Book Logging
Aug. 2nd, 2008 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckBleach 22 - I may actually manage to start remembering the various Shinigami who showed up at Ichigo's school simply because they made me snicker. The introduction of the more potent big bads was something I'd been expecting from the fics I've read, but I really didn't quite get from the fics what they were supposed to be. I'm glad to have a bit more explained.
I'm finding that I'm not all that interested in Ichigo right now. I'm quite interested in the characters around him. Sadly, I suspect that most of them won't (outside of fic. I must look for it) get the attention I want.
Case Closed 13 - The library's missing v.12, so I skipped it. I suppose that, if it turns up, I'll go back and read it, but I didn't feel like I missed much. The first mystery in this volume was the conclusion of something I hadn't read. Fortunately, I remembered watching the episodes and so didn't feel at all lost. All three of the stories here involved complicated methods of creating alibis.
Elemental Gelade 7 - I had trouble with this volume because it was building on details that I'd utterly forgotten in the months since I read v.6. Serialized stories suffer a lot when there are gaps between volumes. I've liked this manga just enough to think that it might be worthwhile, someday when more of it is available, to try to get all the volumes from the library at once so that I can try to remember who's who and who's doing what.
Gin Tama 2 - Still not feeling much love for this. Some of that is the casual vulgarity that overlays everything. It's not inappropriate for the characters and the setting. It just wears at me. I could handle that better if something seemed to be going on, but right now, at least, there doesn't seem to be arc. Of course, this is v.2 of the series, and a lot of series don't really start to have arc that early, but...
Land of the Blindfolded 4-9 - Any time I read something with a love triangle, assuming I like all three characters, I lean toward a OT3 solution. In this case, I liked all three characters and wanted them all to be happy. There were hints that the second guy might be able to find happiness with another female character (with whom he'd bonded over, among other things, her crush on the other male character), but it didn't go anywhere much.
I kept expecting more plot or maybe plot of a different sort than there was. I'm not unhappy with where the manga went or how it went there. I just kept thinking that it might take a hard turn into suspense, angst, the supernatural or something else. Instead, it focused on the everyday lives of the main characters. Their special powers were an extra difficulty (and an extra tool) for each of them, but they weren't really the point.
I did like the series very much, a lot more than I expected when I read the first volume many months ago. (Yes,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
retsuko, you were right. It's a good series.)
Recommended for those who enjoy high school romance without overwhelming angst. (Not that there wasn't angst. There was. It just wasn't the point.)
Law of Ueki 11 - Another fight. Blah. Blah. Blah. I had trouble getting through this volume because it felt like nothing new. I still like that intelligent application of powers is more useful than raw power in the fights, but I'm not in the mood for shonen fight series right at the moment.
Probably more my mood than any change in the quality of the series. I do intend to continue.
Moon and the Sandals 1 - The blurb on the back cover almost put me off this series because it talked about a romance between a teacher and a student. I tend to find that squicky, so I was prepared to make a quick retreat if I encountered something icky. I didn't find teacher/student (or student/teacher) inside the covers, though. The student does make a pass (or three) at the teacher, but the teacher's involved with another adult, and the student ends up falling for another student.
I had some trouble telling characters apart, and I read this with a lot of interruptions, so I'm not sure that my opinion on it is very well grounded. I think I missed a lot by reading a page or two at a time over a period of about a week.
I was amused by the section in which one of the characters is concerned that he doesn't know anything much about how two men can have sex with each other and starts looking for reliable reference material. That seemed like something that would be a real concern and something that most manga wouldn't touch on.
This is somewhat explicit. I have no idea if the level of explicitness increases in the next volume or not.
Neotopia 1 - A servant girl serves as a stand in for a princess, taking her lessons, attending boring meetings and so on, so that her selfish (and not very bright) mistress can have fun. That's already heading for disaster when war starts. The servant actually has a decent grasp of politics and policy and such and keeps exceeding her authority in ways that the reader can see are clearly correct. She's also the reason that the princess has a group of extremely loyal followers.
I'm looking forward to seeing where the series goes. The villains are completely evil but in a slightly more complicated way. They don't care for the restrictions the current culture imposes and want to return to a way of life that lets the elite do whatever they want without considering the planet, other people or anything but their own power. (This is a far future setting in which the planet has recovered from very nearly being destroyed, and humans limit their technology to keep it from happening again. There are multiple sentient species sharing the planet, too, with an investment in keeping the humans in line.)
Never Give Up 1 - I kind of want to know what the main character's mother has been smoking-- Making her daughter work as a male model seems pretty stupid. Of course, the mother seems to be in that tormentor role that so many manga series have-- the person who laughs and keeps adding insane conditions and stupid obstacles simply for plot complication and their own amusement.
