Of Swords and Parasols

Like a few other people I know, I’ve been slowly ready Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? (by slow, I mean about a chapter a week) and finding it to be good but difficult reading. Most of what I’ve read so far has been Hillary alternating between wondering if she’s responsible for every problem short of actually giving birth to Trump (an exaggeration, I admit) and talk about Thanksgiving and gushing over grandbabies.

But I’ve always found it interesting that she likes Madam Secretary and The Good Wife. Both shows largely exist because of her, something I’m sure she’s aware of but-as far as I know-has never talked about, but they can also both be seen as criticizing her marriage. The Good Wife even built some of its early buzz as being inspired by wondering what Hillary Clinton and others whose husbands have had highly publicized cheating scandals are thinking when they say stay with their husbands.

I don’t have anything deep or interesting to say about that, it’s just something I think about any time I see the fact that she likes the shows brought up.

ETA:  As I was reminded in comments...I wonder if she knew about/what she thought about Political Animals, which didn't even bother to mask anything in making it clearly be about her.

Bloodline is a Star Wars novel about Leia set around halfway between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Like a lot of people, I was looking forward to it for the promise of a Leia book, and one that dealt with her as Darth Vader's biological daughter, but I saw several people express disappointment with it. I both agree and really really liked it.

See, the core plot of the book is a middleaged senator who was a hero of the rebellion that created the current government becoming jaded and tired of the government she helped create, which has been divided into to polarizing factions, as the senate starts to be overrun with Bright Young Things who are old enough to remember the war, but not really old enough to understand what it was like to live it, or what the corrupt previous government really was, and so idealized views of it are cropping up. She decides to retire and undertake one final, important mission so that she can go out with a bang and have some more intergalactic adventures with her husband and also spend more time with her brother and kid. She finds the perfect Final Mission, then gets stuck babysitting a young senator from the opposing political faction for it. Then there are a bunch of shenanigans and adventures that alternately involve blasters and political speeches as the two senator work out their differences and are doing Grand Things together until SECRETS and BETRAYAL rear their ugly heads.

The book does a far better job of explaining WTF is going on with the First Order and The Resistance than The Force Awakens did, and bridges the gap between ROTJ and TFA pretty well (though part of me is always going to think that TFA would have been better if it were a few more generations down the road, not one generation after ROTJ). All the political shenanigans and the plotline of the antagonistic senators becoming allies were good and I enjoyed Leia's various sidekicks a lot. As a Leia book though, it just...falls flat somehow. I don't really know how to pin it down completely. Leia doesn't have enough anger or sass, and is too willing to try to color inside the lines for my tastes at times, though I did appreciate a lot that her opinion of Vader's literal last second redemption was pretty much "Well, Luke, I'm glad you have that to make you happy" instead of forgiving him or, you know, naming her kid after the guy who tortured her, made her watch her planet blow up, took an entire city hostage to catch her, froze and sold her boyfriend, and spent a few years chasing her across the galaxy. (My EU exposure was limited, but learning that in the "Young Jedi Knights" series way back when elicited a huge "NNNnnnnoooooo!" from me.)

So, it actually is a good book and one well worth reading, it's just probably not quite the Leia book ost of us wanted.

I only went 2 weeks between installments of this this time instead of months. Go me?

What are you currently reading

The Debs of Bletchley Park by Michael Smith. Nonfiction about the women who worked in Bletchley Park during WWII. This one doesn't have a lot yet (I'm about 1/3 through it) about politics and codebreaking, and is instead focusing on how and why various women were recruited, and how they dealt with the everyday life end of things. One story involved a woman being told she was being stationed somewhere else, and when she got there, she sat in a room while the officers discussed whether she should be blindfolded or just transported in a covered car. She ended up being left a the Bletchley Park gates with no knowledge of where she was and no pass. Another story involved two women getting in a catfight over lunch, each shouting that their mutual lover had told her more secrets than he had the other. They didn't stay very long after that. One of the interesting things is that there were so many people that recruitment went from "why hello there, well educated, literate friend of an official who wants to help with the war effort, you come with great recommendations!" to "Hi, you're smart, can keep your mouth shut, and need a job. Sign this document here."

