Category: Books

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Book (Manga): Light & Shadow by Hee Won

Cover of manga Light & Shadow, original novel by Ryu Hyang, Comic by Hee Won

Light & Shadow
Original novel by Ryu Hyang, Comic by Hee Won
published by Tappytoon.com (complete – 103 episodes)
2019

Prince Eden has a secret: his mother is raising him as a boy to protect him from the fate of women in feudal society, and so she can retain some safety as mother of the heir to the throne, rather than as the mere mother of Princess Edna. The prince is a great student, and a great swordsman to boot! But when the profoundly corrupt king is overthrown, Eden must die along with the rest of the royal family… But the queen throws Edna out secretly, to live as an anonymous woman who escapes only with her life.

Then things get complicated.

Edna is abducted, sold into servitude, abused, and sent off as a substitute bride for a soldier with Butcher in his nickname…

This has all the things you want from a Korean drama: Cross-dressing! Secrets! Murderous royals! Plots! Scandals! Rough-on-the-outside, kind-hearted, misunderstood men with amazing abdominal muscles! A heroine who is good at literally everything! The threat that the people who you’ve fallen in love with could you will kill you if they discover your bloodline! Romance between battles! Weird scars! Good hair!

The idea that heroines of these stories are so good that people would die for them soon after witnessing their kindness is a bit alarming (how desperate are people for signs of kindness, exactly?). It does makes for good comedy scenes from otherwise hardened characters that softens the stories with humor.

A fun read.

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Book (Manga): Claymore by Norihiro Yagi

Cover of Claymore volume 3 by Norihiro Yahi

Claymore
by Norihiro Yagi
published in English at Viz.com
2015 (originally published in Japanese 2001-2014)

I am excited that I finished reading all 155 chapters this month!

Terrifying monsters with superhuman strength roam the land, often stealing the appearance of specific people to hide in a community and (secretly) feast on their family and neighbors. The only defense: hiring a Claymore, a silver-haired, silver-eyed woman warrior who can detect and defeat such creatures. The Claymores themselves are spooky, can survive terrible physical harm, and don’t appear to need human companionship. They are held to a strict (but not visibly moral) code, and if they violate it, their peers track them down and brutally execute them.

This is the dark story of several of these warriors, who work at the behest of their governing body, The Organization. The Organization ranks them to engender competition, and won’t let them intervene in human affairs even when it would be ethical to do so. The Organization also appears to send small groups of them on suicide missions for unknown reasons. What is really going on? Why are there so many monsters? And why is the Organization so obsessive in controlling the Claymores?

A page from Claymore, with five panels showing shocked reactions from various Claymore warrior characters.
Claymore warriors expressing surprise during a conversation.

This tense and very violent story (not for kids!) unfolds at different speeds, with increasing battles and characters, but also increasing mysteries about the motivations of the Organization and the increasingly coordinated (!!) monsters. The origin of the Claymores themselves and the apparent leaders of the monsters are slowly revealed, with some secrets kept until the very last chapters.

The monsters range from simple to extremely complex and fanciful designs. The Claymore warriors themselves look somewhat Eastern European to me, and the artist distinguishes the matching-armor-wearing women with distinct hairstyles. The reason they are all women is explained over the course of the story, and the limited female nudity is intended to make some of the creatures more terrifying – I think it works well.

Great story, old-school drawings, great monsters, great comrade-in-arms bonding, solid (grim) story. I enjoyed this story very much.

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Book (Manga): Why Ophelia Couldn’t Leave by Joo Ahri & Samo

Why Ophelia Couldn’t Leave
by Joo Ahri & Samo
published by Tappytoon.com
2021

Here’s a webtoon/manga for the goth kids. :). This doesn’t follow the Tappytoon themes I’ve described earlier (a modern person wakes in a video game or novel), but instead this is a straight story.

Ophelia’s beautiful mother, Isolde, has married yet again! This time, rather than watching her stepfather die of a mysterious ailment like his predecessors, Isolde dies with her new husband in a tragic – and very strange – carriage wreck.

Ophelia is bereft. Alec, her young step-brother, asks Ophelia to to stay in his family home so he won’t be completely alone, and while the household is unfriendly, she may not have any better options. But when investigators come about the carriage crash, and people start turning up dead, Ophelia wonders what she’s gotten herself into, and whether she can keep her mother’s secrets.

