I addition to reading and writing books, I also DRAW in blank books.
The Topdrawer shop (topdrawershop.com), a subsidiary of Japan’s delightful Itoya brand, has been carrying these handmade, 100% cotton rag paper notebooks from Lamali for a while. They are deckle-edged (meaning you can see how the fibers filled out the frame, untrimmed) and have a nearly crispy texture. The indigo version of the book has indigo-painted pages, and there is something appealing about being able to see the brushmarks, which have a lot of character and variation.
I finally purchased an oversized notebook, and have been filling its pages with abstract acrylic ink drawings. The paper appears to be heavily sized, so my acrylic ink sits on the surface nicely without bleeding or feathering. the contrast is good. The textured surface is hard on the pen tips, but this is why I have replacement pen tips!
Any day I sit and enjoy drawing in this notebook with my markers is a good day.
These paintings show many types of structures, both traditional and modern, and have the same charm and attention to scale and detail that make Urbanowicz’ art so interesting. Unlike the store fronts, these are broader scenes and wider perspectives. (Yes, he works in anime also, and you can see how some of these could function as studies for both ordinary and extraordinary backgrounds for anime dramas.)
You can see scenes from the book at the artist’s website for this book:
“Okuradashi 2010-2021”「お蔵出し」 · Mateusz Urbanowicz
Home website of Mateusz Urbanowicz; artist, creator working in Japan.
I was happy to purchase this book at Kinokuniya (I can’t believe my SF store has already had a 50 year anniversary!), and appreciate Urbanowicz’ drawing styles, comments on watercolor pencils (I use them, so I laughed out loud), and the skill, sensitivity, and affection this artist has for his subjections.
If you loved Tokyo at Night, you might love this, too!
In a grim future, giant alien insects invade earth and violently devastate the population. A heroine appears to fight them; after her death, through risky experiments, the government imbues a group of orphans with her powers. These young people are humanity’s only defense against body-snatching and massacres by these aliens.
One day, another child appears, and seems to also have insect-battling abilities. How is that even possible? And will his arrival turn the tide so that humanity can finally win?
This is a dark tale of a brutal future where children with differently manifesting powers fight on behalf of people who both admire and ostracize their heroes for their freakish abilities. Meanwhile, the arrival of a new child suggests the government keeps strange secrets.
It is high stakes and somewhat dark in subject matter. Kids risking their lives to fight aliens (while adults… don’t) is a grim topic, though it gives them some agency, and they fight to win.
This was my first Tappytoon comic, and I found it well-paced, well drawn, and interesting.
Yes, it is outrageous. Yes, it is good practice. Yes, I’ve been at it so long that they keep updating the lessons AROUND me.
This year I spent time on Hawaiian, and then switched back to German. I miss Japanese, but fear that I forgot all the kanji already. I’m not cool enough for French and Spanish this year, though I’m happy that I found my notebook with Spanish and Japanese notes. (They… are not similar!)
Yes, I’m a paying member, so I was able to buy a “streak freeze” on the few days I couldn’t get to my lessons before midnight. But STILL. I’m… persistent! The owl (die Eule) mascot, Duo, is momentarily appeased.
You know what helps make it easier to get out of a warm, cozy bed in the morning?
Knowing that you baked a pie the previous night.
Just knowing that there is a freshly baked pumpkin pie somewhere in the house (well, in the fridge), waiting for the right moment to join a meal or coffee, is so ENCOURAGING.
Time traveling agents comb through battlefields in the aftermath of devastating wars, and gather intelligence to make adjustments in time and events so that their own side will win. But at one battlefield, there is a note. A taunting, gloating note. An invitation to the finder from a skilled strategic rival to… do what, exactly?
Whether it is a dare or a trap, communicating with the enemy is highly dangerous. And yet, elaborately coded exchanges between these professional rivals begin, woven and shaped through time, so that only a specific arch enemy will spot and interpret it.
And those communications are… thrilling.
Are communications with enemy rivals supposed to be thrilling? Are finding their cleverly devised codes supposed to make your not-necessarily-human heart race?
This is a well-acted, FUN, page-turner-if-this-had-pages story of rivalry, risk, intrigue, and mutual admiration that delighted me. I recommend it highly.
How High We Go In the Dark is a book about a plague that reshapes humanity for centuries. (Note, this is not about the plague we are in at the moment. Also: it is intense to read about a world reshaped by plague, while in a world pretending not to have an ongoing plague at all…)
Melting permafrost reveals the remains of ancient people, who thaw and release the Arctic Plague upon the world, a pandemic of terrifying symptoms and profound lethality. The scale and scope of the suffering it causes remakes the world in surprising ways.
If you have wondered how serious a plague would need to be for society to adjust its values around voluntarily ending life to limit suffering; to refocus the economy around the business as its core; or how the risk of humanity’s end could drive new goals for space exploration, Sequoia Nagamatsu has wondered about this more – elaborately, delicately, thoughtfully. Through a series of interconnected chapters / short stories / vignettes, we learn about the Arctic Plague through the eyes of people who discover it, die from it, spare their loved ones from dying of it, mourn their losses, try to cure it, survive it, and travel between worlds to create a future without it.
Nagamatsu’s world building is remarkable – so plausible, so human, yet so far from the particular choices we are making during our current plague. The characters have motivations that are varied, but make sense. The settings are notable in the way the characters describe how they feel when they experience them, yet are never so detailed that you require footnotes. The emotional journey of coping with global grief and hope is handled so well. The story reveals humanity adapting to this challenge in surprising ways under the worst circumstances.
I listened to the audiobook version of this from Libro.fm, which is brilliantly acted by a cast of about fifteen voice actors (!), whose characters are compelling. (For those of us who live in the SF Bay Area, some of the voices sound pleasantly local in our port-city, collecting-people-from-afar-and-influencing-each-other way.)
This has been my favorite book of 2023. I think of it often, and have recommended it internationally! Go read or listen to this excellent book.
For someone with a very steady and predictable blogging habit, it’s exotic for me to START posting for the year in December. But… it has been quite a year.
In brief: a death in my immediate family, an enterprise-wide technology project, an underperforming vendor whose work I took on, an incompletely staffed team, a previously unenforced building code, a potentially broken bone, an immediate family hospitalization, a death in my partner’s family, countless COVID tests, and other events inflated 2023 beyond a year’s natural dimensions. It has been… an experience which would make for low-quality television, though there have been numerous comedic side quests which could be garishly animated to break the tension.
I still have books to write about, of course. I don’t plan to write often about coffee: though I enjoy my precious French press brews often, I don’t want to write about my local coffee suppliers in a commercial-feeling way, despite recent internet trends (which I’ll write about eventually). But there are plenty of books, and even Korean comics (!), to fill any perceived gaps.
