laceblade

• What are you currently reading?
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
There was obviously lots of Kennedy reminisces last week with the 50-year anniversary of JFK's assassination.
I bought this for $2 at the Memorial Library sale a couple months ago, during the Wisconsin Book Festival.
I like it quite a bit, just finished the chapter about the investigation committee into unions/etc., focusing on Jimmy Hoffa.
Overall, it's very sanitized, pretty obvious Schlesinger was a close family friend, etc.
For example, the mention of Rosemary going to live with nuns in Wisconsin is just a simple, "She got worse," with no mention of the attempted-and-botched lobotomy.
I empathize for RFK, who most people seemed to take as crabby & irritable if they didn't know him very well.

Very! Very! Sweet, volume 4. Only a chapter in, but I finally have this volume, which means I'll get from here to volume 8/the end in short order.

Hild by Nicola Griffith - It took about 70 pages for me to fall into this book. So far, I don't love it quite so much as some of her other stuff, but I'm sure she'll set me straight before the end.
Griffith is one of my favorite authors, & she and her wife are doing in a reading in my city next Tuesday at my favorite bookstore, so I'm pretty excited.


• What did you recently finish reading?
X-Men: Curse of the Mutants - This is essentially X-Men versus vampires. Jubilee becoming a vampire was interesting, but overall I disliked this.

X-Men: With Great Power - Following the previous volume, this was also written by Victor Gischler. I'm glad to get a little familiar with him, as he's going to be taking over the writing for Angel & Faith when Buffy season 10 starts up.
This included some more recognizable characters (Spider-Man), and the team is dealing with PI. I liked the art much more in this volume than Curse of the Mutants, in part because it was much less objectifying of women. While I found Xavier's manpain flashback sentiment in the last issue annoying, I appreciated him communicating to Jubilee that she'll be able to find a way to live with her new condition.
My goal in reading these was to get the backlog for the current series headed by Brian Wood. Given the revelation a couple weeks ago, I haven't decided yet whether I'll be continuing. In the meantime, I'll keep trying to get through the previous arc via the library.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 1-17 or so, + micro 1-8 + Infestation 1 & 2, + Eastman's 2012 annual: I've been behind on this for...years?! But I keep buying the single issues, resulting in general guilt :/
Luckily, I really enjoyed these (yes, some were rereads). I loved TMNT as a kid. I'm pretty sure my parents still have my turtles/Casey Jones/Bebop & Rock Steady action figures. As a child, one of my ambitions (in addition to being Batman) was to be a TMNT myself.
Anyway, these are dark-ish. Mutant turtles fight ninjas! April is a research intern! I roll my eyes a little at the Splinter/turtles/Shredder were Japanese men reincarnated, but overall these are pretty fun to read. I still have more to catch up on.
I found Infestation 1 & 2 subpar except for the art, & kind of loathed the art in Eastman's annual.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America - The title is sort of self-explanatory, but this book has a white investigative journalist telling the story of Jackie Bates, a black woman living in Chicago who provides care for her 3 children, husband who's on kidney dialysis & abuses drugs, ailing deadbeat father, and her diabetic grandma who's in crisis. The book was published in 1993, although it's obviously still relevant today. Complex bureaucracy consistnetly fails the Bates family. I particularly liked the chapter focusing on the Orthodox Jewish doctor who refused to discuss do-not-resuscitate orders with the family because he didn't agree with it himself. While distant with the Bates, Abraham follows him to his practice where he treats other Jews, and his demeanor is totally different.
But the Bates family never finds a practitioner who's on their level.
The book also spends a chapter talking about black people's fear of research, and also how consent given by poor people is often less informed than consent given by middle class whites - with whom many educated doctors can better related. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, there's a voyeuristic feel here - a white woman telling a black family's story. I wonder what Jackie's kids will feel when they grow up and read this book, intimately discussing their family's mental health, drug problems, etc. Still, it was put out by an academic publisher and is less of a fame thing than Skloot's book.
The book is highly relevant to my job, glad to have read it.

The Hemingses of Monticello - I waited until only days before this was due back at the library, so of course I didn't finish it (have since checked it out again so I'll be able to continue!). I think this is a pretty well-known book, but Gordon-Reed's goal is basically to tell the story of the Hemings family - a family of slaves living in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Sally Hemings had numerous children with Thomas Jefferson. I only made it through the first 9 chapters, so 14-year-old Sally and one of Jefferson's daughters had just joined him in Paris, where he's hanging out, still upset over his wife's death.
It'd be easy to focus on Jefferson, and while I've always found him an interesting person, I'm really appreciative that Gordon-Reed refuses to let this story belong to anyone but the Hemingses.
I'm looking forward to reading more of this.

Adaptation - I think I like this the most out of the books I've read by Malinda Lo so far. We read this for beer_marmalade. Very fast-paced, love the characters. Complicated, government conspiracies, a coming out story, lots of good stuff.

