So last week I finally for the first time got around to reading Three Men in a Boat for the first time . . . which of course meant that immediately afterward I had to reread To Say Nothing of the Dog. THE PATH BEFORE ME HAD BEEN PREPARED, OKAY.

Anyway, it is pretty awesome reading them one after another like that because you get to see exactly how much Connie Willis stole straight from Jerome K. Jerome, and it is glorious. Ned's time-lagged rambling, for example? Straight out of Three Men in a Boat - J. is extremely prone to pausing to contemplate the immortal beauty of the stars and only pausing when one of his friends yells at him that they're about to run into the riverbank. (This is the cover of the edition I read and the expression on J.'s face is KIND OF PERFECT. Cover artist, I applaud you!) I should also say that I don't actually laugh out loud at books all that often, but I was seriously reading Three Men on a Boat and cracking up on the subway every other page. The tin of pineapple! The Hampton Court maze! LOLVICTORIANS ARE THE BEST.

Speaking of LOLVICTORIANS - I am beginning to realize that it is probably Connie Willis' fault that I have this fixed idea in my head that the Victorians automatically = HILARITY. The Victorian era was serious business in many ways! Industrialization, imperialism, Jack the Ripper, lots of unfun things! And yet, you say "Victorians" to me and I immediately go "THEY WERE REPRESSED BECAUSE THEY HAD TOO MUCH FURNITURE" and fall over laughing, because To Say Nothing of the Dog was incredibly formative and is going to shape my mental image of Victoriana for ever and ever. Connie Willis, I BLAME YOU. To Say Nothing of the Dog is also one of those books that if you do not watch it will immediately lead you straight down a path of other books so long that you will never escape, and it is taking lots of willpower right now to go back to my actual tottering pile of Books To Read instead of diving straight from Ned and Verity into rereads of Gaudy Night and The Moonstone, not to mention Doomsday Book.

(For those who have not read it, by the way, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a kind of time-travel-Victorian comedy of manners-romantic comedy-thirties mystery novel in which the fate of the space-time continuum is at stake and MORE IMPORTANTLY so is the fate of an incredibly hideous piece of Victorian statuary. In other words, read it!)

Hmm, I don't know if I have all that much to say about The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya. Again, I think I like the books best of all of the versions of the story I've seen - Kyon's narration comes across the most clearly, and it's a large part of what makes the story fun. Also, I really like the hints that all of the 'supernatural' characters are untrustworthy or have a flawed view on events in some way, and that all of their theories contradict each other, and I am totally hoping to see that played up more in later books - I don't remember it coming up in the show so much. I also really liked how Kyon's friends got drawn in a little, and how their general apathy compares and contrasts with Kyon's and with the antics of the club.

That said, Sigh was a little more frustrating as a story than Melancholy because I want to smack EVERYONE for being complicit in really horrible abuse of Asahina, and I don't even like Asahina! I want to keep liking the characters, but it gets a little exhausting constantly fanwanking things in my head so their behavior is not as horrific as it seems.

While I am here, I should probably also mention that scifantasy lent me the first two volumes of the manga to read a while back as well. They were perfectly decent, but they didn't really bring anything new, and I don't think I'll be bothering to keep hunting them down when I can already get the same story in two other media that I like better.

I would like to join the rest of the world in registering my joy over YULETIDE ASSIGNMENTS! I am writing a bit more out of my comfort zone this year and I am totally excited; the only bad thing about having my college roommate visiting this week (which is something otherwise awesome in all respects) is that I cannot get started immediately.

HOWEVER: I will admit that I felt kind of guilty about not offering or requesting the Dalemark Quartet this year for Yuletide (I love it so! But there are many requests for it already, and I wrote it last year, so it is off the roster for this year). So, to overcome these feelings of guilt, I decided to spam my flist with a very long Dalemark playlist!

DO NOT QUESTION MY LOGIC.

If you haven't read the series: massive spoilers within.

( Book I: Cart and Cwidder )

( Book II: Drowned Ammet )

( Book III: The Spellcoats )

( Book IV: The Crown of Dalemark )

My feelings on Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island are very, very mixed.

