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May. 15th, 2008 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckBook logging. This is the rest of April and all of May so far.
Beauty Is the Beast 1 - I had no idea what to expect when I started this. I'm still not sure I know what to expect. So far, it seems to be largely episodic, stories of life in a girls' high school dorm. (The author mentions that she's drawing on her own high school experience of living in a dorm. I think that shows in some of the details.) Most of the volume focuses on Eimi, the new girl, as she tries to fit in and finds out more about the girls' dorm and the off-limits boys' dorm, but there are chapters focused on other girls, too.
I think the title has to do with Eimi's growing acquaintance with a particular boy who most people fear. Rumor says that he spent junior high school in juvenile detention and that even the teachers are afraid of him.
Flame of Recca 1 - Boo to whoever decided to censor this with blue pen by scribbling over the few naked breasts that appeared on one combat scene. Not so much because I wanted to see them but because I hate seeing books mutilated that way, regardless of the content. I found no surprises in this volume. Any differences from the anime were, as far as I could remember, minimal. The main thing that bothered me was how Domon was drawn. He looked wrong to me.
Kamui 1 - This should have been in my last book logging update. I simply forgot to record it. I suppose that's, in part, a measure of how little impression it made. The story's set in a post-apocalyptic future with superpowered teenagers who've been modified somehow. The process seems to make them crazy (or maybe they're selected for treatment based on being crazy). The main character isn't exactly one of these superpowered folks. He has powers, but they're granted in a different manner. He's trying, if I understand correctly, to restore a balance to the spirit world that was thrown off when some artifact or another was stolen or some spirit was kidnapped/bound. If he doesn't, the world will end.
I simply didn't care. The whole thing seemed to be an excuse for crazy kids to attack each other viciously and attractively.
Mouryou Kiden 1 - That was very pretty. I have no idea what's going on. That's okay. I've got two more volumes to figure it out. I *think* there's some sort of mystic battle between two powers who follow two sisters and are now finding out that maybe they shouldn't and so producing a third faction. There's a doomed love in there between the daughter of one sister and the son of the other.
Negima 10-11 - This series is very text dense and character dense. I really feel like I need a cheat sheet and a concordance just to keep track of who is who and which stories they've been involved in. I solve the problem by not trying to track most of the characters at all. I just figure that any special powers anybody shows are legitimate and not new (unless everybody else is astonished by them). I still find the fact that all of these older girls are falling for the ten year old main character rather creepy. It's mitigated a little by him being their teacher since that's a prime age for crushes on teachers (I also find myself wondering if he somehow seems a less threatening crush object as he's physically immature. And then I realize that I'm trying to apply psychology to a manga like this one and bang my head). As long as none of the adult teachers get involved with these students...
One Piece 17 - Silliness and another member added to the crew. They did need a doctor, after all.
Ouran High School Host Club 10 - Do Tamaki's plans ever work? Cute and funny. About what I expect from Ouran.
Polly and the Pirates - Dialect. I hate dialect. It's less disconcerting in a graphic novel where each bit of dialog isn't surrounded by other text, but it still makes me cranky. That biased me against this book. I also didn't get a very clear sense of who Polly was. This book wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for me. Of course, for me, there's also the water phobia barrier. I can't imagine why anybody would want to be on a boat.
Rave Master 23 - Poor Elli. She's got Doom, Doom, Doom. Except that I'm not sure this is that sort of manga. The only people who seem to stay dead are those who die to earn redemption. Well, and the spear carriers.
Red River 9-10 - I'm going to take a break from this series for a few weeks. The soap opera is starting to wear on me. I'd like Yuri either to make up her mind to stay in the past or to go home. The dilemma has gotten old, very old. I'm kind of interested in the politics but not that interested.
Rodda, Emily. Forests of Silence - I ended up skipping a couple of chapters early in this book. When a book's under 150 pages, I usually don't do that. In this case, it was all prelude, all set up for the real story that's going to span the rest of the series. I'll probably read the rest. It looks like a standard kids' epic fantasy with a find the stick set of quests, so I'm not expecting anything more than that.
Rodda, Emily. The Key to Rondo - This kids' fantasy has a world inside a magic music box. Beyond that, there's not a lot unique about it. I liked the main characters and the fact that they had an awful time figuring out who to trust or how the world they'd ended up in worked.