Anytime I read nonfiction about Bletchley Park, or read or watch fiction in which the OSA plays a part (which most certainly does not include TV shows in which the protagonist blithely violates the OSA and reveals BP secrets to the agents of a foreign government in a show of poor codebreaking in what is apparently meant to be a Moment of Cool*) i'm amazed not only by the scope of the OSA, but also by the fact that it actually worked. You had people working together for years, sharing boarding house rooms, spending their free time together, etc, and they NEVER said a single word about their work. Not only that, but this app;ied to family members, and people who married other people who worked at BP or remained lifelong friends after, and they just...never said a word about it for decades.

Getting back on topic, the books isn't lightweight, but is less dense than a lot of WWII nonfiction. It does, though, assume the reader has a general knowledge of Bletchley Park and the OSA. It's a good read, so far, and would probably be liked by most interested in the subject.


What did you recently finish reading?
K: Stray Dog by GoRa and Gohands. A prequel to the first season of the K Project about Kuroh. It's mostly Kuroh having various adventures (including a Shounen Cooking Battle) while looking for the new 7th King. The first few chapters are pretty "LOLs that Kuroh..." but it turns more serious towards the end as it catches up with the anime. Based on the content and art, I thought this was shoujo, but it's apparently categorized as seinen.

Star Wars: Skywalker Strikes by Jason Aaron & John Cassaday. TPB collecting the first 6 issues of the current Star Wars series from Marvel, which takes place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. The first few issues feature Luke, Han Leia and Chewie sabotaging one of the Empire's plants when Vader shows up and makes things go terribly wrong (Lots of "Anakin! Stop trying to kill your kids!" from over here, while also approving of Leia ordering that her father be shot down.) In the last couple issues in the collection, Luke goes off to do some angsty soul searching stuff while Han and Leia go off on a separate mission.

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I enjoyed this more than I expected to. I remember that when I was still reading a lot of superhero comics, I recognized that John Cassaday's art was good and warranted the praise he got, but just couldn't get into it myself, but I liked it a lot here. i do have some issues with Leia's characterization,though. At one point, Leia makes a decision that, while understandable, we know will go very very wrong. Thatin and of itself was fine because of what it was, but it's framed as if she should have just listened to Han in a way that made me uncomfortable. In another scene, it comes across as if she tends to badger Luke into going on missions, which I don't think fits at all.

Kamisama Kiss vol 14-19 by Julietta Suzuki.

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A Dance With Danger by Jeannie Lin. One of Jeannie Lin's Tang Dynasty series. In a previous book that I haven't read, the male lead attempted to assassinate a warlord and is now on the run. He goes to a magistrate friend of his and ends up in a compromising situation with the magistrate's daughter, and they have to get married. At this point, I was very confused because I had really liked Lin's first few books (haven't read the last few before this one yet) and this was reading like a Regency Romance with the numbers filed off, and the cover blurb had given me the same impression. Then the magistrate tries to have him assassinated because having a wanted criminal in the family doesn't actually appeal to him a lot. At this point, I girded my loins, my experience many many 80s and 90s romance novels telling me to expect vengeful abduction and accusations.

Instead, Our Hero goes "welp, I actually was starting to really like her and think we might have cute kids, but she actually is way better off without me, and I do need to warn some people about the angry warlord hunting me down..." and takes off. Our Heroine, for her part, figures out what happened and decides that she is TOTALLY NOT OK with her father trying to assassinate her husband and runs away from home, finagling her way aboard our Hero's ship.

His pirate captain ex-girlfriend finds all this incredibly entertaining.

A lot of the plot is a carryover from the previous book, with a bit of setting up for future books, but I wasn't lost with the plot despite the heavy reliance on the earlier book. Despite a less than great start, I ended up liking it a lot.


