FOL is one of Fumi Yoshinaga's non-BL series (well, unless you count all the people who think that teacher is half of a gay couple) -- I've probably mentioned it before. It's a quiet little high-school slice of life piece, largely focused on a handful of kids who are members of this school's manga club; the plots generally aren't terribly dramatic, they involve things like the gang trying to throw a Christmas party and getting tripped up over putting off the prep to the last minute, or putting on the class play, or going out shopping. Not at all my usual sort of thing, but Yoshinaga-sensei just has a ridiculous track record in taking tropes that normally don't work for me and making them utterly irresistible. I think part of why I like it so much is how sweet-natured it all is -- there's some relatively heavy stuff going on (one kid is a cancer survivor who's missed a year of school because of his treatment, his sister is a hikikomori shut-in, another boy is teased by his classmates for being chubby), but it's all handled with a very light touch, and things generally all wind up working out OK in the end. The closest we get to any sort of heavy angst is the boyish teacher, who at the start of the series is having an affair with a colleague; she knows it's wrong (he's married and a father) and bad for her, but is having trouble working up enough spine and self-esteem to break it off for good. (And even that subplot, which normally would rub me the wrong way, works here because she's angsting over the "this is wrong and I should stop it" angle, rather than the "this is Tru Wuv and he needs to leave his wife for me!" side; plus her lover comes across as a charming, manipulative bastard with no conscience whatsoever, all of which makes it easier to have a little sympathy for her.)
shaenon has a good intro to it here (http://shaenon.livejournal.com/48099.html) -- I'd pretty much agree with everything she writes about it. It's sweet and funny and amusingly nerdy, and enjoyable even to folks like me who don't normally like "happy high school days" stories.
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FOL is one of Fumi Yoshinaga's non-BL series (well, unless you count all the people who think that teacher is half of a gay couple) -- I've probably mentioned it before. It's a quiet little high-school slice of life piece, largely focused on a handful of kids who are members of this school's manga club; the plots generally aren't terribly dramatic, they involve things like the gang trying to throw a Christmas party and getting tripped up over putting off the prep to the last minute, or putting on the class play, or going out shopping. Not at all my usual sort of thing, but Yoshinaga-sensei just has a ridiculous track record in taking tropes that normally don't work for me and making them utterly irresistible. I think part of why I like it so much is how sweet-natured it all is -- there's some relatively heavy stuff going on (one kid is a cancer survivor who's missed a year of school because of his treatment, his sister is a hikikomori shut-in, another boy is teased by his classmates for being chubby), but it's all handled with a very light touch, and things generally all wind up working out OK in the end. The closest we get to any sort of heavy angst is the boyish teacher, who at the start of the series is having an affair with a colleague; she knows it's wrong (he's married and a father) and bad for her, but is having trouble working up enough spine and self-esteem to break it off for good. (And even that subplot, which normally would rub me the wrong way, works here because she's angsting over the "this is wrong and I should stop it" angle, rather than the "this is Tru Wuv and he needs to leave his wife for me!" side; plus her lover comes across as a charming, manipulative bastard with no conscience whatsoever, all of which makes it easier to have a little sympathy for her.)