Anyway, the heroine wants to be a feminine girl but looks rather stereotypically masculine. She's taller than the guy she adores, and he's prettier than she is. Her mother gets him a modeling job, and she's terrified that he'll get seduced (or worse) by the people he'll be working with, so she demands to go with him. That's when her mother pushes her into crossdressing.
Nodame Cantabile 2 - I'm actually pleased to see that our hero isn't a natural at conducting. He definitely came across earlier in the story as needing to learn some people skills.
I almost gave up on this volume at the introduction of the drummer with the crush on the hero (I hate that I can't remember character names. It makes talking about characters awkward). The first page talking about the drummer uses feminine pronouns. I don't know how true to the Japanese that is, but it made me feel icky about how the drummer looked-- a really flat chested woman with a quite visible mustache. Identifying him later on as a gay man made a lot more sense. I'm still puzzled by the 'her' and 'she' references. The character doesn't seem to be crossdressing or transsexual. Was it a translation blip? Casual homophobia? Something else? I seem to recall reading somewhere that many people in Japan equate homosexuality with transsexuality, but I've no idea if it's even remotely true.
Our Everlasting 2 - Read it. Remember very little except that I kind of liked the conflict revolving around each of the guys having ambitions and dreams that would lead them apart and them having to decide what compromises-- if any-- to make.
Pretty Face 1 - I can't. I tried, and I can't read this. It's too much. The basic premise is that a guy wakes up from a year in a coma to discover that his face was so badly burned that he was unrecognizable (and declared dead). A plastic surgeon remade his face based on a photograph that was in his wallet, a photograph of the girl he had a crush on. I didn't get much farther than that. Peeking at later pages shows him mistaken for the girl's missing older sister and pretending to be the sister because (a) he has nowhere else to go and (b) he has a crush.
I think the humor in this sit-com would make me cringe at best and leave me wanting to crawl into a hole and hide until our species dies off at worst.
Prince of Tennis 16 - Read it. There was tennis, including amazing, special moves never seen before.
Rurouni Kenshin 20 - I have five volumes left to read of this series, 21-25. Yes, that means I've read volumes at the end of the series without getting there the usual way. I've been having trouble getting myself through this last arc. I was particularly reluctant to read the Tomoe stuff because I know how it ends and because I found the OAVs so well done. This volume carries the story almost to the end of Tomoe's portion of Kenshin's life. Of course, reading Kenshin again makes me want to write more of that huge AU fic that's been lurking in tiny fragments on my hard drive.
Must find time to write fic....
St. Lunatic High School 2 - That's it? Lame. I liked v.1 quite a bit, but this volume was...um...not so great. This volume got sillier and more clichéd and ran around in circles being annoying. Not recommended.
Shaman King 16 - Revelations about the hero and the villain and Destiny. Fine. It wasn't anything really surprising, in my opinion, though many characters seemed surprised. I still have mixed feelings about this series. I'm interested in seeing where the story goes, but the flaws make me hesitate to pick up each new volume I get from the library. The fact that it's currently in the midst of a long arc of tournament combats doesn't help at all, and I keep wondering when I'm going to hit something else that makes me go, "Oh, please don't do that! Please?"
Those Who Hunt Elves 2 - More silliness. Not dreadfully memorable. It's been less than a week since I read it, and I have only a vague impression of people behaving like morons and getting smacked for it.
To Terra 1 - Reading this, I kept having the feeling that the story was deeply familiar. It's not familiar in its details, but it's also not wildly original. There are mutant humans with psychic powers who're feared by the rest of humanity and killed off by the powers that be of the heavily regimented pseudo-utopia that humans now inhabit.
I say 'pseudo-utopia' because peace is maintained by computers erasing people's memories and reprogramming them to fit their assigned places better. Most people seem not to be aware enough of what's going on around them to be at all unhappy.
The mutants have formed their own society and are aware, generally, that they're not happy. They seem to think that returning to Earth (most humans aren't allowed there) will help, as if that's the gap that they feel. Their society is skewed by the fact that they all know that they'll be killed immediately if humans locate them.
I think that the story was reminding me a little of van Vogt's Slan. The fact that the hero's name (Jomy Marcus Shin) kind of vaguely reminds me of the name of the hero of Slan (John Thomas Cross, as I recall) probably created a lot of echoes, so I'm not sure how much the two really have in common. I haven't reread Slan in at least twenty years.