This is a drama, a murder mystery, a story about self-absorbed parents, a tale of vengeance, and possibly a warning about trying too hard to attract romantic attention. It is 50 chapters long, the story is complete, the period costumes from [some European period setting] are pretty, and the images of Isolde float charmingly in a halo of her daughter’s affectionate memories. I enjoyed it.

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Book: My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Cover of the book Book "My Sister, The Serial Killer" by Oyinkan Braithwaite

My Sister, The Serial Killer
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
published by Penguin Random House
2019

The first time Ayoola calls her doting older sister, Kerede, to say that she’s in a bad situation and Kerede finds her covered in blood, it is stressful. The second time Ayoola insists another man had scared her tiny self, and that this man is dead, Kerede helps her unquestioningly.

But the third time?

No one could possibly think ill of angelic, beautiful Ayoola. No one would even believe Kerede if she told them – surely they would say she is mean due to jealousy, because she is so plain-looking! So Kerede pours her heart out to a comatose man at the hospital where she works.

But now Kerede wants someone who isn’t comatose to believe her, because Ayoola is going out of her way to attract the man Kerede cares about most.

This is a lively tale of family dynamics, trying to survive the patriarchy, loyalty, workplace crushes, the societal currency of being attractive, and the many uses of bleach. I was completely engrossed!

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Book: Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics by Kenya Hara

Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics
by Kenya Hara
published by Lars Müller Publishers
2019

This collection of Kenya Hara’s essays provide examples of Japanese design principles and customs, and suggests that Japan’s (and other local cultures’) values can shape unique products and experiences in ways that differentiate themselves in global marketplaces.

My copy of Hara’s book is filled with little book darts marking ideas I especially like. His optimism that design itself can inspire better decision-making and life choices is appealing. I find the idea that our lives are so crowded with objects that we can’t see and appreciate them individually feels fair. (I feel that the near-minimalist ideal this implies has been superficially transformed here into a different sort of materialism, seen in the vast spaces spotlighting curated “conversation pieces” within the enormous homes of the rich.) Hara’s planning and execution of exhibitions is interesting to read about, and his suggestion that novel demographic changes likely have design solutions is intriguing. His examples of rural support with mobile infrastructure is a lovely example of very democratic, well-designed approach.

Hara has numerous timely insights, such as on the decluttering fad: the problem isn’t just with the individual who has accumulated useless things. “It is not jettisoning the object that is mottenai (shameful waste), but rather the series of efforts conceived and executed with the goal of manufacturing a useless object destined for disposal.” YES YES YES!

I am tempted to delicately reword comments about historic Japanese sensibilities being “diluted” by external influences, due to my sensitivities toward current American xenophobic euphemisms. External influences can be dire, (I write here in the language of people who enslaved many of my ancestors, so I have feelings on this topic), but external influences CAN also bring ideas that can be transformed by the culture that consumes and reworks them. Japan has produced great innovations, including innovations on technologies that originated elsewhere. I fully acknowledge that industrialization (which I don’t conceptualize as a cultural product) specifically has proven both beneficial in raising basic living standards AND highly problematic in environmental impacts.

This is a thoughtful collection. I enjoyed the clarity of the language used, and the mix of theoretical discussions with specific examples of how these theories have been communicated for international exhibit audiences.

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Book: System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells

System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries)
by Martha Wells
published by Tor
2023

This is the 7th or so book in the Murderbot Diaries, so if you haven’t read these, you should go start at the beginning, as this volume rightly jumps into the action immediately without introducing the characters, including Murderbot itself.

Our favorite, broadcast-drama-obsessed, autonomous human+synthetic Security Unit is back in another round of saving humans from bad situations on planets with sketchy alien contamination!

Murderbot has even more on its mind than usual, because of a recent incident that is undermining its confidence. Confident or not, there are murderous agriculture-bots, scary ruins, evil human-enslaving corporations, and the constant threat of alien contamination that can’t wait for Murderbot to even pretend to get comfortable. Which Murderbot would not convincingly pretend anyway, despite its practice routines about imitating full humans.

