Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Michelle Smith

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding: C

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From the back cover:
Lurching from the cappuccino bars of Notting Hill to the blissed-out shores of Thailand, Bridget Jones searches for The Truth in spite of pathetically unevolved men, insane dating theories, and Smug Married advice. She experiences a zeitgeist-esque Spiritual Epiphany somewhere between the pages of How to Find the Love You Want Without Seeking It, protective custody, and a lightly chilled Chardonnay.

Review:
Several things annoyed me about this book. I don’t like plots that hinge on misunderstandings that nobody really tries to explain. And Bridget somehow seems even more incompetent than the last book, letting a situation with a builder just linger on unresolved, and just not earning my sympathy very much. It was still cute, and funny at times. It’s probably worth a read, but I found it quite frustrating.

Our Everlasting 2 by Toko Kawai: B+

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From the back cover:
Surfer dude Horyu and shy intellectual Shouin are very much in love. Their days together are filled with happiness, but when Shouin’s French tutor, a handsome and openly gay man named Nanami, makes his affection for Shouin known, doubts begin to surface between the couple.

Horyu begins to suspect the relationship between Shouin and Nanami, while Shouin begins to believe Nanami’s theory that Horyu is at heart a straight man and will turn to a woman when his experimentation period with Shouin is over.

Review:
The description above concerns only one or two of the stories collected in this volume. Left out is a chapter where Horyu has the opportunity to become a pro surfer, but it would mean sacrificing his relationship with Shouin and a chapter where Shouin’s cousin has dumped off her baby while going off on a trip.

The story with Nanami is okay, but nothing terribly exciting. Standard jealousy and insecurity angst.

I most liked the story about Horyu’s opportunity to turn pro, as it caused Shouin to consider whether he could continue to follow along contentedly at Horyu’s side, or if he needed to branch out and do something for himself. He realizes that being a couple does not necessarily mean that you share the same dreams, as convenient as that would be.

At the end, there’s a short little story where the boys take care of Shouin’s cousin’s baby. This chapter could’ve been totally stupid, but it ended up being cute. I guess this is a good thing, because it’s the last chapter we get of the boys before going to a couple of side-story chapters that are somewhat steamier than the main story.

Even though the volume occasionally employs tried and true angst tactics, and even though Shouin’s a bit weepy and frequently has to call Horyu for help (Horyu calls him The Princess in these situations), there’s enough originality in some of the stories and characters to make this a distinctive title amongst all the Boys’ Love that DMP is producing these days.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding: A-

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From the back cover:
Bridget Jones’s Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud daily chronicle of Bridget’s permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement—a year in which she resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult—and learn to program the VCR.

Review:
I’d seen the film but never read the book, so recently listened to the unabridged audio read by Barbara Rosenblatt. She was particularly adept at making Bridget’s mom even more crazily annoying, and did lots of amusing things with all of Bridget’s aha!s and la la las.

This is a quick, funny, and enjoyable book, with a few flaws that are forgivable. I’m still not convinced how Mark Darcy fell in love with Bridget to start with, and seriously, 131 lbs. is so totally not fat whatsoever. I can’t believe Hollywood made a big deal of Renee Zellweger plumping up for this role when the character only weighs 131 lbs. at the most! It’d be one thing if Bridget were the only one to believe this, but various people she meets seem to reinforce the notion.

The parallels with Pride and Prejudice are cleverly done. I particularly like how Bridget’s mom is sort of Mrs. Bennet and Lydia simultaneously. It’s also v. addictive in terms of language. Go read it!

Hana-Kimi 11 by Hisaya Nakajo: C

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From the back cover:
Mizuki and her friends go to the country, where they meet and try to help a ghost pining for his lost love. Then, for the big Christmas dance party, Mizuki and Nakao are recruited to help make up for a shortage of females—by dressing up as girls! This turnabout for Mizuki, however, proves to be the least of the complications that flare up when the whole ploy proves too successful!