It cannot be denied that Bryson can be very funny, and I enjoyed the first half a lot! I liked the format he started out using, where he would go to a place and flashback about is arrival there in the 70's and then flash forward again to the present - that was cool and interesting! And he has a trick on every so often lighting on exactly the question you have asked yourself many times (for example: "who on earth figured out the ridiculously complicated procedure of making glass out of sand? And HOW?" I too have always wondered about this!) or observing a peculiar thing you have also observed, and then you laugh and feel like you are sharing a joke and all is well.

ON THE OTHER HAND: as the book continued, I began to feel an increasing need to write Mr. Bryson a letter. The letter would look something like this:

Dear Mr. Bryson,

THE UK DOES NOT EXIST FOR THE PURPOSE OF LOOKING PICTURESQUE FOR YOU. GET OVER IT.

Respectfully yours,
Becca


Seriously, I did not mind the first time he went off on a rant about how terrible it was about all the historic houses being destroyed. But by the tenth or eleventh time he launched into his diatribe about how it was A TERRIBLE CRIME and WHY was this building SO UGLY it RUINED the skyscape, SOMEONE SHOOT THE DESIGNER and THE BRITISH DID NOT APPRECIATE THEIR HERITAGE and HERE IS MY GENIUS PLAN FOR RELOACTING ALL INDUSTRY TO PRETTIER LOCATIONS and LEAVE THE HEDGEROWS ALONE! LEAVE . . . THE HEDGEROWS . . . ALONE!, I started wanting to shake him. Look, I appreciate old buildings and preservation of history as much as anyone, but there's something so incredibly condescending about this assumption that everyone's MOST IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION should be whether the scenery is picturesque and pretty. I mean, it's probably your standard (American?) tourist mindset, but that does not make it the attitude any less entitled. Or annoying.


Speaking less crankily of international travel: there is a tiny travel bookstore directly across from where I work. I knew it specialized in international books, but, to my shame, I had never gotten around to visiting it. Yesterday I went in for the first time, and, guys, it is AWESOME. It is super-tiny and arranged in two rooms; non-western places are in the first room and European places are in the second and every country, from Mexico to Burma, has several shelves to itself on which are stocked everything from novels (both from inside and outside the country) to travel guides to history books. I find this kind of a wonderful way to arrange things. I did not buy anything there yesterday but I am determined to do so soon!

jothra (and possibly one or two other people as well?) enthusiastically recced me The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, and I am very glad she did, because otherwise I probably would never have gotten around to reading it. It seems sort of odd to call a book that's so intertwined with many of the horrors of WWII as "adorable," but . . . I am sorry, it really is!

The book is set in 1946 and is written in epistolary format, which is something that is understandably a turnoff to some people but for me is often a key to my heart - I love first-person voices and unreliable narrators and things that come in between the lines of what's said, and novels written in letters are often very good at all of that. I also have a weakness for 1930's and '40s British lady writers (see also: I Capture the Castle, Cold Comfort Farm) and therefore I was thoroughly charmed by the authors' attempts to capture that style.

Juliet, the protagonist, is a writer who made her success writing humor columns during the war and is now looking for a subject for her next book. She finds it when she receives a letter from someone on Guernsey - one of the Channel Islands that was occupied by the Nazis - who has fallen in love with a book that she used to own and wants to inquire if there is any more available by that author. Eventually, Juliet starts to correspond with all the members of the book club that was formed mostly by accident on occupied, starving Guernsey and gets involved in their stories, along with an awesome mixture of book-talk (one character, when introduced to Jane Austen after reading Wuthering Heights, is SUPER EXCITED to discover love stories "not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death and graveyards!" AMEN.) The author really does manage to do a good job of balancing the weight of the backstory, and the different experiences of suffering during the war, with the relatively light social/romantic/literary comedy of the present. Also, it really was fascinating to learn about the occupation of the Channel islands during the war - I honestly had had no idea, which I would feel even worse about if I didn't suspect that the authors knew this and wrote the book in part for that purpose.

