The Manga Curmudgeon

Spending too much on comics, then talking too much about them

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Faking it

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The question of how comics fans can get their wives and girlfriends to share their interest has come up again recently, but what about those poor targets of hobby evangelism? Why doesn’t anyone offer any strategic advice to guide their responses to this unsolicited knock at the door from believers bearing pamphlets? What should they do when the men in their lives give them a Fables trade for their three-month anniversary?

Perhaps the answer will come from France. A Parisian literature professor has developed a methodology that might help: just pretend you’re better-read than you really are.

The New York Times talks with Pierre Bayard (free registration required) about his not-yet-available-in-English primer, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read?

“Domestic life is another potentially hazardous zone. People often want their spouses and partners to share their love of a particular book. And when this happens, Mr. Bayard said, they can both inhabit a ‘secret universe.’ But if only one has read the book, silent empathy may offer the best way out.”

From the wintry north

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I’m usually at a loss to figure out how Amazon’s recommendation system works, because it seems like many of my purchases indicate I would enjoy books I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. An entertaining “Six Degrees of Separation” game could probably be developed to try and figure out how my purchase of, say, the ninth volume of Bleach leads Amazon to believe that I’d like the latest crappy thriller from James Patterson.

The latest suggestion to wind up in my in-box actually sounds pretty promising. It was for Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts, published by the University of Minnesota Press. There are only so many times you can re-read Schodt and Gravett (though I haven’t found the number yet), and more academic (or even quasi-academic) writing on the subject is always welcome.

Between this and the exhibition catalog for the Shojo Manga! Girl Power! show that Dirk Deppey reviewed the other day, it looks like I’ve got a couple of interesting books about manga to add to the pile of actual manga waiting to be read.

"K" is for…

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Sometimes a review just grabs me:

“Meet Kino, a free-thinking, pint-size world traveler who cruises the globe on a talking motorcycle, fighting injustice wherever she finds it. She’s a cultural relativist, kinda, but she definitely knows the difference between right and wrong. She’s like Tank Girl meets Kant, only more butch than both. She’s my new personal hero.”

It’s of Kino no Tabi by Keiichi Sigsawa, one of the light novels being published by Tokyopop, and it sounds really intriguing. The question is, am I ready to throw even more money at manga publishers for prose? I’m not inclined to pick up novelizations of manga series, but stuff like this certainly catches my eye. Has anyone read it?

And oh, happy day! A listing for King of Thorn by Iwahara Yuji has shown up on Tokyopop’s web site. Sure, it doesn’t come out until June, but if it’s half as good as Chikyu Misaki (CMX), then I’ll avoid the rush and commence anticipatory hovering now.

Notability

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My end-of-year list obsession continues, though The New York Times isn’t that much help. Only one graphic novel made its “100 Notable Books of the Year” list, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, though if you’re going to limit yourself to one, that’s a pretty darn good choice.

Another entry from the list’s non-fiction category, The United States of Arugula, is delightful reading so far. The evolution of celebrity food culture is interesting to read about for its own sake, but the behind-the-scenes bitchery is great fun. (Don’t worry… Julia rose above.)

Curling up

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I was looking through USA Today’s top 150 best sellers for any graphic novels, and I found myself distracted by prose.

At #47 is Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck, another look at murder near the turn of the century. Larson also wrote the generally excellent The Devil in the White City; the paperback version is at #140. While Larson does have a tendency to try and go further into the heads of the people he writes about than non-fiction usually permits, I found White City really fascinating for its look at the intersection of crime, culture, and history. (There’s a great graphic novel version of roughly the same material from Rick Geary in his Treasury of Victorian Murder series from NBM.)

At #73 is I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris. You might know Sedaris as inspiration for some of the more disturbing essays from brother David, or you might have seen her as middle-aged prostitute high school student Jerri Blank on Comedy Central’s Strangers With Candy. She is also famous for her cupcakes, which surely will play a role in this combination of useful party-planning advice and twisted comedy.

At… well… okay, it isn’t on the list, but I was at Barnes & Noble the other day, buying some manhwa, when I noticed that there’s a new collection of short stories from Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The book is called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. Most of the stories in the collection have been published elsewhere, but they’ll all be new to me.

The world is flat

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I’ve decided that the thing I really love about Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels is that my favorite is always the one I’ve read most recently. At the moment, that’s The Fifth Elephant. Because really, any author who makes the time to fold a pitch-perfect Chekov satire into the narrative without derailing any of the story’s momentum is my kind of author.