I continue to appreciate the alien contamination threat that lurks in the background. The idea that ancient civilizations left behind tools to perpetuate their societies, only to have them accidentally infect later civilizations whose individuals AND machines go on to build crazy stuff under their influence… It intrigues me. There is so much potential for trouble there!

I also like Wells’ vision of nearly constant communication channels, so that information/situations/data can be shared so efficiently. I mean, I hate it in my current life, because all of those channels are filled with people who want something at work, but I love it in the wandering through abandoned ruins on unfamiliar planets practicality way. Good communication tools could support actually good communication – it could happen!

The humor, the debates about which kinds of hatches are scariest, the swearing / sarcasm / name-calling – it all gives the relationships between the characters a warmth that shows Murderbot is building meaningful relationships, especially with other machine intelligences.

This is another fun read from Wells, and a satisfying adventure.

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Book: The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue, edited by Emily Hall and Jennifer Liese

The Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue
edited by Emily Hall and Jennifer Liese
published by The Museum of Modern Art, NY (MoMA)
2020

Art exhibitions are a special sort of book, and I was excited to obtain this one after having missed the exhibit at MoMA (because: COVID).

The curator’s essay notes that architecture has its movements and manifestos, and that Speculative Critical Design, which could include Oxman and her lab’s practice, “has featured earnest but inconsequential exercises and clichéd storytelling,” which could honestly be a summary of nearly every architectural movement/manifesto (I could stop the sentence here) that hasn’t delivered a robust body of work. Oxman’s written philosophical content can provide insights, but appears intended to produce a shell of theory for the practical purposes of funding an experimental practice. You can gloss over it, admire the design of the catalog itself (modeled in tribute to Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog), and then look at the interesting experiments and models that Oxman and her teams have produced.

Oxman produces attractive art objects that show off the potential of experimental, available natural materials. To utilize these materials, different fabrication methods involving both showy robots and insects are attractively documented, so that the processes behind the forming of materials is clear.

There is a tiny caption in an image “the shellfish industry produces more than 1 million tons of chitin-based waste per year,” and suddenly the context of the many forms and pieces involving chitin is clear. We have abundant supplies of materials that are the byproduct of other industries, which could offer opportunities to escape our petroleum and plastic-based problems.

The emphases on responsible material use, experimental manufacturing, and artistically documented processes interest and please me. Displays of models and experiments charm me (in a way similar to Studio Olafur Eliasson’s geometric model shop), though these models often have forms suggesting industrious insects made them, or perhaps volcanic springs formed them over time – and I mean that as a compliment. There are a few pieces that aren’t as tightly conceptualized to appeal to me (the death masks, for example), but the results are attractive, and they aren’t here to please me alone, so I won’t complain.

This is an attractive, well-designed catalog that shows off intelligent and attractive materials engineering experiments. I appreciate Oxman’s innovative work and overall practice, which is very STEAMY (in the putting the Art back into STEM way).

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Unfinished Reading

I have several books in storage that I started reading before the move to my temporary apartment, and will likely need to start over when I get to unpack them. I have a long reading list of newer and older things that are waiting for my attention.

But what else am I reading, aside from daily news at WaPo and the UK Guardian, plus some posts on Mastodon (which I visit weekly-ish, only to fall into various research rabbit holes)?

The book I am most likely to stay up late reading: System Collapse (the Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells. I love Murderbot!

II have finished a few manga I haven’t written about yet. (Next weekend, maybe?)

Reading in progress, in no particular order:

  • Claymore (manga on viz.com) by Norihiro, a very dark dystopian fantasy with swordfighting women super-soldiers fighting monsters. I’m in chapter 51-ish, and can read through the end, as the story is complete a couple hundred chapters from now.
  • Designing Japan: A Future Built on Aesthetics (non-fiction physical book) by Kenya Hara. 1/3 of the way through.
  • I Became a Sitter for the Obsessive Villains (manga at tappytoon.com) by Seongyeong oh, Yeoram, & i singna: a classic Tappytoon woke-up-in-a-book story, ongoing serial publication.
  • I Became the Villainess in a Disastrous Novel (manga at tappytoon.com) by Hagyeoon, Geoguri, & Yoonrim (heroine wakes up in a book with a bad ending and tries to leave town), ongoing serial publication.
  • There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (fiction physical book) by Kikuko Tsumura. A few chapters in, I’ll need to start over when I’m in the mood for reading about someone watching surveillance video!
  • To My Husband’s Mistress (manga at tappytoon.com) by Lachic, Dancingbrain, Nessa (abused young wife’s revenge plot with a hot, rich, arrogant male accomplice), ongoing serial publication, not many chapters available.