Dengeki Daisy, vol. 1 - Teru's brother was a hacker before he died. On his death bed, he gave a phone to her so that she could communicate with his friend DAISY - another hacker like himself who will always listen to Teru's problems now that she's alone, & will help her out of binds.
The real-life Daisy is a 24-year-old janitor at her school, although they both pretend they don't know he's Daisy.
When Teru breaks a school window, she has to "work off" her debt.
I grow tired of shoujo manga plots where the heroines become indentured servants to men.
It seems weird at first for a girl to be soe dependent on a guy she's never met but still tells all her problems to, & yet I did the same thing in middle/high school with a guy I'd met in an internet chat room, so this story has enough for me to continue for now.

Wild Com - a volume of short stories by Yumi Tamura, the manga-ka behind my beloved Basara.
I really loved the first story, in which people with elemental powers try to save others around them. The theme is "try your best no matter what," which happens a lot in manga but never fails to be incredibly moving to me!
The other stories were strange & weird but more forgettable.

Air: Letters from Lost Countries by G. Willow Wilson. Since she's going to be writing Ms. Marvel when it starts coming out in 2014, I wanted to be a little more familiar with Wilson's work. So far I've only previously read the stand-alone "Mystic" comic, meant for kids, which I didn't really like.
Air is about a flight attendant who's afraid of falling. Her love interest is an inpersonation-chameleon, and either a terrorist himself, or running from terrorists - or both.
There's a lot going on here, & I'll be reading more.

Lots of comics!reading. Prompted by: Borders going-out-of-business sales, living 2 blocks from a comics shop, multiple bad pain days.

I don't really do heavy synopses; sorry if that's what you're looking for.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse - 4-volume manga series by Mingming. An AU!Evangelion in which everyone attends school, and fights in a virtual reality world with guns.
The art style was mediocre, but it was emotionally satisfying in that the kids - Kaworu, Rei, Shinji, Asuka, etc. all stand up for each other in a way they never do in the actual Evangelion series. I found the plot mostly nonsensical.

I'm not upset that I read it, but I don't think I'll be keeping it. Anybody want it? I'll send it to you for the cost of shipping.

Codename Sailor V by Naoko Takeuchi, volume 1 of 2. The titular Sailor V character is Sailor Venus, one of Sailor Moon's friends/fellow fighters in the Sailor Moon series. Sailor V was a pre-cursor to the Sailor Moon saga, and I enjoyed reading it (I've been wanting to for a long time!). Minako is ready to kick some ass right from the beginning in a way that takes a few issues before Usagi feels the same way in the sister series.
This was fun to read in a cracktastic way - there isn't much in the way of "deep, meaningful plot." Still, it was a fun ride, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Sailor Moon, vol. 1 also by Naoko Takeuchi, a U.S. reprint by Kodansha. I'm one of the rare people who has all 18 volumes of Tokyopop's initial print of Sailor Moon. The original printing was pretty small (shorter, thinner than the average manga book), and the glue job was actually the worst I've ever seen in manga.

This re-release by Kodansha used the art touch-ups from the Japanese reprint. So a lot of the art looks cleaner, more in proportion, etc. If you're interested in side-by-side comparisons with the original, you can check that out here. Some of the changes I like, but one thing I liked about the original was when characters "go faceless," or their features - eyes, nose, etc. - disappear in moments of high drama, when characters are attacking or shouting or etc. So, while I'm really really glad about the re-print, I'll be saving my old tomes even though they're falling apart.

I won't recap the plot/premise because most of you know it (and if you don't, you can read such a review here.)

Buffy, Season 9 - Only one issue so far, but it looks like it's going to be a better ride than Season 8 was (this will have fewer characters, much less EPIC of a plot, etc). I like reading these a lot; the comedic timing of the show still transfers, and I like re-visiting these characters.

Angel & Faith - It's hard to talk about this much without giving away massive, massive spoilers for the end of Buffy Season 8, so let's just say that based on first issue, I like this even more than Buffy season 9. It's Angel and Faith, captured perfectly in comics form, doing what I like watching them do best - struggle with redemption for the terrible things they've done.
This takes place on the same timeline as Buffy Season 9.

Batwoman - with DC revamping 52 of its titles, I figured I'd jump on board with a few of them. For Batwoman, I read the Batwoman: Elegy compilation, and have now read the first issue of the new series. I'd say this is worth reading for the art style alone: it's gorgeous. As bonus points, Batwoman herself is a lesbian, which is much-appreciated in the sausagefest wasteland that is Most of DC's Other Titles. I've heard this team had a hard time sticking to a schedule during Elegy, so I hope that they can keep it up.
Either way, I highly recommend checking out Batwoman: Elegy, which tells her backstory. Our library has multiple copies.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - A decent first issue, imo. I like the art style, there are heaps of nostalgia for me, as I owned lots of TMNT action figures in my youth and enjoyed the gritty 80s movies (or was it early 90s??). They're putting a few twists on things: April O'Neill is a lab researcher instead of a reporter, Raphael seems estranged from his fellow turtles in the present although we don't know why, etc.
As a warning, there is a page of domestic violence in the first issue, although I don't think it will be a continuing storyline.


Next week I intend to check out Wonder Woman and the new Ultimate Spiderman.
I have piles of manga to read, too. I left Borders more than once carrying armfuls, ^^;