Anyway, one other thing about this book is that it has gotten me into a very letter-writing mood! So if you would like, drop me a comment with a mailing address over at this screened post, and within a few weeks you will receive a possibly-incomprehensible handwritten scrawl in your mailbox! I feel I should warn you however that my epistolary style is impressionable like warm wax, so any letters may slip into a terrible wannabe 1940's-British pastiche thing AT ANY MOMENT.

So along with 20th Century Boys, I have also been reading Urasawa's Monster and I am now up to Volume 7!

I don't love Monster as much as I love 20th Century Boys, but I do like it a lot, especially now that the plot has picked up and gotten creepier and more complicated. The story follows Tenma, a Japanese doctor in Germany, who rebels against the prestige-based hospital system and chooses to operate on a young boy instead of the town's mayor, in a stand for truth, justice and principle! Unfortunately the child that he saves turns out to be a cold-blooded murderer who proceeds to go on a rampage throughout Germany. OOPS. After the initial setup, the plot follows Tenma as he careens around post-Cold-War Germany trying to stop Johan, gradually picking up allies and enemies, occasionally performing NINJA NEUROSURGERY, and avoiding the police (who of course think he is the prime suspect for the murders.) What makes the story exceptional is the way that the plot really intertwines with the culture and politics of Germany in the 90s. There are plotlines dealing with prejudice against Turkish immigrants, with the various political factions of the country and with the resentment of the people who lost their homes and businesses with reunification, and the whole situation is presented as accurately complicated and is really well-done. (There is also a hilariously accurate depiction of 80s and 90s fashions!)

Characterwise, I still spend more time facepalming at Tenma than otherwise (my biggest quibble with the series - the way various people keep meeting Tenma and knowing instinctively that he couldn't kill anyone! IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY! The series even recognizes this with Johan, which is why it ticks me off so much with Tenma) but I really like a ton of the side characters. Favorites include Anna/Nina, Johan's sweet, pretty and totally badass twin sister, and Tiny Adorable Dieter, who makes the most hilarious dubiousfaces, and who really should demonstrate more issues than he does, but I don't really care because he's hardcore adorable and adorably hardcore. (Urusawa is not as good at drawing differentiated/individual child characters here as he will get in 20th Century Boys, but he is AWESOME at drawing tiny dubiousfaces.)

( Spoilers under the cut! )


And hey, while I'm talking about Urusawa, I might as well add in ( spoilery reactions to Volume 5 of 20th Century Boys )

Dear Yuletide Writer:

First of all, whoever you are, if you are writing me fic for one of these fandoms, you are AWESOME. I know this for a fact! No matter what you write, I will be incredibly happy to receive it, and if you already have brilliant ideas and need no rambly thoughts from me I trust you to follow your instincts and turn out something amazing. Basically, feel free to ignore as much of the below as you want!

A couple of general comments:

Things I love include (but are not limited to): strong women; ensemble-fic and stories about unlikely teams coming together; ordinary characters who can be unexpectedly hardcore when the need hits and hardcore characters who can be unexpectedly ordinary when real life hits; mundane details interwoven with fantastic or dramatic events; comedy; tragedy; stories that mix the two together. As a sidenote, I also love crossovers like burning, so if you happen to get inspired by an amazing crossover idea, I very much encourage you to go for it!

Things I do not generally love include: character-bashing (especially towards female characters) and stories that are disturbing/violent for the sake of being disturbing/violent (except in some cases where that's part of the canon, but I am not sure it would suit any of the ones I have requested this year.)