Train + Train 1-2 - I read these but have only a general impression of wackiness and action that's not yet aimed anywhere. The story's set on a world where trains are used as institutions of education, carrying students from lesson to lesson all over the world. There's one train that's weird and extra challenging and so on. The hero doesn't intend to board that one. He wants a normal, sane education. Then he ends up handcuffed to a girl boarding the special train. As the special trains are infrequent and she's on the run, he ends up going with her. The story goes from there.
I'm hopeful that the story will go in interesting directions and build up as it goes along. I just haven't gotten far enough yet to be sure it will.
Vampire Game 12-13 - I'm glad to finally get my hands on the rest of this series. For a long time, the library didn't have the last four books. I put in a request and then checked back periodically to see if they'd come in. Now they have.
I still rather want to smack Ishtar, but meeting so much of her family has explained a lot. I feel sorry for the people involved in the various romantic tangles that are simply not going to work out well. I want them all to get happy endings, and they won't.
Vampire Knight 3 - Vampires, politics and angst, oh my. I've little to say. This is not exactly my sort of thing, but I'm enjoying it in small doses. I don't think there's anything about this one that I can take seriously even though it's not humorous.
Wallflower 4 - My memories are blurry-- I'm not sure which events I remember from the series happened in this volume. I know it was still funny, and that I still love the heroine.
Wild Adapter 2 - More violence. Lots of violence. I was a little put off by having so much of the volume center on a new character who, if I'm reading the signs correctly, probably won't be back. Yes, it's nice to have an occasional outside perspective on the characters, but I don't generally want it early in the series. Draw me in, let me get to know the characters, then show me how they look and shock me a bit with things I've stopped seeing.
Wild Ones 2 - Aw. Still very sweet. I wasn't even put off by the introduction of a second guy to chase after the heroine. I like the way all the members of the gang will rally to help out their princess and the way she returns their loyalty but isn't quite sure what to do with them.
YuYu Hakusho 14 - The world might end. Bad things might happen. So the heroes fight the bad guys. I should have more to say, but I don't. I had fun reading the volume, but it hasn't stuck with me.
Zatch Bell 18 - Read it. I think there were hints of set up of the next big challenge, but I think it was also a we-need-to-get-there-from-here volume, more connective than anything. Of course, I could also be forgetting a lot. It's been a couple of weeks.
I'm finding that I'm not all that interested in Ichigo right now. I'm quite interested in the characters around him. Sadly, I suspect that most of them won't (outside of fic. I must look for it) get the attention I want.
Case Closed 13 - The library's missing v.12, so I skipped it. I suppose that, if it turns up, I'll go back and read it, but I didn't feel like I missed much. The first mystery in this volume was the conclusion of something I hadn't read. Fortunately, I remembered watching the episodes and so didn't feel at all lost. All three of the stories here involved complicated methods of creating alibis.
Elemental Gelade 7 - I had trouble with this volume because it was building on details that I'd utterly forgotten in the months since I read v.6. Serialized stories suffer a lot when there are gaps between volumes. I've liked this manga just enough to think that it might be worthwhile, someday when more of it is available, to try to get all the volumes from the library at once so that I can try to remember who's who and who's doing what.
Gin Tama 2 - Still not feeling much love for this. Some of that is the casual vulgarity that overlays everything. It's not inappropriate for the characters and the setting. It just wears at me. I could handle that better if something seemed to be going on, but right now, at least, there doesn't seem to be arc. Of course, this is v.2 of the series, and a lot of series don't really start to have arc that early, but...
Land of the Blindfolded 4-9 - Any time I read something with a love triangle, assuming I like all three characters, I lean toward a OT3 solution. In this case, I liked all three characters and wanted them all to be happy. There were hints that the second guy might be able to find happiness with another female character (with whom he'd bonded over, among other things, her crush on the other male character), but it didn't go anywhere much.
I kept expecting more plot or maybe plot of a different sort than there was. I'm not unhappy with where the manga went or how it went there. I just kept thinking that it might take a hard turn into suspense, angst, the supernatural or something else. Instead, it focused on the everyday lives of the main characters. Their special powers were an extra difficulty (and an extra tool) for each of them, but they weren't really the point.
I did like the series very much, a lot more than I expected when I read the first volume many months ago. (Yes,
retsuko, you were right. It's a good series.)Recommended for those who enjoy high school romance without overwhelming angst. (Not that there wasn't angst. There was. It just wasn't the point.)
Law of Ueki 11 - Another fight. Blah. Blah. Blah. I had trouble getting through this volume because it felt like nothing new. I still like that intelligent application of powers is more useful than raw power in the fights, but I'm not in the mood for shonen fight series right at the moment.