I’m not generally a fan of anachronisms. I’ve seen enough conceptualized productions of Shakespeare to actually develop a tic in response to some of it, whether it’s the women of Comedy of Errors striking Charlie’s Angels poses or Richard III humming “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as he wanders through scenographic rubble. It’s not that it can’t be done well; it’s just that it generally isn’t.

But the anachronisms in Pratchett’s books are generally delightful. He throws them in for no other apparent reason than that they might be a hoot; they almost always are. And since Pratchett is building his multifaceted world from scratch, I really can’t call them anachronisms, can I?

And the more of the books I read, the more impressed I am with the craft of them. At this point, Discworld is one of the most well-populated fantasy series on the shelves, and the huge cast of characters shows remarkable internal consistency. Pratchett knows how to shuffle them to keep things fresh, mixing and matching different temperaments and backgrounds to create new comic possibilities.

Sometimes I find the plots more admirable in their construction than interesting in their specifics, but there’s so much great throw-away stuff that it’s rarely a problem. With Discworld, I’ve completely abandoned my anal tendency to read a book series in order. There’s continuity, and it’s surprisingly stringent, but it’s just a nice part of the backdrop rather than a reader prerequisite. Like the good old days when a footnote would make me want to look up another Marvel or DC comic, a reference to a bit of cultural evolution makes me more interested in the books I haven’t read yet as opposed to puzzled by the one I’m reading. It’s a neat trick.

Food stuff

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Much as I love The Food Network, they do seem to have a mission to gather anecdotal evidence proving the argument that familiarity breeds contempt.

Paula Deen has gone from being a bracingly unhealthy guilty pleasure to showing up everywhere, inviting viewers to her wedding and first trip to Europe, and she has a new live-audience show. Rachael Ray has reached such a saturation point that she actually had to move to other networks to find room for more programming.

Even my beloved Alton Brown (so informative and entertaining on Good Eats and Iron Chef America) managed to reach the too-much point with Feasting on Asphalt, where he dished out more culinary reverse snobbery in a half an hour than I would have thought possible. (Dude, it’s a corndog.)

So I’m delighted to see them add Nigella Lawson to their line-up, because I can’t imagine ever getting tired of her. Some of her BBC programs aired on either O or We a few years ago, and it was love at first sight. She tends to be marketed for her sexiness, but the real draw is her intelligence, her caustic humor, and her uncanny ability to evocatively describe the sensory experience of eating really good food.

Her cookbooks are a joy to read, because her broadcast voice translates brilliantly to prose, and she always provides wonderful personal context for her recipes. She also wrote a column for The New York Times for a while that was equally engaging. And I would cook virtually anything she prepares; she’s convincingly passionate about cooking without being fussy or gushy.

Speaking of fussy and gushy, I’m in a recorded-book shame spiral, because I’m going through a phase where I can’t stop myself from picking up mysteries by Diane Mott Davidson from the library. (I’ll clearly listen to things I’d never actually read.) Her books star caterer Goldy Schulz, who can’t seem to lay out a tray of pastries for a book club without tripping over a dead body or three.

The idea of combining food writing with sleuthing intrigues me, because I love both. But I do wish there was someone better than Davidson doing it. The culinary bits err towards the rhapsodic, and the mysteries are hampered by Goldy’s singular failings as an investigator.

The pattern seems to be that prim, moralistic Goldy never makes any progress in an case, though she asks a million questions. Ultimately, the culprit either mistakenly believes Goldy is about to expose their crimes, or they reach the conclusion that she’s too stupid to live. Thus, they end up revealing their own guilt by unsuccessfully trying to kill Goldy, and it’s hard to fault them.

But there seems to be plenty of good food writing out there at the moment, and I really need to catch up with it. I still haven’t picked up a copy of Jane and Michael Stern’s Two for the Road, where they take roughly the same approach as Brown did with Feasting. The difference (I hope) is that they won’t make it seem like quite so much of a holy pilgrimage. (The Sterns are my favorite elements of The Splendid Table, which is a great listen all the way around.)

The Times has also made me want a copy of The United States of Arugula, a new bit of culinary anthropology from David Kamp. (This might partly be due to the fact that the review is written by A.O. Scott.) Food culture is one of my favorite subjects for non-fiction (or fiction, for that matter), and this looks like an excellent entry in that category.