( Specific request details. )

Last and most importantly: THANK YOU SO MUCH, and what will make me most happy about any fic is that you have fun with it! :D

First things first: while I kind of suck at remembering birthdays in general (seriously, I will disappoint - in fact I just remembered a good friend whose birthday was four days ago that I forgot! BECAUSE I SUCK) there is one person's birthday that I always remember! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, cupenny! You and me know why this day is worthy of fireworks, and it's not because of some dude who failed to blow up Parliament. :D


Secondly: booklogging! I just finished The Shining Court, the third book in Michelle West's Sun Sword series, and I think it is my favorite so far. If The Uncrowned King centered on AU Fantasy Olympics, The Shining Court takes as its centerpiece AU Fantasy Mardi Gras. Demons are planning to do SOMETHING EVIL on the festival night involving cursed masks and the Winter Queen and worlds meeting and a crazy mage and honestly I was kind of confused as to what exactly their diabolical plan was and how Our Heroes thwarted it, but that's okay, because at least I could get that the characters were busy being awesome! ( More specific thoughts and vague spoilers! ) The books still have their flaws, but their strengths are still very much their strengths, and moreso in this volume, where even more than before pretty much everything revolves around women and their relationships with other women, and the obvious and subtle ways that they hold power.

And, speaking of, I have a question for you guys! Okay, so we know that many characters in fiction are motivated by revenge. For female characters, I feel like that revenge tends to be for either personal trauma (assault, often sexual) or for dead dudes - husbands, fathers, sons. And dudes are always going around swearing revenge for their dead girlfriends or wives, but they're just as often avenging fathers and brothers and BFF-buddies, too. I could be wrong, but I feel like it's rare for women to be motivated by revenge for other women. Diora from these books is one very strong example; if I remember correctly Gelis in the House of Niccolo series is another, though I haven't gotten up to her books yet so I might be wrong. But those are about the only two I can think of - can you guys think of any other examples of women who are acting to avenge other women? Are there a million and I'm just crazy?

This weekend I had the joy of kidnapping varadia! And certainly did not force her to watch through all of Princess Tutu with me. There was just mild encouragement! Um.

However you all know my feelings about Princess Tutu (show of my heart and story of my soul etc.) so there is no need for me to reiterate them really. Instead I am going to talk about the other show we watched, Baccano!, which I was introduced to about a week before Lynne got here and was super excited to watch through again, which should tell you how much I liked it.

Basically, Baccano! is about gangsters, immortals, a couple of gangsters who are immortals, and an EPIC TON of completely insane people who collide in often brutal and often hilarious ways. (One of the funniest scenes involves two dangerous lunatics in a fight on the roof of a train, while a third patiently stands back and waits for her turn.) The story is told anachronically; there are three main linked plotlines that affect and impact each other:

- in 1930, two bottles of elixir of immortality go through a wacky Rube Goldberg-esque series of adventures that result in a bunch of Camorra bigwigs accidentally becoming immortal

- in 1932, an girl looking for her missing asshole brother gets caught up the fallout of the conflict between two mafia families and the Most Badass Newspaper Ever!

- and in 1931, a group of wannabe immortals staging a politically-motivated kidnapping; a group of psychotic gangsters staging a train hijacking for the ransom, the violence and the lulz; a group of teenaged bootleggers staging a robbery for the money; a scheming immortal child transporting secret explosives; and a pair of wacky thieves escaping from their latest train robbery all happen by pure chance to pick the same train. Which may or may not also be haunted by a bloodthirsty monster called the Rail Chaser. AS ONE MIGHT IMAGINE, hijinks ensue!

ETA: Now ACTUALLY with picspam!

However, if you are like me, what you will find most fun are the characters. Therefore, because I can: ( a character introduction picspam! )

Thieving a meme from wanderlustlover!

1) Post a list of up to 20 books/movies/anime/TV shows/whatever that you have been dorkily in love with at some point or other. (This is a randomly chosen and by no means complete list, as you all know very well.)

2) Have your f-list guess your favorite character/member from each item. (Some of these will be total gimmes, I am well aware! I am not exactly unpredictable . . .)