What do you think you'll read next?

More manga and Star Wars comics, library books.

*Not, I'm not over that one episode of Agent Carter yet, WHY DO YOU ASK?

For the last few months, this series has taken up most of my reading time.

Set in late 19th century New York, Sarah Brandt was born to to a Dutch "old money" family, rebelled against her parents and married a poor doctor, and is now a widow who works as a midwife. While checking on one of her patients, she gets caught up in a murder investigation and meets Frank Malloy, a less-corrupt-than-average police officer, woh really doesn't appreciate interference from anyone. Through the course of her interfering, Sarah speaks to her mother for the first time in years, deciding that solving a murder is worth rebuilding bridges.

Sarah and Malloy's relationship starts rock bottom and progresses to the inevitable romance slowly, with a number of books stuck in "I actually really, really dislike to always getting involved, but somehow, people find you less scary than me..." and "You are mean and annoying but I strangely like solving crimes. Also, it gives me an excuse to hangout with my mother." A couple nice highlights are that while Malloy redeems himself because of Sarah, it's not actually at her prompting, and is 100% without any expectation of acknowledgement or the idea that she should reward him for achieving decent person-ness, and that her response to "I loved you from the day we met" was "I didn't like you then or for along time. you were MEAN."

And then I get depressed that the state of romantic tropes is so rock bottom that men not expecting romantic/sexual rewards for not being awful people and women not loving guys for being jerks is worth noting.

But, I mean, in context, it's done very well and the depressing state of romantic tropes is separate from the actual series.

The series starts in 1895 and the first 10 or so books deal with Roosevelt's turn as police commissioner (Roosevelt and Sarah knowing each other growing up is also a device used to get her involved in some cases) and his reforms in the police department. The reforms provide a fair bit of dramatic impetus in early books, until history dictates that Roosevelt moves along. There's a lot of triggering stuff in the books, primarily child abuse, rape (to the best of my recollection, this is only in the cases. I don't remember any of the major female characters having been threatened with rape.), and pedophilia, but it isn't treated as easy drama or "that's just the way things were," but as abuses of power. A lot of the case are inspired by real events that Thompson found records of. Classism and institutionalizes privilege and oppression are also a major theme, with most plots focusing either on the murders of lower classes that no one official cares about, or trying to investigate murders among the classes you aren't allowed to touch. There's also a lot of racism, though in the context of racism in 1890s America, not 2015 America. We'd consider most of it to be xenophobia today. The prejudice is primarily directed towards white immigrant groups, and I think the only books to feature a non-white group the latest book, Murder on Amsterdam Avenue, which seems to indulge in a bit of "Old South" and "not all slaveowners were awful" nostalgia at first, but pretty thoroughly rejects that idea by the end, and Murder in Chinatown. I did read 16 books over a period of several months, though, and some plots have blended together in my head. And, I mean, a lot of the groups represented are groups that people tend to ignore were there and on the receiving end of prejudice at the time, but the almost-all-white 1890s New York can be a bit off putting at times.

Aside from Sarah and Malloy, the principal character include:

Mrs. Ellsworth: Sarah's very very nosy neighbor who has an omen for every little thing, is frequently very useful, and possibly has a custom made Sarah/Malloy shipper badge.

Mrs. Malloy: Frank Malloy's mother, who is considerably less personable than Mrs. Ellsworth (but I'm 99.9% certain they'll be BFF in a few more books) and very not open to the idea of Malloy finding a new wife. also prone to giving good advice.

Brian Malloy: Malloy's young son. Born with a clubbed foot and initially believed to be mentally handicapped, but soon revealed to actually be deaf. Thompson put a lot of research into beliefs about deafness and the schooling of deaf children for the time period, and it shows.

Felix Decker: Sarah's EXTREMELY estranged (at first) father who has a lot of money and influence and few problems with using them, but mostly in moral ways, at least in the current timeline. (In the backstory, he was considerably less moral about this, with catastrophic consequences.)