I have started and stopped several manga that are not my cup of tea. While very few aren’t drawn consistently well (rare for published work!), there are some that start well but eventually all the girls are showering for no reason that advances the plot; they are nothing but fight scenes; they are about a video game, and a bit too much like playing one in which you respawn and have to replay the same levels; or they start strongly as a revenge tale, but somehow wind up having entire chapters that are discussions about… royal politics and agriculture??!? I won’t write about those. There are more fun things to write about!

I have abandoned a few audiobooks, but subscribe to support a local bookstore, so I’ll be back on that horse soon. I have several digital books that I will read if ever my eyes aren’t so tired from staring at screens (ahem).

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Books (Manga): Updates to Ongoing Manga I’ve Recommended

I’ve written about several manga still being serialized, and want to provide an update on how far along they are now.

Ghost Reaper Girl by Akissa Saiké (at viz.com) went on a hiatus from May 2022 until returning October 2023. I hope this fun artist is back in full health! I likely wrote when there were twenty-something chapters: now, the latest Chapter is 37. Chloe Love is winning battles and scaring her demonic enemies, which is funny when you realize she is fighting Cthulhu mythos-y sorts of characters.

Kaiju No. 8 by Naoya Matsumoto (at viz.com) had 54 chapters when I last wrote about it, and now has 97! The situation has… escalated into some very organized kaiju wars, and the defense forces may not be ready for monsters who can THINK. Many chapters are a few minutes in a single battle in the greater war – there is a whole lot of fighting going on, and each character is pushing themselves to succeed for their own reasons.

Spy x Family by Tatsuyo Endo (at viz.com) was at volume 58 when I wrote about it. At the moment (in late 2023) there are 91 chapters published at Viz.com, and we’ve seen each member of the family at their most skilled at what they do, plus workplace crushes, actual hostage situations, and inappropriate brotherly love.

I’m still reading each of these, and look forward to additional issues.

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Book: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
audiobook published by HarperAudio
2021

This audiobook, read by the author, gets off to a rough start: people in bad situations are making bad decisions, and the wrongness of it all started to dissuade me from sticking with it… but the story turns!

After Tookie’s bad decisions lead to a long prison sentence, books help her survive incarceration, and lead her to seek a job at an indigenous bookstore in Minneapolis.

Her passion for books makes her an effective bookseller, and her love for a former tribal policeman gives her a warm home life. However, the survival of the bookshop – and everyone she cares about in and outside of it – is in doubt when the COVID pandemic hits.

An eventful year unfolds. Tookie meets her unexpected grandchild-in-law, a white customer dies and haunts the store (!) creating cultural difficulties in her discussions with her husband about ghosts and fear the customer was killed by something she read (!), she experiences the routine annoyance of white people badgering her and her colleagues with their we-were-the-good-guys family mythologies about indigenous people, and George Floyd is murdered nearby. The protests, and the solidarity from the Indigenous experience with police, made this year-in-the-life tale feel completely current.

Erdrich, who is Chippewa herself, spins a heartfelt story of a difficult year of an indigenous person with a criminal record trying to hold her life together. Tookie has had a gritty upbringing and has developed unusual expertise in saying the wrong thing, but her actions are always infused with caring, good intentions, and books.

Erdrich’s love of books comes through very clearly in the writing, and this is one of those fiction books that comes with its own recommended reading list! (I am pretending that I will someday get to the books on the list!). It also includes friendly-but-serious bickering between characters about wild rice preferences.

This book is an unconventional narrative that portrays one imperfect woman’s experiences of recent global and US events, the ongoing challenges of being a previously incarcerated person, the aggravations of midwestern racism, and getting along with in-laws, plus abundant and heartfelt book-love. The book’s title will shift in meaning as you read it.

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