3) When someone guesses correctly, strikethrough the item and put the name of your favorite character next to it.
1. Princess Tutu [Rue], guessed by scifantasy
2. Avatar: The Last Airbender [Sokka], guessed by varadia
3. The Dalemark Quartet [Mitt], guessed by parcae
4. Capital Scandal
5. Howl's Moving Castle [Sophie], guessed by parcae
6. Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles [Philippa Somerville and Danny Hislop], guessed by mawombat
7. The Fionavar Tapestry [Dave], guessed by varadia
8. Into the Woods [The Baker's Wife], guessed by lunamystic
9. Notre-Dame de Paris [Clopin], guessed by rahkan
10. Pushing Daisies [Emerson Cod], guessed by winding_path
11. Kage Baker's Company books [Joseph], guessed by varadia
12. The Sarah Connor Chronicles [John Henry], guessed by genarti
13. 20th Century Boys [Kenji], guessed by ojuzu
14. Ouran High School Host Club [Kyouya], guessed by genarti
15. Fullmetal Alchemist [Izumi], guessed by oneechan19
16. The Middleman [Wendy Watson], guessed by magwana
17. Sherwood Smith's Inda books [Tanrid, Cherry-Stripe, Noddy, Hadand], guessed by varadia and genarti
18. The Great Escape
19. Newsies [SPOT CONLON], guessed by saphyria
20. The Phantom of the Opera (I am only including this because I bet I can stump people >:D) [Philippe de Chagny], guessed by gramarye1971

As genarti pointed out to me the other day, it is difficult for me to go more than a few months without rereading a Diana Wynne Jones book. *sheepish* Next up in the reread pile: Conrad's Fate! I devoured it in the bookstore when it came out a few years ago, so I thought it was time for a nice, slow, proper appreciative read . . .

. . . ha. Yeah. "I'll just keep reading until Millie shows up!" I thought, and then I looked up two hours later and it was over. :(

ANYWAY. Basically Conrad's Fate is like "the whole upstairs/downstairs British class setup is kind of ridiculous! Let's hang out with Conrad and Christopher as they pretend to be servants and see JUST HOW ridiculous it is!" I mean, there is a lot of hilariously complicated DWJ-ish plot going on in the background with five zillion secret identities and alternate universes and forbidden love and bad karma and wicked witches and even wickeder uncles, but it is so background for most of the book that you don't even have time to be confused about it all; the real joy is in watching Conrad and Christopher bitch about their stupid uniforms and how pointless it is that there are three hundred people to keep a house up for two ladies! And Christopher's subtle realizations about his own privilege are also awesome. I love teenaged Christopher - how he thinks he is so fabulous and suave and amazing and witty, and then half the cast like ". . . honey, nice try, but you have to EARN that fabulousness, and you have not earned it yet."

(I also love how Christopher is TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH MILLIE already ("LET'S GO LIVE ON A PRIVATE ISLAND TOGETHER"), and Millie is just like "Christopher, you are annoying me, will you please shut up about private islands already." It is hilarious and makes me ship them even more than I already did! Also the way he panics and goes into freakout when he can't find her. <3333333 I do wish Millie got more to actually do in this book, but you can't have everything.)

( Clearly a Chrestomanci reread on a slow day at work also calls for a poll! Because I value your opinions very much and not because I enjoy making you all dance for my amusement, obviously. )

Probably the only person who has any interest in reading this is cupenny, who has been demanding that I read my way through the Fullmental Alchemist manga on onemanga.com. Sorry, Star, even with the internet at my fingertips I am only through Volume 6!

( HOWEVER, since I am now reading online and with a keyboard right there: liveblogging FMA volumes 4-6 )

The book I did not have the brain to review on Friday was Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I am not sure I really have the brain to review it today either - I mean, in the grand scale of things, Toni Morrison's brain is JUPITER and mine is, like, a medium-sized asteroid on a good day - but I will do my best!

From what I understand, this is kind of a written-up version of three lectures analyzing and critiquing both the use of black characters and "blackness" in early American literature, and the absence of other criticism looking at this. The last part is kind of the mos significant to her, I think. I mean, over the course of the book, she makes a lot of really good points about the purposes that black characters served for these white American authors -one of her main arguments is that in order to write the (white) "American identity" of freedom, liberty and potential, you need the presence of a decisively non-free population to contrast it against, which is fascinating - but the actual literary analysis often takes a backseat to her arguments for more of this kind of study. At its most basic, her argument revolves around the point that too many scholars kind of uncomfortably gloss over the black presence in these books because they feel too awkward to write about it and therefore pretend it doesn't exist, which does nobody any good at all.

