#my sister is reading faust in school this was her comment

[gideon2]

Goethe is the og fanfic author

like, he just straight up wrote rpf about that one girl he had a crush on and then killed his self-insert oc and now we teach it in schools as a masterpiece of literature

and then he also wrote Faust which ALSO is fanfic and now widely considered a masterpiece (in germany)

[madamecolette]

Bookish Questions

The witty creature that graces this site with her presence under the name of @cafeleningrad tagged me in this. Thank you! (PS: how do you like A Tale of Love and Darkness? I loved it!)

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?  I’m afraid I have no idea. It could be a small, illustrated book by Beatrix Potter. It could be something by Agatha Christie. It could be a collection of tales, such as “Irish Ghosts”, “German Ghosts” and similar. A lot of ghosts, yes.

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?  My current read is Le Rouge et le Noir. I’m quickly developing this odd mixture of boredom and pronounced dislike for Julien Sorel. 

My last read is the cycle of Claudine by Colette and it has been a joy to read. 

My next read is Dune by Frank Herbert. @cafeleningrad is extremely responsible for this so if I develop an obession, you all know whose fault it is.

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated?  I am going to skip all the YA literary production that’s so popular, because this is like shooting apples in a barrel and mention instead “Be my knife”, David Grossman. “Be my insane, extremely unbelievable, absurd obsession with no basis” would be a more fitting title.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t? This is funny, because I can copy/paste Lewis’ answer here. “Doktor Faust” by Goethe and I have some unfinished business.

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?” I don’t think anyone plans this.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end? I don’t read it first, but I admit that often sometimes I end up reading it before.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside? When I’m in love with a book, I try to make it last as long as I can, and I read everything after the novel is finished: introductions and postscripts by critics (that I mostly don’t read before to avoid spoilers), acknowledgements, everything.

8. Which book character would you switch places with? No book character. If I’m in a book, I am the funny narrator. I would love to swicth places with the narrator of a story and make comments about it while narrating it.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)? When I was twelve, there was this locker in the classroom, filled with mostly boring, old books. The kind of books that a long time ago was considered for children and that couldn’t be more far from children’s interests. If the aim was to get them near to reading, that locker was the prime example of the opposite. My subconscious has now protected myself and removed any memory of the books, but I still remember a moldy, yellowish volume with a white bunny pictured on the cover and a depressingly basic title like “The bunny’s adventures” or something equally soporific.  The locker must have contained no more than 50 books. We had the nerve, and the imaginative effort, of calling it “the library”. Absorbed in this collective fiction that that small locker could be considered a library, once every three months, we held elections in order to elect two librarians. Taken by sudden inspiration, my best friend (a boy gloriously resembling Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory) and I announced our candidacy and won. My first and last political direct commitment. We kept a handwritten registry of all the books, which we were very proud of. At the end of this high mandate, our teacher gave us a book per each as a gift. Weirdly enough, they didn’t come from the library. Mine was a collection of Wilde’s works, that a publisher from some decades ago (the book was quite old) had oddly decided to call The Quadrilateral. It was a lovely gift and a great reading. It would always remind me of those sunny, carefree mornings, when we played being librarians with the same seriousness as if we had been chosen to run the free world.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.  The story up above works for this question too.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?  Choosing the right book for the right person is one of life’s pleasures. Trying to think of the one that most fits their taste, imagining their reaction when reading... The whole process is wonderful. So of course, yes, I’ve done it and I will keep doing it.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?  A comic book of The Peanuts, probably. It’s one of those books that I’ve carried around with me for a long time, in case I had to wait on queue at the post office, the dentist’s and such.

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later? ALL THE NOVELS ABOUT SICILY AND/OR FROM SICILIAN AUTHORS THEY MADE US READ (or were supposed to, because I must have read a 15% of the total, enough to fake a passable knowledge of the events). I’m sorry, but I can’t read 300 pages of a book set during a train ride of an average man from Rome to Sicily where he just has an infinite inner monologue about how poor Sicily is compared to Rome. Or one about an old camera operator who had to endlessly turn this crank handle for a job and proceeded to talk, for three volumes and 900 pages, about how his job was mechanical. 14. What is the  strangest item you’ve ever found in a book? rand new?  A pressed butterfly, in my great-grandmother’s Latin Grammar book. 

15. Used or brand new? I’m good with both, if the used one is in a good shape. What I love about used ones, though, are the very personal dedication one might find there. A sympton, a very small sign of someone holding them before in their hands, and a secret, very small window to someone else’s existence.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses? He’s an amazing narrator. Just, I’m mostly not interested in his stories. I loved The Body and Low Men in Yellow Coats, though.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book? I agree with Lewis, Stardust was better as a movie than as a book. 

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid? I can’t think of something very specific right now. The rule is of course that movies are worse than the books and so it is for the majority of them, some really misunderstand the book in its inner soul, but I can’t think of something this immediately catastrophic. Maybe Beowulf :)

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question? There should be a name for this syndrome, if it’s a syndrome: I quickly, invariably get infected by the character’s food choices/tastes. Testament of Youth made me cook and eat omelettes and coffee at midnight. I have had dreams about Harry Potter’s treacle tart for years. A thriller was responsible for my attempt at cooking a borsch.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?  Latin and Greek teacher from high school, my sister, and two friends whose taste and intellectual vivacity I am sure of (one of whom tagged me in this). This was a delight. I’m tagging @khaleesionmars, @robymassiart, @elldafire. Feel free to ignore if you won’t want to do it!

