So, just a week after I made a post about this subject, Sam started a roundtable discussion for Manga Recon about digital comics. And here it is: Manga Recon Roundtable: Digital Comics. Everyone has very good points to make, and it’s a much better (less whiny) read than my entry, so go see!

On a related subject, is there anyone who hasn’t been following the stuff about the text-to-speech capabilities of the Kindle, and how some folks are up in arms about it violating the copyright of audiobooks? Neil Gaiman has made some awesome posts about this, and in his most recent one, he links to Wil Wheaton’s post too, which includes a side-by-side comparison of a human voice (his) reading a passage from a book (also his) and a computer voice reading it. I think his point is well made.

Just a quick note to let you know that a review of mine went up this evening at Manga Recon’s Otaku Bookshelf. The review is of Vertical’s release of Sakie Yokota’s heartbreaking memoir, North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter, and I hope you’ll take a moment to stop by and read it. This is not a perfect book by far, but I would recommend it to anyone. It’s a story that very much deserves to be read.

In other news, I finally finished reading Tokyo Babylon, and now I’m kind of traumatized.

I realize this is hideously mainstream of me, but… wow, I love Google. I’m not talking about the search engine (though I love that too). Lately I’ve become so dependent on a few of their web applications, I am not sure how I got by without them all this time.

1. Google Reader: I have talked about this before, but seriously, Google Reader is solely responsible for my ability to keep up with what the rest of you are talking about every day. In the beginning, I actually used to just click things one by one from my blogroll, and when that eventually proved to be too cumbersome, I switched to using Safari to collect RSS feeds. But Google Reader… oh, Google Reader… it allows me to keep track of exactly what I’ve read and what is new from any of the three computers I use regularly, eliminating the need to add feeds to three different browsers or to waste time with things I’ve already seen. I’m also able to organize my subscribed feeds into different categories, such as “manga/comics” and “friends” to facilitate more focused reading. Google Reader, I love you.

2. Google Docs: It’s gotten to the point where I write basically everything in Google Docs, because it allows me to (again) access whatever I’m working on from multiple locations. It auto-saves every few minutes, which is awesome, and also allows me to share documents with others, for instance if I want someone to look something over for me, or if I want to collaborate on a document with another person (or multiple people). Yes, I still save copies of really important items to my hard drive (actually to more than one), but the fact that I no longer have to remember to carry a USB key with me everywhere I go is seriously awesome.

3. Google Calendar: This is a new addition for me, but boy has it become quickly indispensable! I use Google Calendar to keep track of important manga release dates, as well as all of my (largely self-imposed) review deadlines, for Manga Recon, Comics Should Be Good, and even here! I’m a person who works best if I have a firm deadline, so I tend to set them and stick to them almost 100% of the time. Also, I’m a fast reader but a very slow writer, so laying out my deadlines in a visual form helps me better understand and manage my time. Google Calendar lets me have a different color-coded calendar for each of these categories, which I can view all at once to see everything that I have coming up at a glance. Again, I can access this from any computer, and share each calendar with other users as desired.

Thus concludes my ode to Google applications. The day Google starts charging money for these things is the day I become a weeping puddle of goo. Let’s hope that day does not arrive soon.

With my review schedule finally under control, I actually have some time to read some things to talk about here, but I’m having a hard time deciding what to start with. I have volume 1 of Two Flowers for the Dragon sitting here looking at me, as well as a number of other things. It’s been so long since I had time to read something just for pleasure, I hardly know what to do! :)

In the meantime, I’ve been looking around online, and I have a couple of links to share. First of all, Ed Sizemore posted a review today of the most recent Mechadamia journal, and I though it sounded really interesting. His review is good reading on its own, so I recommend checking it out.

Also, Gia reported at Anime Vice about Crunchyroll’s participation in the upcoming Global Shinkai Day, including the fact that they’ll be streaming (among several of his films) 5 Centimeters Per Second which is a film I love very, very much. It is the kind of fiction that makes me long to create something that could affect other people the way it affects me. If you’ve never had a chance to see it, do yourself a favor and go watch for free at Crunchyroll on February 28th!

Lastly, I think I mentioned somewhere around the New Year that I decided to let my Shonen Jump subscription expire and pick up Shojo Beat instead. I got my first issue a little while back and… I’m so glad! Not only am I enjoying more of the comics, but I also really appreciated some of the other features in the magazine. So, Bakuman aside, it seems my early shonen manga obsession really is over! I guess I really am a girl after all! ;D

Watch for a review from me in the upcoming Otaku Bookshelf column at Manga Recon. Until then, goodnight!

It gives me pain to see those two titles listed together. Heh. So, I have two reviews out today. First, at Manga Recon I have a review in this week’s Manga Minis for DMP yaoi title Tricky Prince. You know, DMP has such pretty books–nice large size with a dust jacket and everything–but man… as I lamented to Michelle right after I read it, I think there was actually more character development in Hanky Panky. And that’s just sad.