Me, because I am a lit-dork, I wanted more actual specific textual criticism than there was, but that is in no way to put down the importance of her arguments in favor of the kind of criticism that she wants to see. I mean, I want to see it too; that is why I picked up the book!

OK I was trying to remain strong and keep my insane cackling to myself instead of spamming my flist but

I must

I MUST

point you all to the Phantom of the Opera's official Twitter feed.




You're welcome.


ETA: and now there is a rival! Man, I am almost ready to succumb and subscribe to Twitter for this. *_*

So I realized while reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that this classic work of science fiction literature is basically Phantom of the Opera . . . UNDERWATER!

( NO WAIT HEAR ME OUT )

When I picked up Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon, I knew from interviews that one of the author's goals in writing it was to really get into the head of the Tall, Dark, and Moderately Sociopathic (But Sexy) protagonist who pops up in so much fiction and present an unglamorized version. And she did a very good job with that! It is not the book's fault that I did not love being stuck in the head of a Tall Dark and Mildly Sociopathic Protagonist much of the time, which was the main reason that this book is not making it up into the ranks of my favorites.

What I did very much like about the book:

1. The mythology, which is cool and dark and deals with the consequences/sacrifices of magic and a magical economy in a nicely gritty way. (The basic idea is that to gain power, magicians have to offer a chance for demons to spend time in this world, which generally involves sacrificing humans to be possessed; their opposite number, the members of the Goblin Market, make money selling charms and defenses against demons and magicians.)

2. Many of the characters! Even Nick, who is the protagonist, I found interesting - he is the kind of character who has difficulties with empathy and understanding other people (to put it mildly) and is pretty much entirely focused on his brother Alan, whom he wants to protect even though he doesn't understand him either. It was a cool and unusual viewpoint (and I really did like how she set up for the ending), but the problem for me is that I was just as much or more interested in all the other characters that Nick emphatically Doesn't Care About - and also in Alan whom we only see through Nick's eyes - and so after a few chapters of Nick I wanted to go follow someone else around for a change. Does this happen to anyone else with books, where you enjoy the story but you would like be in someone else's head to see it happen? (This happened to me in Harry Potter, too.)

3. The fact that our protagonists are not on any kind of crusade to save the world, but are in it for their own personal survival and to protect the ones closest to them - the story kicks off when the brother of the girl that Alan has a crush on gets marked by a demon for possession, and eventually Alan also gets marked, and as far as Nick knows the goal is the simple one of Getting The Mark Off Alan, and I Guess Off Jamie Because Alan Won't Shut Up About It Otherwise.

4. The complicated and morally gray backstory going on with the previous generation. I was pretty fascinated by Alan and Nick's morally ambiguous/completely insane mother Olivia - and, again, I really wanted to see many scenes that Nick just did not care about, such as the conversations between Olivia and Alan's crush Mae. (Actually I wanted to see more of Mae in general, who is the main female character, but who, again, I could not get much of a fix on, because Nick does not care about anything about her except that she is occasionally annoying and has boobs.)

However! This is the first book in a trilogy, and from what I understand the other books will be from the viewpoints of different characters, and I am pretty excited for that! The author has posted short stories set in the same universe on her LJ as backstory for some characters who appear in the book, and those actually got me way more excited for the sequels than the book itself did - I would especially highly recommend The Arundel Tomb, which can stand alone as a short story, is not really spoilery for The Demon's Lexicon, and has magic and female friendship and love triangles that aren't!

I did not know until just now, when I was looking it up on Amazon, that Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House was the first in a series! Fail, self. Anyway, as you might guess from that, The Birchbark House stands on its own - it follows a year in the life of Omakayas, a seven-year-old Ojibwa girl living on Madeline Island in Lake Superior in 1847. The big event that you'll see hyped on the back cover plot summary is a winter smallpox epidemic, but though that is definitely big and dramatic, the book devotes just much more time to chronicling little details of daily life beforehand and dealing with the emotional fallout after. Amazon is helpful again in telling me that Louise Erdrich spent epic amounts of time talking to Ojibwa elders (Erdrich is also Ojibwa), reading letters from the time period, and just hanging out with her kids on Madeline Island to see how they reacted to things, and her research definitely shows in how believable and matter-of-fact everything is. It is also worth mentioning that the illustrations are adorable.