Saikano 1 - Wow. I could tell, within a dozen pages, that this could only end badly. The romance was too sweet and too deep for anything else. The boy and girl falling in love have to deal with the fact that she's been altered to be a weapon. I'm very puzzled as to why her. She has a family, and I'd expect that to cause problems. Why send her to school at all? Is this one of those series where I'm supposed to be too distracted by the angst to look at the logic?
Shaman King 14 - I approached this volume with some trepidation. It wasn't as bad as I feared. I'm a little puzzled by the fact that the old man's name suddenly changed from 'Indio' to something that sounded a lot more like a name. This volume revealed the second major villain-- a woman who believes powerfully that suffering is the only way to save the world, sinners suffering, that is. She goes in for serious mortification of her own body but also puts heavy emphasis on killing her opponents in dreadful ways to punish them for opposing her vision.
Shout Out Loud 1 - I've not run into this cliché from this side before. That is, I expect to see the plot with the mother who resorts to porn to support her kid. I've not previously seen a father going that way. Admittedly, doing voice acting for yaoi anime and CD plays is a lot different from doing live action porn, but it's still the same situation. Judging by the publisher (BLU), later volumes probably involve actual sex, but this volume doesn't particularly, at least not real sex apart from one kiss.
Solitaire, Jenna. The Keeper of the Waters - I recently saw someone comparing books to cheetos. That's an apt description of this series. They're not even really good cheetos, more like the stale ones that you keep eating because they're the only junk food in the house. To be fair, the books are pretty readable. They're light and quick and require no brain power at all. In fact, I ran into trouble every time I tried to think about the plot, the characterization, the (lack of) research, etc. Templars, Catholic priests, demons, ancient artifacts, one true bloodline that can control those artifacts. Blah, blah, blah.
Plus, I'm annoyed by the conceit of having a first person, supernatural quest set in the almost real world that puts the main character's name in the author slot on the cover. It is a strong signal of the sort of book that this is, I suppose.
Solitaire, Jenna. The Keeper of the Flames - I'm putting this after The Keeper of the Waters because that's the second book in the series and this is the third. Otherwise, I'd alphabetize. For some reason, my inner librarian believes that series order trumps title alphabetization. Go figure.
I spent the early half of this book wanting to beat the narrator with a big stick. It's creepy to continue to push a person after they've said no to sex. It doesn't matter if the person saying no is male or female or if the person pushing is male or female. The guy's a priest. Him saying no doesn't mean 'badger me some more.' It means he takes his vows seriously. And he doesn't have to have a reason to say no.
Admittedly, the narrator is a nineteen year old woman who's recently lost her grandfather and who's traveling the world on a mystic quest that's probably going to end with her either dying or going mad (but if she doesn't do it, the world will end, so...). The priest is the one person who's stayed with her for all three books. Her obsessing with him is fairly reasonable under the circumstances, but-- Ick. I don't want to be in her head for it. And these aren't the sorts of books that have psychological depth to do complex motivations well.
I'll still read the next book if I stumble upon it, but I'm not very enthusiastic.
Tenshi Ja Nai 8 - I don't think that the story could have ended any other way, not really, but I didn't find the final volume of the series fully satisfying. Then again, I'm not sure there was an ending that I would find satisfying. At least the characters got their happy ending.
Tsubasa 16 - Um... ::brain breaks:: Yeah. I need to reread all of this and xxxHOLIC some day, after every volume is out, and try to figure out what exactly is going on. As it is, if I hadn't been reading spoilers, I'd be utterly lost.
Yurara 1-2 - I'm intrigued by this series, intrigued enough to look for the rest of it. The notion of the female lead having a spirit in her that manifests by changing her appearance entirely reminds me of Ceres. Though I expect a different story arc entirely, assuming we get an arc at all in this one. Two volumes isn't enough to know whether or not there's an arc or just episodic stories because it's all been episodic, character introduction stuff so far. I'm also reminded a bit of Zombie Loan in the sense that there are two attractive guys to go along with the girl and that the three of them are dealing with folks who haven't quite passed on. It's different, however, in that these are ghosts that nobody else can see.
YuYu Hakusho 12 - More fighting. More character and power development. Just not enough to be very memorable. (These blurbs are a lot better if I don't wait weeks to write them. This is not news, but I somehow keep failing to write my impressions down fast enough.)
Zatch Bell 11-13 - I'm glad to see friendship, teamwork and brains working against coercion and brute force. Still pretty standard shonen fair. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the woman scorned thing for one of the villains. It's obviously meant to be silly, but it makes me uncomfortable.