Probably more my mood than any change in the quality of the series. I do intend to continue.
Moon and the Sandals 1 - The blurb on the back cover almost put me off this series because it talked about a romance between a teacher and a student. I tend to find that squicky, so I was prepared to make a quick retreat if I encountered something icky. I didn't find teacher/student (or student/teacher) inside the covers, though. The student does make a pass (or three) at the teacher, but the teacher's involved with another adult, and the student ends up falling for another student.
I had some trouble telling characters apart, and I read this with a lot of interruptions, so I'm not sure that my opinion on it is very well grounded. I think I missed a lot by reading a page or two at a time over a period of about a week.
I was amused by the section in which one of the characters is concerned that he doesn't know anything much about how two men can have sex with each other and starts looking for reliable reference material. That seemed like something that would be a real concern and something that most manga wouldn't touch on.
This is somewhat explicit. I have no idea if the level of explicitness increases in the next volume or not.
Neotopia 1 - A servant girl serves as a stand in for a princess, taking her lessons, attending boring meetings and so on, so that her selfish (and not very bright) mistress can have fun. That's already heading for disaster when war starts. The servant actually has a decent grasp of politics and policy and such and keeps exceeding her authority in ways that the reader can see are clearly correct. She's also the reason that the princess has a group of extremely loyal followers.
I'm looking forward to seeing where the series goes. The villains are completely evil but in a slightly more complicated way. They don't care for the restrictions the current culture imposes and want to return to a way of life that lets the elite do whatever they want without considering the planet, other people or anything but their own power. (This is a far future setting in which the planet has recovered from very nearly being destroyed, and humans limit their technology to keep it from happening again. There are multiple sentient species sharing the planet, too, with an investment in keeping the humans in line.)
Never Give Up 1 - I kind of want to know what the main character's mother has been smoking-- Making her daughter work as a male model seems pretty stupid. Of course, the mother seems to be in that tormentor role that so many manga series have-- the person who laughs and keeps adding insane conditions and stupid obstacles simply for plot complication and their own amusement.
Anyway, the heroine wants to be a feminine girl but looks rather stereotypically masculine. She's taller than the guy she adores, and he's prettier than she is. Her mother gets him a modeling job, and she's terrified that he'll get seduced (or worse) by the people he'll be working with, so she demands to go with him. That's when her mother pushes her into crossdressing.
Nodame Cantabile 2 - I'm actually pleased to see that our hero isn't a natural at conducting. He definitely came across earlier in the story as needing to learn some people skills.
I almost gave up on this volume at the introduction of the drummer with the crush on the hero (I hate that I can't remember character names. It makes talking about characters awkward). The first page talking about the drummer uses feminine pronouns. I don't know how true to the Japanese that is, but it made me feel icky about how the drummer looked-- a really flat chested woman with a quite visible mustache. Identifying him later on as a gay man made a lot more sense. I'm still puzzled by the 'her' and 'she' references. The character doesn't seem to be crossdressing or transsexual. Was it a translation blip? Casual homophobia? Something else? I seem to recall reading somewhere that many people in Japan equate homosexuality with transsexuality, but I've no idea if it's even remotely true.
Our Everlasting 2 - Read it. Remember very little except that I kind of liked the conflict revolving around each of the guys having ambitions and dreams that would lead them apart and them having to decide what compromises-- if any-- to make.
Pretty Face 1 - I can't. I tried, and I can't read this. It's too much. The basic premise is that a guy wakes up from a year in a coma to discover that his face was so badly burned that he was unrecognizable (and declared dead). A plastic surgeon remade his face based on a photograph that was in his wallet, a photograph of the girl he had a crush on. I didn't get much farther than that. Peeking at later pages shows him mistaken for the girl's missing older sister and pretending to be the sister because (a) he has nowhere else to go and (b) he has a crush.
I think the humor in this sit-com would make me cringe at best and leave me wanting to crawl into a hole and hide until our species dies off at worst.
Prince of Tennis 16 - Read it. There was tennis, including amazing, special moves never seen before.
Rurouni Kenshin 20 - I have five volumes left to read of this series, 21-25. Yes, that means I've read volumes at the end of the series without getting there the usual way. I've been having trouble getting myself through this last arc. I was particularly reluctant to read the Tomoe stuff because I know how it ends and because I found the OAVs so well done. This volume carries the story almost to the end of Tomoe's portion of Kenshin's life. Of course, reading Kenshin again makes me want to write more of that huge AU fic that's been lurking in tiny fragments on my hard drive.
Must find time to write fic....