Elisabeth Decker: Sarah's much-less-estranged mother, who initially seems a bit too passive and obedient, but soon gets really, really, REALLY into helping out with cases. She also seems to regard the apparent passivity and obedience as a form of passive aggressive warfare that women of her class engage in.

Later on, we also have:

Catherine: Sarah's 4-year-old ward, who has a surprisingly traumatic and angsty past for a pre-schooler.

Maeve: Officially Catherine's nursemaid, actually detecting sidekick. A teenaged ex-grifter who possibly intends to become a Pinkerton agent in a few years and successfully cons and manipulates her way into being involved with various cases.

Gino Donatelli: A very young Italian police officer who hasn't been on the force long enough to become more than a tiny bit corrupt. He is VERY happy to be Malloy's sidekick, thinks Sarah hung the moon, and has an ill-disguised crush on Maeve that he has no intention of doing anything about any time soon, possibly out of fear that Malloy would very literally kill him if he did.

The books, in order, are:

Murder on Astor Place
Murder in St. Mark's Place
Murder on Gramercy Park
Murder on Washington Square
Murder on Mulberry Bend
Murder on Marble Row
Murder on Lennox Hill
Murder in Little Italy
Murder in Chinatown
Murder on Bank Street
Murder on Waverley Place
Murder on Lexington Avenue
Murder on Sister's Row
Murder on Fifth Avenue
Murder in Murray Hill
Murder on Amsterdam Avenue

A rather fluffy murder mystery set in the 30s. Several years pre-book, Amory Ames dumped her nice, stable, somewhat dull fiance, Gill, for Milo, a charming playboy who stayed reformed just long enough to get bored with marriage, leaving Amory to twiddle her fingers on his estate while he has affairs in every country he can think of.

During one of Milo's brief visits home, Gil shows up at their door and would like to know if Amory would please come to Brightwell, a coastal resort, and convince his sister to please not marry a very Milo-like playboy (which I don't think we were meant to read as rubbing an apparently terrible life choice in Amory's face, but I couldn't help reading it that way to a degree). Oh, and also, could she pretend to be his lover? For Plot Reasons. Amory agrees because it's Milo-free and she does like Gil's sister after all, and who knows, maybe fake affairs can be like fake dating and turn real in the last two scenes.

At the resort, Amory barely has time to acquaint herself with an Agatha Christie-esque collection of guests before the playboy fiance ends up dead, with Gil as the prime suspect. Them Milo shows up, apparently having decided that maybe he isn't really ok with Amory having as much extra-marital fun as he has. Possibly, someone gave him a speech about Geese and Ganders.

Between a somewhat dull murder suspect with possible Nice Guy tendencies and a more entertaining philanderer who could have STDS for all Amory or I know, I can't say I think much of Amory's romantic options, but I did have a lot of fun reading the book, and look forward to the sequel.

This was a somewhat awkward book, primarily because it's the book that marks the end of part one of the series, and also because it's the book that marks the series switching over to hardcover format. There's a character list at the beginning and a narrative prologue in the form of (IIRC) Barabas writing a journal entry to catch people up, but the book is burdened down not only by having to wrap up most of the plots that were building up to this point, but also having to explain what's going on to people who picked it up in hardcover but hadn't read the previous ones. So it's good, but awkward and/or clunky in places.

( spoilers )

For a bit of amusement, I was looking at Amazon reviews earlier and there was a reviewer very put out because she hadn't know Andrews was a husband/wife team and declared it "subterfuge" because it hadn't been spelled out in previous books. Except that it was officially declared after...what, the third book? And has been part of the author bio everywhere (including Amazon) since then. And it wasn't exactly a secret before then, it just wasn't official.

And I get not knowing if you don't go to author websites and blogs and online review sited and haven't read other reviews (because quite a
few have mentioned it over the years). I mean, it's a bit of a stretch for me, but, I mean, SUBTERFUGE. I wonder if they get put out every time they learn an author's name is a penname, and not the author's real one. (And if they realize how many authors have written under more than one name, and how many pennames are for collaborations.)

