laceblade | Entries tagged with a: oda eiichiro

I've been trying to read LeGuin's Hainish cycle, somewhat in order. I really liked Semley's Necklace, which was a lot like Rip Van Winkle. Why doesn't more SF deal with the effects of FTL travel?
I enjoyed Planet of Exile and Rocannon's World mostly for the prose, but liked Semley's Necklace better.
I've also read "April in Paris," which is unrelated to Hainish stuff but in the same collection of short stories as Hainish stuff.

Phantom Thief Jeanne, vols. 1-3 - I really enjoyed these. I love Maron's hair, which is always perfectly drawn. Viz's release is very pretty.
I think this is the first time I've seen virginity explicitly/textually linked with mahou shoujo power. The threat of rape is used repeatedly in the third volume, which I really didn't care for.
The primary love interest also makes comments that he might not be able to "help [himself]," and wants Jeanne to stop being a Phantom Thief, :[ Very controlling, sometimes disturbing images of him holding her wrists against the wall while towering over her to argue. Ugh.
What does attract me is Maron's loneliness, her desire for strength/fortitude but eventual acceptance that she can and should rely on her friends while she's not yet strong enough to do everything on her own.
Also loved Maron's facade of cheerful strength, which covers up her loneliness. I hope to read more of this rerelease.

After volumes 19 and 20, I've finally abandoned One Piece. I seem to never be able to make it past ~20 volumes with shounen, or at least that's been true of this, Naruto, and Bleach. Fullmetal Alchemist is a well-loved exception.

Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary is hard to describe, but I absolutely loved it, definitely going on my list of favorites. I think it might be my favorite by Dean.

Vampire Knight, volumes 1-5 - I've read the first few volumes before, but now that the final tome has been released, I thought I'd reread & go straight on through to the end. I'd forgotten how heinous this is.
Everyone's hair always looks wet. Sucking of blood is used an excuse for everyone to bit/like one another while having mid-orgasmic facial expressions. The omake pages are literally titled, "Vampires covered in blood are forbidden from entering this page!" AMAZE. Self-aware manga-ka are the best.

One Salt Sea - Fifth Toby Daye, which I enjoyed a lot, possibly even more than #3, which had been my favorite.

Please Save My Earth, vol. 1 - This was a reread from a lonnnnng time ago. Sadly, my library system doesn't carry the rest of the series, and I'd have to outer-library loan every single volume after this. Not sure if I'm interested enough to keep doing that, but I'd also really like to see where the story goes, after only knowing the beginning for about a decade.

Fangirl - I pretty much devoured this. Over-identified in a few places, as I had a hard time making friends in college, spent a lot of time in my dorm room, etc. There's a lot of mental illness running through the pages of this book, so cw for that.

Arrows of the Queen - Someone at Tor.com is reading a reread of these Mercedes Lackey books. Having never read any Lackey ever, I thought I'd join in to learn about "sparkle ponies" that have often been discussed at WisCon.
I think I referred to reading this book as like eating cotton candy. SPARKLE PONY SCHOOL?! WHERE YOU GO AFTER BEING CHOSEN BY A PONY TO HELP RULE THE KINGDOM?! Amazing.

Malice - another fantastic book by Higashino, although this one was NOT about Detective Galileo, as the last two published in the US were. I love the writing. I'm completely unable to guess how things fit together, and I just really love Higashino as an author and wish that more of his books were translated into English.

How to Save a Life - With this, I've now read all available Sara Zarr books, I think? I usually suck these books down in about a day, becoming completely enthralled, and this one was no different.

ATLA: The Rift, part 3 (final) - I really enjoyed this as an end to this third post-ATLA series trilogy. Is Gene Luan Yang doing more? I really hope so!

I know there have been a bunch of other comics I've read after borrowing them from people from comics club, but I'll have to do those after my vacation!

Crossposts: http://mystickeeper.livejournal.com/728286.html

Buffy #3 - I read this! Written by Nicholas Brendan, which is sort of notable. It was amusing enough, although I'm probably not as excited as other fans are.