I might have called this a coming-of-age story if I didn't know it was the first in a series, but I think I'm kind of glad that I'm not going to. Omakayas definitely goes through a lot of growth over the course of the book, but I am pretty excited to get to see her grow more! I am also looking forward to reading more about her family; unsurprisingly, my favorite part is the relationship between Omakayas and her siblings: perfectionist older sister Angeline, SUPER ANNOYING little brother Pinch, and Neewo, the much-adored baby. I also loved Old Tallow, the tough-as-nails old bear hunter who has dumped three husbands and terrifies everyone but has a soft spot for Omakayas. Although the book is definitely meant for middle-grade readers, the writing does not have that annoying talking-down-and-over-simplifying quality that you get with some authors new to YA who are trying too hard, and the characters are completely 3-D. I will be reading the sequels (now that I know they exist) and I'm also curious about her adult novels; if anyone knows anything about them, I would appreciate thoughts!

I was going to wait until I had read some more Monster and then do a big post on both Urasawa series, but after reading volume 4 of 20th Century Boys last night I must babble while my glee is fresh!

Basically I would say that 20th Century Boys is like a cross between It and Watchmen, except so far I like it better than either! It is about a bunch of kids in the 60's who made up an elaborate game about saving the world from an evil group of evil, as kids do, and then all grew up to do various boring things and forgot all about it - except now a bunch of creepy things are happening that echo the game they made up, which has something to do with a cult called the "Friends" who are using the kids' symbol.

That makes Kenji, kid would-be superhero who came up with most of the evil group of evil's plans for the purpose of having something awesome to thwart, just about the only guy who can save the world. Except now Kenji is a failed rock musician who runs a convenience store and whose biggest worry is how to take care of his MIA sister's baby (and may I take a detour to mention: I LOVE HIM. More on this further down!) and who, understandably, hardly remembers anything about the games that they used to play as kids.

The first two volumes pretty much establish the creepiness of what's happening with the Friends and the various characters slowly starting to figure out the connections; in the third volume the plot really starts intensifying and by now I am completely hooked! What I really like is, first of all, the realisticness of how the characters remember their past - everyone's ideas of what happened are a little bit different and everything is kind of fuzzy and at times they're kind of appalled by their younger selves (there is a scene where they dig up a time capsule that they buried that I love because they are all so bemused to find sketches of ray guns and porn!) and changing landscapes and culture and so forth are actual serious plot points - and second of all, the art, which is gorgeous and really amazing at distinguishing individual characters and their expressions and emotions (I love how Urasawa draws the continuity between the younger and older versions of the same character - they look completely different but are always identifiable. I think the secret is in the eyebrows!) and third of all, the characters. These days I often find myself burned out on the Loser Hero, but against all my expectations I love Kenji - he is a tremendous dork who runs around with this baby strapped to his back that he is totally determined to take the best care of to make up for all the sacrifices his sister made for him that he never appreciated when they were kids! My heart grew three sizes that day! I also really like Yukiji, airport security guard who was known round the block as the Strongest Girl in the World, and what we get to see of Kiriko and Donkey.

( Spoilers for volume 4 )

And now I have a dilemma, because I really like the translation and I like reading it in volume format and getting the cast of characters at the beginning and cultural notes at the end, etc., and I don't want to race through it all online because I enjoy it enough that I want to pace myself . . . but the new volumes are only coming out every 2 months, and onemanga.com is right there. D: TEMPTATION.

I have a new one for my list of top favorite Heyers! The Talisman Ring may come only second to Cotillion as Heyer Novel That Has Brought Me Most Delight. Well, okay, maybe it is also tied with Spring Muslin. Anyway, it is HYSTERICAL, and does exactly what I love best, which is spend a lot of time poking loving fun at ridiculous gothic tropes!