New October Daye!

( spoilers )

Hopefully I'll get back to actually doing this weekly.

What are you currently reading

Nothing. Sadly, I haven't read any more of Legend of the Condor Heroes since last time.

What did you recently finish reading?

The Real Boy by Anne Ursu. About a magician's shophand, Oscar, who lives outside of a city where no one is ever sick. Oscar (along with a healer's apprentice, Callie) has to figure out what's going on when a monster starts killing people in the woods, and the children in the city start suffering from a mysterious illness. Like Breadcrumbs, this is based on a fairy tale, though not in the way you'd initially assume. It was pretty good, though very much overshadowed by its predecessor.

Do You want to Try? Vol 1-5 by Kim Kyung Hee. Manhwa about a girl who ends up fake-dating another school's gang leader to help him get out of an arranged marriage. It's mostly comedy but part melodrama, and never quite manages to quite get the right balance between the two, but I enjoyed it, despite the need to add extra unnecessary drama in the second half by adding a pre-series sexual assault on the heroine to help drive the plot. The manhwaga has also clearly come across a few of the 500 or so versions of Hana Yori Dango, though in a way that was amusing more than anything else.

Enchanted by Alethea Kontis. YA fantasy based on a multitude of fairy tales, but mostly The Frog Prince. The heroine, Sunday, is the seventh daughter (with a few brothers mixed in, too) of a seventh son and a seventh daughter. Her mother's family already had numerous fae abductions and sisters running off to become good and bad fairy godmothers, and her father decide it was the perfect family to marry into. (No. Seriously. He actually sought out the most magic and cursed family he could find to marry into.) At the start of the story, several of Sunday's older siblings have already had their fairy tale stories and or either dead or probably miserable because of it (Except the one sister who ran off and married the pirate king. She seems pretty happy.) and the talking frog she befriends is actually a cursed prince who is partially responsible for one of her brothers being turned into a dog, and then disappearing (presumed dead) shortly after. It wants to criticize the idea of the happy fairy tale ending and general romanticism with the worldbuilding and extended family, but it also wants to be the idea of the romantic fairytale with Sunday and her romance. It's a bit over ambitious and doesn't quite come together the way it should, but I enjoyed it, especially with the focus of thoroughly messed up but devoted family dynamics, and all the sisters with complicated relationships that rather took over the second half.

Don't Touch Me Vol 1-5 by Soo Hyun-Joo. Incredibly cracktastic manhwa about a narcissistic and violent girl, Mirang, who returns to her childhood home and falls for her childhood frenemy, Won, who is incredibly dense and exceptionally pretty. Won appears to be veryvery loosely based on Gao Changgong, as they both have to go around hiding their faces behind masks lest people swoon due to exposure to their incredible beauty. Except that Won, being dense, thinks people react to his face because he's ugly. It spends a lot of time going "neener neener" to a lot of shoujo tropes, mostly in a "I gleefully trample over you as I bulldoze my way to the next plotpoint" way. It was fun, but possibly too odd for a reread.

What do you think you'll read next?

Not sure yet. There's a new "Women of the Otherworld" book by Kelley Armstrong that I have from the library, but it's a werewolf book, and those are hit and miss for me.

This is a companion novel to Code Name Verity but one that can be read completely independently of its predecessor. It's apparently getting criticism for not being as good as Code Name Verity, but the narrative devices that made that one so popular aren't something a writer should try to do twice, especially in a related book. Rose Under Fire is a very good book on its own merit, though one I have some issues with.

The main character, Rose Justice, is an American pilot working as a courier who is captured and sent to Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp. Ravensbruck is real and...well, it was a concentration camp. If you aren't familiar with what went on there, please look it up. (Trigger warnings for...everything.) It's very much a concentration camp novel, but also one about women from different walks of life bonding and helping each other. It also addresses the aftermath of concentration camps for the survivors, both in terms of PTSD and what was expected of them after, such as having to recount their experiences in trials.

