I make at home a lot, but while the rice in my onigiri always gets hard and dry if I refrigerate it overnight, this onigiri’s rice remained magically perfect and moist, even after a night in my fridge. Yum, yum, yum.

While we were there, we picked up lunch at one of the many little restaurants, and I got to eat takoyaki (octopus dumplings, for those who are not obsessed with Japanese culture like I am) which was squishy and delicious!

The main reason for the trip, however, was to pick up ingredients for sukiyaki, which we had for dinner today! Paul got a portable gas stove for Christmas, just the thing for cooking food at the table, so with the perfect setup, we served up our sukiyaki (Kanto style), raw egg and all. It was extremely delicious, and will be a wonderful dish to share with family and friends!

The week has been a little crazy, and I haven’t managed much manga-wise, other than reading a couple more volumes of Yotsuba&! (SO CUTE) and making three trades at mangatude (YAY). I do have a couple of reviews up at Manga Recon today, though, and they are both of pretty interesting titles, so I’ll pass the links along here!

First off, I review Viz’s Heaven’s Will in today’s On The Shojo Beat column, and I must tell you that though I only graded it at a B-, I actually really liked it. It’s a complete mess, and impossible to recommend, but there is something so compelling about its quirky cast of characters, I really just wanted more. Read my review, and you’ll see what I mean. I should point out, too, Michelle’s review of Otomen vol. 1 in the same column, which made me want to run right out and buy it, though it’s obviously just for fun.

Secondly, I have a full-length review of the first volume of Nanae Chrono’s new series, Momo Tama. Writing this review was incredibly difficult for some reason, especially surprising considering that I quite liked the volume. I’ll be interested to see where this series goes, and whether it really does become a full-blown comedy as the promotional material suggests. I kind of hope it doesn’t, because it’s more interesting to me the way it is now.

Okay, that’s all for now. I look forward to the long weekend!

Thanks to Lori Henderson at Manga Xanadu, I have discovered the wonderful world of Mangatude, where people swap volumes of manga they don’t want for volumes that they do. With my tight budget these days this is a godsend, and I’m sure I’m not the only one in that boat right now. I’ve signed up, and already have a trade in the works!

Of course, as wonderful a find as this is, I’m thinking about how it affects the industry for us to be trading books instead of buying new ones on our own. Right now, I’ve justified it in that my budget is pretty inflexible, and I wasn’t going to be spending more anyway, so better to be maintaining my interest in series that I eventually *will* buy more volumes of. Better, too, that books I don’t need (like our accidental duplicate copy of Fullmetal Alchemist vol. 8) will find their way into grateful hands. It’s made me think a lot also about what series I *really* want, and what I’d be willing to give up in order to get something I want more.

I don’t have a lot for trade right now (and half of what I did have is already gone), but I’m sure that will grow as time goes on. In any case, I’m passing the info along in the event that I’m not actually the last person to know about this. :)