Review:
With this volume, I’ve begun to lose my patience with Hana-Kimi. The ghost story is pretty lame, and is only an excuse for Nakatsu to glomp on Mizuki some more. It’s just a little two-chapter deal that really doesn’t serve any narrative purpose. It does introduce Umeda’s parents, however. His dad’s pretty foxy.

And then, yet again, Mizuki is forced to pretend to pretend to be a girl. This bunch of boys is pretty obsessed with making some of their classmates get into drag! Buuuuut, Sano does look awfully cute dancing and there are a couple of sweet moments between them.

So, even though there’s a dash of lame in these stories, there’s still enough here to keep me interested.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: A

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From the back cover:
Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Calliope into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Review:
I don’t normally go in for multi-generational family epics, and I still think the basic concept is a boring one, but in Middlesex it’s handled in such a way that it’s all leading up to some revelations made in the first paragraph and explains how they came about. About halfway in or so when I discovered I was enjoying the sprawling epic, I looked it up and found that it had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. I think it’s well-deserved in this case.

Although I do own a paperback copy of Middlesex, I actually listened to an unabridged audio recording read by Kristoffer Tabori, who was excellent. The language is not exactly florid, but it is pretty detail-rich. It might’ve been annoying to me if I were looking at it on a page, but Tabori adopts a storyteller mien that makes all the description seem necessary to convey the proper atmosphere.

There are a few things that keep this from getting an A+, however. There are two characters who receive quirky nicknames, which can come off as just a little pretentious. When Calliope’s brother is called Chapter Eleven in the first chapter, it totally elicited a groan from me, because I generally hate books that do stuff like that. It is eventually explained, but it just seems a little look-at-me clever. Also, there’s a bit of a plot hole at the end.

So, a plain ol’ A it is. Get the unabridged audio if you can.

Pangs

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Man, I am hungry. I’ve been sick the past few days and haven’t really felt much like eating, but today I am ravenous. Hopefully this is a sign that things are improving. It hasn’t been an utterly debilitating variety of sick, but I’ve felt pretty listless and my stomach has been tetchy.

Some comments on recent books:

Abhorsen Trilogy by Garth Nix
I’d been curious about these books for a long time, but worried that they might be overly gothy on account of their subject matter. They turned out to be quite enjoyable. I had the good fortune to find unabridged audio versions narrated by Tim Curry. His voice for Moggett, a cat, was especially good. Sabriel is good and can function just fine as a stand-alone. Lirael, the second book, goes a little deeper into the title character’s personality and motivation, and just might be my favorite of the lot. It ends on a cliffhangery note. Abhorsen picks up precisely where Lirael left off and is just action, action, action until the very end, when things get more character driven again. I really felt like it wasn’t a book in its own right, but was just the second hunk of Lirael that got chopped off when someone decided it was too long.

I kept thinking that it might be rather dull to be physically reading this series at times, but the narration kept me entertained, and my complaints are few. Therefore, it’s recommended, but snag the audio if you can. My library had them all, and this town doesn’t even begin to be cosmopolitan, so I bet others will, too.

Daisy Miller by Henry James
What a weird little book. The moral seems rather ridiculous by today’s standards and is delivered by the sledgehammer method, making the end particularly silly. I guess I liked it alright. It was short, at least.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca rocks. There’s so much going on here I can’t really describe, but you’ve got a very cinemagraphic style of writing, a mysterious ex-wife named Rebecca, a meek and shy second wife who is occasionally very annoying, a creepy housekeeper, a moody older man, etc. If you haven’t read or seen it, you should. My main gripe is with the protagonist sometimes being very dumb (I saw one big plot twist coming miles away), but some of the other turns are genuine surprises, and just overall, the sense of suspense is finely maintained. Next on the list for me by du Maurier—Jamaica Inn. It’s the other of her novels that was made into a movie by Hitchcock. She also wrote the short story that inspired The Birds. Betcha didn’t know that!