St. Lunatic High School 2 - That's it? Lame. I liked v.1 quite a bit, but this volume was...um...not so great. This volume got sillier and more clichéd and ran around in circles being annoying. Not recommended.
Shaman King 16 - Revelations about the hero and the villain and Destiny. Fine. It wasn't anything really surprising, in my opinion, though many characters seemed surprised. I still have mixed feelings about this series. I'm interested in seeing where the story goes, but the flaws make me hesitate to pick up each new volume I get from the library. The fact that it's currently in the midst of a long arc of tournament combats doesn't help at all, and I keep wondering when I'm going to hit something else that makes me go, "Oh, please don't do that! Please?"
Those Who Hunt Elves 2 - More silliness. Not dreadfully memorable. It's been less than a week since I read it, and I have only a vague impression of people behaving like morons and getting smacked for it.
To Terra 1 - Reading this, I kept having the feeling that the story was deeply familiar. It's not familiar in its details, but it's also not wildly original. There are mutant humans with psychic powers who're feared by the rest of humanity and killed off by the powers that be of the heavily regimented pseudo-utopia that humans now inhabit.
I say 'pseudo-utopia' because peace is maintained by computers erasing people's memories and reprogramming them to fit their assigned places better. Most people seem not to be aware enough of what's going on around them to be at all unhappy.
The mutants have formed their own society and are aware, generally, that they're not happy. They seem to think that returning to Earth (most humans aren't allowed there) will help, as if that's the gap that they feel. Their society is skewed by the fact that they all know that they'll be killed immediately if humans locate them.
I think that the story was reminding me a little of van Vogt's Slan. The fact that the hero's name (Jomy Marcus Shin) kind of vaguely reminds me of the name of the hero of Slan (John Thomas Cross, as I recall) probably created a lot of echoes, so I'm not sure how much the two really have in common. I haven't reread Slan in at least twenty years.
Train + Train 1-2 - I read these but have only a general impression of wackiness and action that's not yet aimed anywhere. The story's set on a world where trains are used as institutions of education, carrying students from lesson to lesson all over the world. There's one train that's weird and extra challenging and so on. The hero doesn't intend to board that one. He wants a normal, sane education. Then he ends up handcuffed to a girl boarding the special train. As the special trains are infrequent and she's on the run, he ends up going with her. The story goes from there.
I'm hopeful that the story will go in interesting directions and build up as it goes along. I just haven't gotten far enough yet to be sure it will.
Vampire Game 12-13 - I'm glad to finally get my hands on the rest of this series. For a long time, the library didn't have the last four books. I put in a request and then checked back periodically to see if they'd come in. Now they have.
I still rather want to smack Ishtar, but meeting so much of her family has explained a lot. I feel sorry for the people involved in the various romantic tangles that are simply not going to work out well. I want them all to get happy endings, and they won't.
Vampire Knight 3 - Vampires, politics and angst, oh my. I've little to say. This is not exactly my sort of thing, but I'm enjoying it in small doses. I don't think there's anything about this one that I can take seriously even though it's not humorous.
Wallflower 4 - My memories are blurry-- I'm not sure which events I remember from the series happened in this volume. I know it was still funny, and that I still love the heroine.
Wild Adapter 2 - More violence. Lots of violence. I was a little put off by having so much of the volume center on a new character who, if I'm reading the signs correctly, probably won't be back. Yes, it's nice to have an occasional outside perspective on the characters, but I don't generally want it early in the series. Draw me in, let me get to know the characters, then show me how they look and shock me a bit with things I've stopped seeing.
Wild Ones 2 - Aw. Still very sweet. I wasn't even put off by the introduction of a second guy to chase after the heroine. I like the way all the members of the gang will rally to help out their princess and the way she returns their loyalty but isn't quite sure what to do with them.
YuYu Hakusho 14 - The world might end. Bad things might happen. So the heroes fight the bad guys. I should have more to say, but I don't. I had fun reading the volume, but it hasn't stuck with me.
Zatch Bell 18 - Read it. I think there were hints of set up of the next big challenge, but I think it was also a we-need-to-get-there-from-here volume, more connective than anything. Of course, I could also be forgetting a lot. It's been a couple of weeks.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 12:23 am (UTC)Anytime you would like to read my unfinished fanfiction about it, just say the word. No pressure, of course.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 12:11 am (UTC)For Land of the Blindfolded, the psychic powers gave just the right extra to the high school romance.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 12:54 am (UTC)I enjoyed the Nodame anime, but is the manga worth reading? There'll be a continuation of the anime this fall set in Paris.
no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 12:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 12:03 am (UTC)