[recentanimenews]

The Manga Revue, 2/19/18

One of my resolutions for 2018 — besides eating more kale, of course — was to update The Manga Critic on a more frequent, predictable schedule. To that end, I’ll be instituting a new feature on Mondays that I’m calling The Manga Revue. This column will include one or two short reviews of recent manga, as well as links to noteworthy reviews around the web. My goals are twofold: to review new and ongoing series, and highlight great writing about manga. In addition to The Manga Revue, I’ll be doing a short Wednesday link post that will highlight breaking news stories — sales figures, licensing announcements, awards — as well as industry job opportunities, interesting essays about anime and manga, and interviews with artists, editors, and translators. Look for in-depth features and reviews on Fridays.

Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 Story and Art by Yuki Shiwasu Adaptation by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane VIZ Media, 200 pp. Rated T, for Teens

The opening pages of Takane & Hana offer a uniquely Japanese twist on the meet cute: the couple in question are set up by a marriage broker who thinks she’s introducing a twenty-three year old beauty to a twenty-six-year-old bachelor. The bride-to-be, however, is a sixteen-year-old high school student who’s posing as her older sister — don’t ask — while the potential groom is an impossibly handsome jerk who’s angry that his family is pressuring him to settle down. Insults fly, followed by apologies, flowers, and a few chaste dates.

I’m of two minds about Takane & Hana. My fifteen-year-old self loves it, as Hana is smart and sassy, the kind of girl who says devastatingly true things and still manages to stay in other people’s good graces. My forty-five-year-old self, however, feels uncomfortable with the ten-year age gap between its lead characters. While Yuki Shiwasu cheerfully acknowledges the troubling power dynamic between Takane and Hana, she wants to eat her cake and have it, too: Hana’s incisive comments are supposed to level the playing field with the older, more experienced Takane, making it OK for the two to flirt, date, and kiss. At the end of the day, however, the economic and educational gulf between Hana and Takane still seems vast, making Takane seem like a predatory creep for preferring the company of a mature sixteen-year-old over the company of a woman his age.

I know, I know: I’m a humorless killjoy. But in a moment when we’re having serious conversations about power and consent, I’m having difficulty getting caught up in Takane and Hana’s romantic shenanigans, however much Hana sounds like a teenaged Rosalind Russell, or how wonderfully elastic Takane and Hana’s faces may be. Takane & Hana is unquestionably someone’s guilty pleasure — just not mine.

Must-Read Reviews

The peerless Shaenon Garrity demonstrates that she’s still the sharpest, funniest manga critic on the interwebs with her brief review of Gabriel Dropout, a manga about an angel who discovers the joys of eating instant ramen and playing video games. Over at The Manga Test Drive, Megan R. jumps in the WABAC machine for a fond look at Legal Drug, “the slashiest thing that CLAMP has ever written,” while Martin de la Iglesia, host of The 650-Cent Plague, argues that volume 13 of Yotsuba&! and volumes 24 and 25 of Kimi ni Todoke were three of 2016’s best manga.

New and Noteworthy Manga

Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment) Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Kate O’Neil, The Fandom Post) Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore) Devilman Grimoire, Vol. 1 (Eric Cline, AiPT!) Elegant Yokai Apartment Life, Vol. 1 (Eric Cline, AiPT!)* Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards) Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin) Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Nick Smith, Icv2) Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment) Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Chris Meharg, Anime Science) Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Valerie Complex, Black Girl Nerds) Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Mitch Jay, Digital Rice) Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Tony Sin, Geeks & Gamers) Hunter x Hunter, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews) Hybrid x Heart, Vol. 1 (Brittany Vincent, Otaku USA) I Am a Hero, Vol. 1 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reviews) Iceland (D.W., The Comics Journal) Infini-T Force 01, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews) Ma Ma Ma: Magical Director Mako-chan’s Magical Guidance (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network) Oh! My Sweet Alien (Keith Hendricks, NerdSpan) Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Eternal Edition, Vol. 1 (Brittany Vincent, Otaku USA) Queen’s Quality, Vol. 1 (Che Gilson, Otaku USA) RWBY (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards) RWBY (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin) The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Vol. 1 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore) A Strange and Mystifying Story (Che Gilson, Otaku USA) Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network) Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading) Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Aaron, Manga Energy) Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Anna N., The Manga Report) Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Che Gilson, Otaku USA) Unmagical Girl, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network) Val x Love, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment) Yokai Girls, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)

Ongoing Series

Alice & Zoroku, Vol. 3 (Aaron, Manga Energy) Arakawa Under the Bridge, Vol. 2 (Evan Bourgault, Boston Bastard Brigade) Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 3 (Helen, The OASG) Erased, Vol. 3 (Helen, The OASG) Food Wars!! Shokugeki no Soma, Vol. 20 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards) Frau Faust, Vol. 3 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore) JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 3: Stardust Crusaders, Vols. 4-5 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network) Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages (Lindsay Schubert, BentoByte) Love & Lies, Vol. 4 (Aaron, Manga Energy) My Hero Academia, Vol. 3 (Eric Cline, AiPT!) My Hero Academia, Vol. 11 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reads) Nisekoi: False Love, Vol. 24 (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin) orange: future (Demelza, Anime UK News) orange: future (Manjiorin, The OASG) The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment) PTSD Radio, Vol. 2 (David Brooke, AiPT!)* PTSD Radio, Vol. 3 (David Brooke, AiPT!)* Requiem of the Rose King, Vol. 7 (Kate O’Neil, The Fandom Post) Say I Love You, Vol. 18 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading) Waiting for Spring, Vol. 4 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore)

From the Vault

Black Jack, Vol. 2 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews) Hot Gimmick (Megan R., The Manga Rest Drive) I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!! (Megan R., The Manga Test Drive) Papillon, Vol. 1 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reads)

* Denotes a digital-only or digital-first release

By: Katherine Dacey