Beauty Is the Beast 1 - I had no idea what to expect when I started this. I'm still not sure I know what to expect. So far, it seems to be largely episodic, stories of life in a girls' high school dorm. (The author mentions that she's drawing on her own high school experience of living in a dorm. I think that shows in some of the details.) Most of the volume focuses on Eimi, the new girl, as she tries to fit in and finds out more about the girls' dorm and the off-limits boys' dorm, but there are chapters focused on other girls, too.
I think the title has to do with Eimi's growing acquaintance with a particular boy who most people fear. Rumor says that he spent junior high school in juvenile detention and that even the teachers are afraid of him.
Flame of Recca 1 - Boo to whoever decided to censor this with blue pen by scribbling over the few naked breasts that appeared on one combat scene. Not so much because I wanted to see them but because I hate seeing books mutilated that way, regardless of the content. I found no surprises in this volume. Any differences from the anime were, as far as I could remember, minimal. The main thing that bothered me was how Domon was drawn. He looked wrong to me.
Kamui 1 - This should have been in my last book logging update. I simply forgot to record it. I suppose that's, in part, a measure of how little impression it made. The story's set in a post-apocalyptic future with superpowered teenagers who've been modified somehow. The process seems to make them crazy (or maybe they're selected for treatment based on being crazy). The main character isn't exactly one of these superpowered folks. He has powers, but they're granted in a different manner. He's trying, if I understand correctly, to restore a balance to the spirit world that was thrown off when some artifact or another was stolen or some spirit was kidnapped/bound. If he doesn't, the world will end.
I simply didn't care. The whole thing seemed to be an excuse for crazy kids to attack each other viciously and attractively.
Mouryou Kiden 1 - That was very pretty. I have no idea what's going on. That's okay. I've got two more volumes to figure it out. I *think* there's some sort of mystic battle between two powers who follow two sisters and are now finding out that maybe they shouldn't and so producing a third faction. There's a doomed love in there between the daughter of one sister and the son of the other.
Negima 10-11 - This series is very text dense and character dense. I really feel like I need a cheat sheet and a concordance just to keep track of who is who and which stories they've been involved in. I solve the problem by not trying to track most of the characters at all. I just figure that any special powers anybody shows are legitimate and not new (unless everybody else is astonished by them). I still find the fact that all of these older girls are falling for the ten year old main character rather creepy. It's mitigated a little by him being their teacher since that's a prime age for crushes on teachers (I also find myself wondering if he somehow seems a less threatening crush object as he's physically immature. And then I realize that I'm trying to apply psychology to a manga like this one and bang my head). As long as none of the adult teachers get involved with these students...
One Piece 17 - Silliness and another member added to the crew. They did need a doctor, after all.
Ouran High School Host Club 10 - Do Tamaki's plans ever work? Cute and funny. About what I expect from Ouran.
Polly and the Pirates - Dialect. I hate dialect. It's less disconcerting in a graphic novel where each bit of dialog isn't surrounded by other text, but it still makes me cranky. That biased me against this book. I also didn't get a very clear sense of who Polly was. This book wasn't bad, but it didn't work well for me. Of course, for me, there's also the water phobia barrier. I can't imagine why anybody would want to be on a boat.
Rave Master 23 - Poor Elli. She's got Doom, Doom, Doom. Except that I'm not sure this is that sort of manga. The only people who seem to stay dead are those who die to earn redemption. Well, and the spear carriers.
Red River 9-10 - I'm going to take a break from this series for a few weeks. The soap opera is starting to wear on me. I'd like Yuri either to make up her mind to stay in the past or to go home. The dilemma has gotten old, very old. I'm kind of interested in the politics but not that interested.
Rodda, Emily. Forests of Silence - I ended up skipping a couple of chapters early in this book. When a book's under 150 pages, I usually don't do that. In this case, it was all prelude, all set up for the real story that's going to span the rest of the series. I'll probably read the rest. It looks like a standard kids' epic fantasy with a find the stick set of quests, so I'm not expecting anything more than that.
Rodda, Emily. The Key to Rondo - This kids' fantasy has a world inside a magic music box. Beyond that, there's not a lot unique about it. I liked the main characters and the fact that they had an awful time figuring out who to trust or how the world they'd ended up in worked.