Now I have a cool announcement. About a month ago, Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good (home of Danielle Leigh and sometimes host to Michelle Smith) asked me if I’d like to be an occasional contributor to the site, like Michelle. I jumped up and down in an undignified manner and said I would like to very much. Today my first contribution has been posted! Behold my review for Mushishi, volume 6 which will be a part of my new, occasional series, “Tokidoki Daylight” (meaning “sporadic daylight,” TokiDay for short). Many thanks to Michelle and Grace for helping me decide on the name. I’m pretty thrilled to have been offered this opportunity, as I’m sure you can imagine. So go on over and see! :D

“You mean it wasn’t real? The bandit? The moonlight?”

Earlier today, an old friend commented on my Facebook status, jokingly begging me to blog about something other than manga. I had to laugh a bit, especially since this person has known me a very long time, because I would have thought most people in my life have realized by now that, well, I don’t really do hobbies. I do passions. I grab on to the things that are meaningful to me, and let them carry me to my next destination. I’ve always felt very strongly that these things lead me to where I most need to be, and so far that philosophy has served me very well in life.

So, if you’re among those who mourn the fact that this has become primarily a manga blog, just try to think back to all the things that brought me this far–all those stops along the way where I found each of you–and remember that even when I’m unsure about where I’m going, I’m always fully committed to the journey. This is the one truth about my life I know for sure I can believe in. For now, the journey has brought me to manga, and I’m extremely excited to find out where I’m headed from here.

Now… will somebody please license Bakuman?

I’m enjoying a much-needed idle evening here at home. I have reviews I probably should be working on, and maybe I will as the evening goes on, but for now I’m feeling the need for random surfing and maybe a blog commenting spree.

Speaking of blog commenting, I drove by Danielle Leigh’s reading diary today, but didn’t actually read it, because she has a review there for the first volume of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking just released by Del Ray, and though I’m eagerly anticipating reading it myself, I already know I’ll be reviewing it for Manga Recon, so for now, other reviews are off-limits. I have found that I am easily intimidated by someone else’s fantastic review, so after one such experience, I decided to force myself to keep away until I’ve completed my own review. Now I’m wondering, you who review manga (or anything else for that matter), do you do the same?

In other news, I really enjoyed Brigid Alverson’s interview with Matt Thorn, whose translation of est em’s Red Blinds the Foolish (reviewed by me here) I found pretty spectacular. After I read the interview, I did some searching around, and discovered this essay on shojo manga that Matt Thorn published back in 2001. It was a pretty great read, so I thought I’d share that here.

Lastly, Lianne Sentar asked me for further elaboration on my accusations of misogyny in Let Dai, and I’m embarrassed to be unable to respond with any kind of credibility, because I don’t have print copies of the series. Can anyone help me out? I think some specific examples of the language used by Dai would help me, but unfortunately, I’m not good at remembering exact words, especially when I’ve consumed a series as rapidly as I did Let Dai. If you’ve got some handy, let me know! ETA: I think these are no longer necessary! Conversation progressing without them. :)

Leaving a quick link here to my review of the full series of Let Dai over at Manga Recon. I have mixed feelings about this series (hence the fairly lengthy review), but as an epic boys’ love story, it shines like a jewel in a sea of one-shots and short series that never get the chance to be fully developed.

People have called Let Dai “the Korean Banana Fish” which I take some issue with, mainly due to the fact that Let Dai (unlike Banana Fish) asks me to love a sociopath, which isn’t something I can do so easily. That said, it is absolutely, utterly impossible to stop reading Let Dai, at least in my experience, and that’s some powerful storytelling.

Hello all! Just a quick update this morning. I have two longish reviews in today’s On The Shojo Beat column at Manga Recon, one for the first volume of a new series, Magic Touch, and also for volume seven of Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden, which I’ll talk briefly about here.

I’ve never read the original Fushigi Yugi, which I realize makes me a very poor shojo fan indeed, but the truth is, it’s never really caught my interest, and every time I mention it here, I find out something through your comments that makes me even less excited to read it. Now I’m actually a bit torn, because I really enjoyed Genbu Kaiden, though I suspect that may be because it avoids the problematic elements of the original series, particularly issues concerning friendship between women. Anyone here read both?

In any case, Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden is on a pretty slow release schedule, both here and in Japan, but the next volume comes out here in April, and I’ll definitely be looking forward to it!

I have a long review coming out later this week which has taken up most of my free time over the past few days (and probably for the next day or two as well), so I haven’t had time to read or think about much else. Oh, to be a faster writer! I cling to hope that my careful deliberation pays off in some way.

On my RSS feed this morning (via Dirk Deppey), I found this link to Stephen Schleicher’s recent post on the (according to him) exciting future of digital comics distribution. To be perfectly honest, it filled me with dread.

I like reading books. A lot. I like the feel of them, the smell of the paper, the winning combination of portability and tangibility. I like being able to pass a book from one person to another–knowing that something that I’m reading has been read by someone else before me, or that it will be someday in the future. More than any of that, though, they are just plain easy to read.

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