Plume 1-4 - I picked these up in the $0.25 bin at the comics shop. It's apparently based on a webcomic. It gave me a lot of feelings reminiscent of Min-Woo Hyung's Priest manhwa, but I think I like this heroine a bit more. The art style is really great. I asked my comics guy to order the fifth issue for me, which wraps up this introductory arc. I believe this printing was funded by a Kickstarter; to read the rest, I'll need to read it here.

One Piece, vols. 10-12 (omnibus) - A decent continuation of the plot from the previous volume. I liked Luffy's superpower actually being used (as opposed to a glaring continuity error). I also liked Usopp finding the will to fight after thinking about facing his courageous friends afterward if he hadn't.
I enjoyed the closure to Nami's arc - she's my favorite character. It's fun to see the gang finally hanging out in the Grand Line, even if it's not going as they expected. I hope that Tashigi sticks around. She seems like an interesting character.
For 12, I felt pretty meh of the denoument of this arc?! But the next volume starts a new one!!

Homecoming - This series used to be a childhood favorite of mine, & I was in need of a comfort read.
I still really love this, & it came at a good time for me. I like how the kids respond positively to being treated like adults, how much they trust one another, the way the entire book is about class privilege, and how awesome Dicey is.
I'm glad this comfort reread held up for me.

Dicey's Song - This is another reread; it's probably been at least fifteen years since I'd last read it. Dicey defying her teacher over something she wrote made me remember why I identified with her so strongly.
Even though I knew what would happen, the ending still made me cry.
I love this family and the community they create. The truths everyone teaches one another are comforting.
I'm really glad to have returned to this series, & hope to keep progressing.

A Dangerous Inheritance - This was a good follow-up to "Innocent Traitor," which I'd read back in April, & focused on Lady Jane Grey.
This book picks up where that one left off, focusing on the life of Jane Grey's sister, Katherine. I found Katherine Grey to be pretty stupid, but luckily this book has two heroines. Interlaced with Katherine Grey's life is the story of Katherine Plantagenet, the bastard daughter of Richard III. Both Katherines live mostly unhappy lives, manipulated by the people around them due to their bloodlines. They fall in love with people they shouldn't. And they both have an unhealthy obsession with what happened to Richard III's nephews, famously known as the princes in the Tower.
I like Weir's historical fiction in part because I know she's an historian and a lot of her plots are based on facts. Her afterward reveals what she made up, and from where she found her facts.
I loved the small glimpses we got of Elizabeth I in this book, and I'm looking forward to reading the next book, which focuses on her: Captive Queen.

A True Novel, Book I - This is only the first "half," but the library only sends me one at a time, & at 450 pages I'm counting this as its own "book," even though I haven't read the second volume yet.

This is technically a retelling of Wuthering Heights. The characters are Japanese. It's a book about wealth, racism, westernization, the effects of World War II on Japanese society, and human nature.
I've consumed a lot of Japanese-created media, but this book is unlike anything I've ever read. Mastserful. I kept having to remind myself that it's fiction.

There's a family tree in the back - wish I'd known that all the way through.
I really hope they translate more of Mizumura's novels into English. In the meantime, I am very much looking forward to book II.

Crossposts: http://mystickeeper.livejournal.com/702960.html

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #3 & 4 - Wow, a crossover event that I didn't hate! This may be a first 0:)
People are fighting HYDRA - does this make Ultimates part of the same universe as CA:TWS?
Didn't care for the death at the end of the fourth volume, although I understand they're trying to mirror Peter Parker's story. I DO really like Mary Jane & Gwen Stacey. Maybe I need to see the Spider-Man movies with Emma Stone in them.
Anyway, I love Miles and I wish the wait at the library for volume 5 weren't so long.

The Broken Kingdoms - I feel less critical about this than other reviews I've read. While it's the second in a trilogy, there's a new protagonist with a completely different perspective on events, societal structure, and characters in the first book.

