It’s nice to find reading material that feels specifically designed for your pleasure. I almost always enjoy Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, but Witches Abroad seemed like Pratchett sat down and wondered, “Now how can I make this more to David’s tastes?” Of all of Pratchett’s character sets, I love the Lancre witches best, and the meta-dissection of the maiden-mother-crone triad in Witches Abroad is a real treat. The book is a triptych of various fantasy landscapes, and it’s consistently hilarious. (I’m still giggling over a throw-away jab at The Hobbit.) Pratchett is quite a juggler, balancing pointed genre parody, cultural commentary, and meta-examination of storytelling tropes, while still giving readers a wonderfully strong narrative filled with interesting and varied characters. It’s fun, satisfying stuff (and the footnotes help).
The travelogue elements also weakened my resistance to a new release, The Clumsiest People in Europe. It’s a collection of horribly xenophobic travel writing from a Victorian author of children’s books, Favell Lee Mortimer, edited by Todd Pruzan. (This might have been another case of NPR forcing me to buy a book if I hadn’t read last week’s review in The New York Times first.)
I also made a bit of a dent in the manga stack, checking out the second volume of Doubt!! and the first of Tuxedo Gin (the latter thanks to Rose and Steven).
Doubt!! still isn’t clicking very well for me. After reading the second volume, I think it’s because the protagonist, Ai, just doesn’t have the force of personality required to carry a manga or to pull off the kind of personal reinvention that drives the story. There’s more guilty-pleasure fun in the second volume than the first, but I still don’t think Kaneyoshi Izumi is taking enough advantage of the premise’s darkly comic possibilities. I will admit that Ai’s friend, the profoundly tan Mina, is a treat. A strangely forward-thinking mantrap, she steals every scene she’s in with her blunt observations and twisted emotional logic. Ai’s at her most interesting in scenes with Mina, too, much better than when she’s stuck with her bland shôjo prince suitors.
As for Tuxedo Gin, I’m surprised by how trite or potentially unpleasant manga scenarios can be substantially improved by the participation of an anthropomorphized penguin. Dim gang boys, drippy star-crossed lovers, creepy girl-in-peril scenarios… all of these become markedly more entertaining thanks to the presence of a penguin in a necktie. I know these elements aren’t actually any better than they would be normally, but there’s just something about penguins, I guess. File this one under “Pleasures, Guilty.” (Incidentally, I think this notion is portable. Many, many comics that I find offensive or stupid would get gentler treatment if they would feature characters reincarnated as or randomly transformed into penguins. Sue Dibny, Wolverine, Batman, Northstar… the possibilities are almost limitless.)
Last but certainly not least was Fullmetal Alchemist. After careful consideration, I’ve decided it’s pretty awesome. But I go into that at painful length in this week’s Flipped, which should show up sometime today.