It's also a concentration camp novel in which there isn't a single Jewish character, and in which the Jewish people are barely mentioned. On the one hand, I find it endlessly frustrating that so much of modern culture and fiction tends to think that (A) the Holocaust is the only thing of note to ever happen to Jews, and (B) the Jews were the only ones who were persecuted and/or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. But skipping over that altogether isn't exactly an improvement, IMO.

Then there's Rose. My criticism here is not of Rose herself (I like Rose and think she's a very good character!), but of the choice to use Rose. Ravensbruck is a real thing that happened to around 150,000 women, a high percentage of them Polish and Jewish, and only a few thousand of whom survived. To tell their story, we're given a narrator who is an educated, literate American girl who writes poetry and appears to be from a reasonably well off family. There may have been American women in Ravensbruck (I don't know) but theirs isn't the main story of Ravensbruck, and reading it, I couldn't help thinking that as bad as Rose's story was, those of the other women were far worse, and more representative of the real women in Ravensbruck.

It's a very good book and very worth reading, but should also be read with the knowledge that all the trigger warnings ever apply.

What are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 14. I think it's been about a month since 7 Seeds completely took over my kindle time, so I'm still playing catch up and trying to remember who all these secondary characters running around are.

What did you recently finish reading?

Finished Georgette Heyer's The Black Moth. Slow start but entertaining overall, though it's more a case of you can see the elements that eventually became Heyer's strengths than that it's really good on its own. I doubt I'll be reading These Old Shades, as "redeem the rapist" plots don't appeal to me. (And while it may have been a failed rape attempt in this book, not only was the intent still there, but he was obviously successful more than once in the past.) I'm curious, though, to see if we start getting some adaptations of Heyers books over the next few years, as they start entering the public domain.

Caught up with 7 Seeds, which I posted on separately.

The Last Dragon by Jane Yolen and Rebecca Guay. Graphic novel set in a medieval-lite world in which a dragon is born 200 years after the last of the dragons were supposedly chased away. When a dragon begins attacking a town, several young men are sent out to find a "hero" to fight the dragon, and instead return with a braggart more familar with spinning stories than fighting. Meanwhile, the local healer's youngest daughter comes up with plans of her own to beat the dragon. It's simple and straightforward and relies more on wit and creative thinking than flashy heroics, and is more concerned with how the dragon affects people's daily lives than with the dragon itself. Very nice little book.

Steel's Edge by Ilona Andrews. Fourth book in Andrews's "The Edge" series. I liked it more than the last 2 books in the series, but less than I do most of the Kate Daniels books. The first half is pretty much the protagonists setting out to destroy every human trafficker they can find, and it later branches out to wrap up most of the threads from previous books. I think it's supposed to be the last book in the series, but if so, I suspect it'll get revisited once or twice later down the road to focus on the teen characters as adults. My favorite part was when the heroine would invert healing magic to make her enemies sick, as I've always wondered why people with healing magic in fantasy worlds aren't able to do that more. (Sadly, the book didn't go where I wanted with that. Oh well.)

Black Bird Vol 1-3 by Sakurakoji Kanako. I read a little bit of this when it first came out, and couldn't quite remember if I disliked it or wasn't quite grabbed by it when I saw that the library had the first 10 copies, so I checked out the first 3. I feel like i need to read about 30 columes of good manga to make up for this.