The Golem and the Jinni - I think this might be my favorite book of the year so far. Beautiful writing, lovely characters, interesting insights into Christian Syrian & Jewish immigrants living in New York City, in 1899.

One Piece, vols. 4-6 - What a ridiculous series! Even the omake pages are absurd and heinous. I love Nami.
Boring shounen fights are more tolerable in the omnibus format.

The Killing Moon - While many of the elements of this book sound like my catnip (ninja priests, political intrigue, people's closely-held truths turning out to be manipulative lies), but I just did not dig this book at all.
The last third improved due to action. Even the writing bugged me. Maybe I prefer Jemisin when she writes in the first person?
At any rate, there's enough here to make me willing to try the sequel, because I know it's from a different perspective.

Crossposts: http://mystickeeper.livejournal.com/699789.html

Pioneer Girl - I had to keep reminding myself that this was a novel, & not a memoir, which is a credit to the writing.
In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo Wilder gives Laura Ingalls a golden pin with a house on it. In the 1960s in Vietnam, Lee's grandfather encounters a customer in his restaurant named Rose. Rose leaves behind a gold pin with a house on it. It's unclear whether she forgot it, or intended it as a gift for their many conversations.
Decades later, Lee has graduated from UW-Madison with a PhD in English Literature, but cannot find a post-doc anywhere, so she's temporarily living with her distant mother & grandfather again. She starts investigating whether the Rose her grandfather met could be Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was in Vietnam in the sixties, three years before she died, covering the war for Time magazine.
In ways, this book reminded me of Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child, how the Little House series is used as a touchstone for the children of Asian immigrants to North America. In this novel, the Manifest Destiny tug that Laura, her Pa, & her daughter Rose all feel is compared to Lee & her brother's desire to escape their mother's way of life, constantly opening Asian buffets in strip malls in different Midwest cities.
Lee's reading of the Little House books felt really familiar to me. The title is named after the first version Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about her childhood - a single-volume autobiography called Pioneer Girl. Her story was broken up into multiple books, and reshaped (or ghost-written?) by her daughter Rose through a lot of epistolary editing.
The above is a little fragmented, but I really loved this book. I think I finished it in less than a day.

Buffy s10, #2 - I felt like this was a more solid intro to the season than #1 was. I often feel bad about shipping Buffy/Spike, but it just never goes away.
Nicholas Brendan is going to be authoring at least one issue focusing on Xander (and Dracula), & James Masters is going to be authoring a mini-arc on Spike that takes place during season 7. I'm...not really excited about either? Xander only became more atrocious to me in season 9 of Buffy, & I already didn't care for him on the show.
I was pleased by the appearance of [spoiler].

Kaze Hikaru, volumes 20 & 21 - It was nice to see Sei use her femininity as a tool in this little arc. I think volume 21 has been my favorite so far. I really liked the fleshing out of Sei's past, & the choices she makes. I find her love for Okita Souji much more compelling than Okita himself. I'm now caught up with Viz's release of this series in the US. To read more, I'll need to turn to fan-translations...

One Piece, volumes 1-3 - This is one of the most popular series in Japan, & I've never read it! Monkey D. Luffy wants to be a pirate so badly that he stabs himself in the face to impress the other pirates. Unfortunately, he can't swim & can never learn how, so the pirates are uninterested in making him part of the crew. So, Luffy decides to become THE BEST PIRATE IN THE WORLD. To do so, by the end of this omnibus, he's acquired THE BEST SWORDSMAN IN THE WORLD and THE BEST THIEF/NAVIGATOR as the beginnings of his tiny crew.
This is a fun series, & so far Nami, the thief/navigator who hates pirates, is my favorite.

Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand - Kitty and Ben go to Vegas. I didn't care for this one too much? But it ended up being setup for the next book, Kitty Raises Hell, which I liked A LOT. I like Kitty & her pack & her radio show & Ben & her family. I wanna see what happens when Cormac rejoins them in Denver, tho. I WISH KITTY WERE REAL AND WE COULD BE FRIENDS.