One of the anime series currently available for viewing on Crunchyroll is La Corda d’Oro, based on the manga series licensed in the US by Viz (which is, I understand, based on a video game). My husband brought it up to me recently as a series he’d be interested in watching and when he told me the name, my ears perked up as I reached excitedly into my pile of review copies where I have volume ten of the manga waiting to be reviewed for Manga Recon’s “On The Shojo Beat” column next month. Seeing this as a great opportunity for me to study up for my review (I don’t own or have access to the first nine volumes of the manga), we plunged right in.

Now I’ll say right off, I am really enjoying this anime series. Sure, the musical selections are straight out of someone’s supermarket CD of “Your Favorite Classical Music Hits,” but honestly this is what I expect to see in popular fiction, and even when the arrangements of these overused standards are utterly ridiculous (I looked it up–there actually is an existing arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon for just violin and piano, as ill-advised as that may seem) the characters are so sincere about playing them it’s hard to remain snobbish about it, even for a stodgy old music geek like me. Recently, however, there has been a bit of a plot twist that has seriously thrown me for a loop. I found my own reaction to it surprising, revealing, and actually a little bit hilarious so I thought I’d talk about it here. Major spoilers after the jump.
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First of all, my review of Sayonara, Zetsubuo-Sensei, Vol. 1 is finally done and posted at Manga Recon. I really enjoyed this book, and though I haven’t read any other full reviews of it yet, I get the feeling most people will either be pretty delighted with it or be completely baffled that anyone could be. Its humor just happens to hit my funny bone just so, which is a pretty great thing!

Secondly, I’ve been waiting until I was finished with the review to talk about my anniversary, so it is finally time! Besides a lovely dinner and so on and so forth, the main feature of the day was that we both got Blackberry Storms! Yes, we spent our wedding anniversary geeking out over new phones, do you have a problem with that? We geeked out at home, we geeked out at the restaurant. All in all, the “Geekiversary” (as we named it early on) was pretty fantastic, and now that I’m finally done with that review, I am finally allowed to really play around with my new toy! I’ll begin with two photos I took this morning of my office. The camera on the Blackberry blows away the one on my old phone (though my skills are sadly the same).
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Just a few loose ends on this lunch hour. Today is my eighth wedding anniversary, so I probably will not be online much this evening, but there are a couple of things lurking in my head which I will try to type out now.

Random: I finished Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei last evening in preparation for writing a review this week for Manga Recon, and it is one of those comics that makes me really, really wish I could read Japanese. Also, I’m really looking forward to completing my review so that I can finally read everyone else’s.

Also, someone’s comment early this morning got me thinking more about the discussion of online identity, specifically what I value most when I’m assessing someone’s credibility online. I replied in comments with my thoughts, but I’ll share them here as well.
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“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?

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’ve always thought you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at his/her desk. I was looking at mine just now, and I thought it revealed quite a bit about me.

Details after the jump!
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Thank you all for letting me into your world.

I thought the storm would be over by the time I got up this morning, but it’s snowing still! Not as hard as it was yesterday, but enough so that we’re going to have to shovel for a third time.

I’ll get back to talking about manga soon, but for the moment, check out snow photos after the jump!

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Before I forget to say anything about it, I have a new full-length review up at Manga Recon, for volume 1 of Idumi Kirihara’s Hitohira. I had mixed feelings about this manga, though I admit I’m considering buying the second volume, just to see if it gets any stronger. I’m hoping it does. Also, I think my reviews are getting more solid as I go, which makes me happy.

Life is a little crazy leading into the holidays, especially at work, so I’m trying to take time to enjoy the nice things as they come. This morning on my way to work, our local NPR station played Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Greensleeves, which my college orchestra played at our holiday concert my senior year. It really brought me back to that time, and I spent much of the day feeling nostalgic about that concert.

It also made me feel like sharing, so here’s a piece from the beginning of that concert, an arrangement (I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember whose) of the Christmas Hymn, performed by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic and Choirs, conducted by Dr. Robert Page, December 1990. It’s a bit chaotic, I suppose. The holiday concert is traditionally performed in the foyer of the College of Fine Arts, which is a big, echo-y, marble place, and for this, the choirs were split up and placed on all sides (including up on the mezzanines), with the conductor in the middle. In a place like that, we really couldn’t trust our ears, so we had to go just by sight. I chose this song, because I figure it’s the one people are most likely to know out of all the pieces we sang on that program. Hope you’ll enjoy. :)

Now I must tackle the work I brought home with me. Goodnight!

This is a going to be a pretty strange little entry, I think, consisting mainly of bunnies and boys’ love. First of all, my husband took new photos of our bunny, Kino, the other day, and I wanted to share because, well, bunny. You can see them here on flickr. My favorite is this one.

I was going to ask for people’s opinions as manga fans on NY Comic Con, because I thought I might go, but then I realized that it is on the same weekend as UPTAs this year, which I am committed to attend for work. Very sad!

So, okay, boys’ love manga. I know I always say I’m not really a fan, and then I end up talking about it anyway. It just so happens that in the past week or so, I’ve ended up reading one of the nicest BL volumes I’ve personally read, and one of the worst. I won’t talk about the worst right now, because I’ll eventually be writing a review of it for Manga Recon. The other, though, I will discuss a little.

The book is Hinako Takanaga’s You Will Fall in Love, which I first became aware of thanks to Johanna Draper Carlson’s very thoughtful review at the beginning of the month. Her review is really right on, and there isn’t much I can add to that, except to say that what it really made me wish for was more of itself. I don’t mean more stories like it (though that would be fine too), but rather I wish it could have played itself out over a longer period, so that the characters and their relationships could have been more fully developed.

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