Saikano 1 - Wow. I could tell, within a dozen pages, that this could only end badly. The romance was too sweet and too deep for anything else. The boy and girl falling in love have to deal with the fact that she's been altered to be a weapon. I'm very puzzled as to why her. She has a family, and I'd expect that to cause problems. Why send her to school at all? Is this one of those series where I'm supposed to be too distracted by the angst to look at the logic?
Shaman King 14 - I approached this volume with some trepidation. It wasn't as bad as I feared. I'm a little puzzled by the fact that the old man's name suddenly changed from 'Indio' to something that sounded a lot more like a name. This volume revealed the second major villain-- a woman who believes powerfully that suffering is the only way to save the world, sinners suffering, that is. She goes in for serious mortification of her own body but also puts heavy emphasis on killing her opponents in dreadful ways to punish them for opposing her vision.
Shout Out Loud 1 - I've not run into this cliché from this side before. That is, I expect to see the plot with the mother who resorts to porn to support her kid. I've not previously seen a father going that way. Admittedly, doing voice acting for yaoi anime and CD plays is a lot different from doing live action porn, but it's still the same situation. Judging by the publisher (BLU), later volumes probably involve actual sex, but this volume doesn't particularly, at least not real sex apart from one kiss.
Solitaire, Jenna. The Keeper of the Waters - I recently saw someone comparing books to cheetos. That's an apt description of this series. They're not even really good cheetos, more like the stale ones that you keep eating because they're the only junk food in the house. To be fair, the books are pretty readable. They're light and quick and require no brain power at all. In fact, I ran into trouble every time I tried to think about the plot, the characterization, the (lack of) research, etc. Templars, Catholic priests, demons, ancient artifacts, one true bloodline that can control those artifacts. Blah, blah, blah.
Plus, I'm annoyed by the conceit of having a first person, supernatural quest set in the almost real world that puts the main character's name in the author slot on the cover. It is a strong signal of the sort of book that this is, I suppose.
Solitaire, Jenna. The Keeper of the Flames - I'm putting this after The Keeper of the Waters because that's the second book in the series and this is the third. Otherwise, I'd alphabetize. For some reason, my inner librarian believes that series order trumps title alphabetization. Go figure.
I spent the early half of this book wanting to beat the narrator with a big stick. It's creepy to continue to push a person after they've said no to sex. It doesn't matter if the person saying no is male or female or if the person pushing is male or female. The guy's a priest. Him saying no doesn't mean 'badger me some more.' It means he takes his vows seriously. And he doesn't have to have a reason to say no.
Admittedly, the narrator is a nineteen year old woman who's recently lost her grandfather and who's traveling the world on a mystic quest that's probably going to end with her either dying or going mad (but if she doesn't do it, the world will end, so...). The priest is the one person who's stayed with her for all three books. Her obsessing with him is fairly reasonable under the circumstances, but-- Ick. I don't want to be in her head for it. And these aren't the sorts of books that have psychological depth to do complex motivations well.
I'll still read the next book if I stumble upon it, but I'm not very enthusiastic.
Tenshi Ja Nai 8 - I don't think that the story could have ended any other way, not really, but I didn't find the final volume of the series fully satisfying. Then again, I'm not sure there was an ending that I would find satisfying. At least the characters got their happy ending.
Tsubasa 16 - Um... ::brain breaks:: Yeah. I need to reread all of this and xxxHOLIC some day, after every volume is out, and try to figure out what exactly is going on. As it is, if I hadn't been reading spoilers, I'd be utterly lost.
Yurara 1-2 - I'm intrigued by this series, intrigued enough to look for the rest of it. The notion of the female lead having a spirit in her that manifests by changing her appearance entirely reminds me of Ceres. Though I expect a different story arc entirely, assuming we get an arc at all in this one. Two volumes isn't enough to know whether or not there's an arc or just episodic stories because it's all been episodic, character introduction stuff so far. I'm also reminded a bit of Zombie Loan in the sense that there are two attractive guys to go along with the girl and that the three of them are dealing with folks who haven't quite passed on. It's different, however, in that these are ghosts that nobody else can see.
YuYu Hakusho 12 - More fighting. More character and power development. Just not enough to be very memorable. (These blurbs are a lot better if I don't wait weeks to write them. This is not news, but I somehow keep failing to write my impressions down fast enough.)
Zatch Bell 11-13 - I'm glad to see friendship, teamwork and brains working against coercion and brute force. Still pretty standard shonen fair. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the woman scorned thing for one of the villains. It's obviously meant to be silly, but it makes me uncomfortable.