The heroine, Misao, has blood that is superduper extra yummy blood that makes demons stronger. Her One True Love is a tengu named Kyo who was her childhood friend, and is now a teacher at her school. His saliva can cure wounds. Naturally, Misao is constantly bleeding. (I will pause a moment to ponder what Clamp and/or Kaori Yuki would do with this idea. Whatever it was, it'd be better than this.) The healing is frequently over Misao's protests, and often staged to look like sexual assault. This is aside from Kyo's regular sexual assaults (often at school) that are ok because they're in love and she's his destined bride. Kyo is also fond of deliberately terrifying Misao to teach her that she has to rely on his body for protection, and Misao thinking that there's no reason to refuse Kyo's sexual advances if he loves her, and that it's touching when he's cruel to her because he's trying to teach her to rely on him out of lurve. There is, I think, an average of about 1.3 rape attempts (not including anything from Kyo) per volume. All by people Kyo has warned Misao to avoid. In fact, I think every person Kyo has told Misao not to talk to (which is everyone but his servants) has tried to rape and/or murder Misao. She has to learn her lesson about never having an independent thought or decision of her own somehow, amirite?

Brain bleach required. Very glad I only grabbed a few volumes, because I probably would have felt to read the rest if I'd grabbed them.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn. This is kind of like reading Astro City in prose form. That's not a criticism. Celia West is the non-superpowered daughter of her city's (the world's?) superheroes. At 17 she became emancipated and ran away to college, and is now a forensic accountant who does her very best to avoid her parents' superhero lifestyle. Unfortunately, her parents' secret identities were exposed when she was a teenager, and she's been kidnapped so many times that it's become boring, and the prosecutor trying her father's archnemesis for tax fraud has decided that it'd be good publicity to have her hepling on the case. There are elements of a parody in there and a pretty strong critique of superhero/vigilante culture and romanticism (one that appears to have made some Amazon and Goodreads reviewers cry in agony at the book daring to resist), and the general feel is of Silver Age surperheroes giving way to more modern superhero through the eyes of someone on the outskirts. While I haven't read superhero comics in probably 5-6 years, I read enough in the 15 years before that to see a lot of the twists coming, but that didn't affect my enjoyment.

The Adventures of Sir Balin the Ill-Fated by Gerald Morris. Part of Morris's irreverent "The Knights' Tales" series of children's books (not to be confused with his YA series, "The Squire's Tales," which can also be irreverent depending on Morris's opinion of whatever tale he's adapting at the time, but is another beast entirely). If you're familiar with the tale of Balin and Balan, you're probably going "but how do you make that a children's book?" The answer is "by relentlessly mocking obsession with fate and destiny." Light fluff, but entertaining and funny, and a quick read.

Rasetsu Vol 1-9 (complete) by Shiomi Chika. I read and enjoyed the first couple volumes of this when Viz first started publishing it a few years ago, then wasn't able to continue buying it because of finances, but the library now has the volumes I didn't, so I finally read all of it. Rasetsu is about a 18-year-old psychic named Rasetsu who was cursed by a demon when she was 15, with the demon claiming that he'd claim her for his own if she didn't find her "true love" by her 20th birthday. Thankfully, while the "find your true love" element isn't completely shelved, there isn't much of a focus on it more often than not (it's there and not something she can exactly forget, but there are other things going on) and most of the focus is on Rasetsu and her coworkers fighting malevolent ghosts and demons. There's a romantic plotline and something of a triangle, but it's generally well done (I say "generally" because I wasn't fond of the third party or his behavior, but it fits the overall plotline) and I liked the actual romance more than expected. My only real beef with it is that, as usual, Shiomi tends to surround her heroine with several men, and no other major female characters. It's connected to Shiomi's other series that was released by Viz, Yurara, in that Rasetsu's love interest, Yako, was in Yurara, and both heroines are psychics, but you don't need to read Yurara to read this.

What do you think you'll read next?

I have Natsuo Kirino's The Goddess Chronicle and the latest Kate Daniels book, and since I've read a bunch of Carrie Vaughn's standalone books, I went ahead and checked out the first couple books in her urban fantasy series. I also have the ATLA tie-in books that my library has, as I recall some listies liking them. I was going to say "I should back off a bit from manga for a while before I OD," but then I was at the Library's main branch this morning after a doctor's appointment and they had just acquired a lot of manga i haven't read yet, so that might not be happening. I also still have Kelley Armstrong's Omens to read.