The plot: Eustacie, a beautiful young French girl rescued from the Terror (all right, in a thoroughly legitimate fashion three years before anything actually started happening, but SHE MIGHT HAVE GONE TO THE GUILLOTINE, OKAY, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN VERY DRAMATIC) is fleeing an arranged marriage with a Thoroughly Unromantic Older Cousin(he UTTERLY REFUSED to ride at breakneck pace to her deathbed! Because he thinks she is quite unlikely to die!) when she runs into . . . her LONG-LOST COUSIN LUDOVIC, the RIGHTFUL HEIR, who has BEEN FALSELY ACCUSED OF MURDER over a MYSTERIOUS TALISMAN RING and has now BECOME A SMUGGLER!

Eustacie and Ludovic promptly launch into a series of very romantic schemes to prove his innocence, while Eustacie's long-suffering ex-fiance/cousin Tristram tries to keep Ludovic from getting picked up by the police or accidentally murdered in an excess of drama. He has the very excellent help of Sarah Thorne, BEST CHARACTER EVER, who wanders into the middle of all the drama while accompanying her brother around England, decides this is the most utterly hilarious series of events she has ever encountered, and convinces her brother to stay so she can help out and assist with project Help Ludovic Not Get Himself Killed!

There is so much hilarity and genre-mockery in this book, guys. ( Mild spoilers! )

Thanks to areyoumymemmy for pointing out that this was an excellent Heyer and should be moved up my list! My current Heyer rankings go I think as follows:

Cotillion
The Talisman Ring and Sprig Muslin (tied!)
The Corinthian
The Unknown Ajax
Sylvester
The Masqueraders
The Grand Sophy
Venetia
Regency Buck

Sherri L. Smith's Flygirl is definitely making my list of top YA novels read this year. The book's narrator is Ida Mae Jones, a light-skinned black woman in the 1940's whose father taught her to fly (and love) airplanes, but who was denied her pilot's license because she's a woman. When war breaks out, she loses her brother to the army, but she gets her chance to fly - the US Army has started supporting a division of Women's Airforce Service Pilots (or WASP) to transport and test-fly army planes and free up male pilots for combat duty. Of course, in the segregated US Army, the WASP isn't going to accept a black woman, but Ida Mae is just light enough that she thinks maybe she can get away with passing in order to get up in the air.

You guys know I have a weakness for books about women passing as men in all-male disciplines, and in one way this felt very familiar to me - Ida Mae's constant fear and awareness that she has to perform at all times, the small subterfuges and the genuine friendships that nevertheless might dissolve at any time if the truth came out, all resonate with that genre. But there are ways in which the stakes in this game are much higher, and Sherri Smith doesn't flinch away from any of that. As a white woman, doors do open to Ida Mae, but she can't acknowledge any of the people who are most important to her (there's a scene where her mother comes to visit her at her training that is pretty heartbreaking), sometimes she's completely boggled by the disconnect between her experience and the privilege her new white friends express, and she's well aware that the longer she decides to continue as "Jonesy" the flygirl the more she'll lose her connection to her family. At the same time, the WASP themselves are fighting for legitimacy and recognition in an army that won't guarantee them jobs after the war or even pay for their funerals in the line of duty, because they're not officially commissioned officers. The choices are never easy, and Smith does a really good job balancing all the different forces at work in the story - racism, sexism, privilege conscious and unconscious, family history, ties and responsibility to friends and family and country and Ida Mae's own need to be in the air.

It's also just a really good story. Smith has done a ton of research (the book started as her master's thesis) and portrays the time period and the training that Ida Mae goes through and her eventual army service incredibly well. Ida Mae is also a fantastic narrator, and the characters that surround her (especially her fellow WASP trainees, upper-class Jewish girl Lily Lowenstein and carny wing-walker Patsy) are also really strong. (newredshoes, I was thinking about you especially - brassy 40's dames! WWII pilots! Brassy 40's dames who are WWII pilots!)