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ladybusiness2019-10-18 08:37 am
spindizzy) wrote in ladybusiness2019-10-18 08:37 am
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Eight Book Minimum: *capslock resumes* [18/10/19]
Hello everyone! It's been approximately a million years since I posted an Eight Book Minimum, and so much has happened since then! Travel, Worldcon, mental health shenanigans, new jobs, turning thirty... It's been a lot! But there have been many books, so fingers crossed I'm going to have time to get back to yelling about them on the regular!
1. Midday Moon Volume 1 by Yayohi Monzen [Top]
Midday Moon is about Amano, an ordinary human who started working in an inn for spirits after his best friend was drowned by monsters. It's a job he does excellently until Tsukiyomi, the king of the deathless, appears, bearing a remarkable resemblance to his old friend.
So yeah, it's a kinda sweet BL manga about memory and sacrifice, because the characters all think that the other person has sacrificed too much for them without thinking through the effects that those sacrifices (or
rejecting those sacrifices) has on them. The everlasting world – the domain that Tsukiyomi rules – causes memory loss, which means that for all that Tsukiyomi has more power than Amano does (he is the king after all), it feels unbalanced in the opposite direction. Tsukiyomi is shedding memories all through the book, to the point that he's forgotten things from the start of the book by the end of it, which means Amano knows more about Tsukiyomi's life and sacrifices than he does, and never tells him. Not only does Tsukiyomi not know that his attempt to save his best friend was all for nought, he thinks that Amano is the one giving up his life! The end result is weird and sad, which throws me when I look back at the sections that are supposed to be funny, or the fractious relationship that they have to start with.
I... I think it was good, and I'm somewhat interested in more stuff by the creator! Their art style is good and I like the silhouettes of their figures! I just maybe need to find out if all of their stuff is this bittersweet first.
2. ADD-Friendly Ways To Organise your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen G. Nadeau [Top]
So you may or may not know this, but I got diagnosed with ADHD at the start of June! (This as a good thing, because it feels amazing to have an explanation for *gestures vaguely at mental health issues*) As part of my
figuring out how to work with/around it, I've been trying to do some reading, and it turns out that someone has written an entire book of advice for people with my exact problems!
First off, I feel very seen; the book describes problems and struggles that I have had, and it has some really good suggestions for how to work around them! The chapters on time-keeping and how to
organise your space were really helpful for me, and I think I did get a lot out of it. (Apparently "Constantly adding commitments without ever removing any" is an ADHD thing? And you don't magically get more time to do things just because they're on your to-do list? My entire life is a lie.) On the flip side, the advice feels like it's aimed at a more middle-class American audience, and the chapter on technology feels extremely Old Man Yells At The Cloud – its suggestions for how deal with the internet being distracting is to turn it off and hang out with a "real person"! So it doesn't really take into account that hi, most of us are using the internet to talk to real people! Or work! Or any number of things that mean "just turn it off" isn't an option for us! But there was enough good ideas in it that I'd still recommend it, just with caveats.
... But seriously, if you have any recommended reading for ADHD books, please let me know! I've had recommendations for Driven
To Distraction, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder, and Your Life Can Be Better, but I'll gladly take more! Especially if they're neither heteronormative nor focused on white collar workers.
3. Robots Vs Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe [Top]
I’ve started reviewing Robots vs Fairies for SFF Reviews! The round-up post is here, and I’ll link to all the reviews
in Adventures Elsewhere as they come out! The main things to take away is that it's an anthology where the gimmick is "are robots or fairies more awesome?" and it's somehow impressively bleak despite that premise? It's a good anthology, and the stories that I liked I liked a lot! But if you're looking for something hopeful, this is maybe not the collection for you.
4. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O'Neill [Top]
The Tea Dragon Festival is a prequel to Katie O'Neill's The Tea Dragon Society, which I read and loved last year. It focuses on a small village as it gets ready for their Tea Dragon Festival – especially Rinn, a wanna-be cook, who stumbles across a real, actual dragon sleeping in the forest while they're out looking for ingredients!
The Tea Dragon Festival is like the previous book in all the best ways. The art is cute and colourful, the cast is diverse, the story is gentle and peaceful, and similar themes run through it. The themes of memory and relationships are immensely important; from the desire to share memories of something that matters to you, to missing out on making memories, to making new ones; memory is incredibly important to the characters here. As for relationships, the way that the village bands together to support each other – even newcomers, like their dragon friend, or by the entire village learning sign language – is very sweet, and it was lovely to see how much these bonds mattered to the characters.
As for the storytelling, I found the narrative more cohesive, as the focus was on one specific storyline rather than split across four. I liked the way that the use of American Sign Language was introduced and depicted in the story, and I enjoyed seeing a pair of familiar adventurers show up! If you liked The Tea Dragon Society, I would definitely pick this up, even if you just want to revel in the adorable tea dragons some more!
[This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
5. Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu [Top]
Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu centres on Nova Huang, a queer teenage witch working in her grandmothers' magic bookshop, and her childhood friend(/crush) Tam Lang, a non-binary werewolf who's been driven out of their home by their abusive step-father, as they try to stop a horse demon that's roaming the woods!
It's very sweet in a lot of ways; Nova's family is supportive and charming, and I enjoyed the way that they welcomed Tam in with open arms! Especially how even though Nova's parents have died, they're still important to the family (and still have strong opinions on what she should be doing with her life). Nova and Tam falling back into their friendship after so long apart was lovely, and I was cheering for their romantic relationship pretty much from the beginning.
However, there is underlying seriousness beneath that sweetness; even without getting into the horse demon problem, Nova is an orphan struggling with the death of her parents and the expectation that she should be leaving home, and Tam has been driven out of their home by their abusive step-father. I felt that Mooncakes handled both aspects really well! It meant that while there was darkness and betrayal in the story, there was also hope, and I needed that. The ending doesn't resolve all of the characters' issues, but it does show that Nova and Tam are growing, and might be able to resolve them in the future!
I've been a fan of Wendy Xu's art for a while; here it's really colourful and characterful, and while some of the bigger scenes felt a little jumbled to me, I did adore the art and how it handled the magic! Plus, Nova's outfits are amazing, and I really hope that they have real-world counterparts.
The tl;dr is that if you're in the mood for some urban fantasy with teenagers saving the day and falling in love, this is a really solid choice!
[Caution warnings: abusive step-parent, homeless teen, dead parents] [This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
6. The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn Volume 1 by Waki Yamato [Top]
I wasn't really impressed with The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn. It's an adaptation of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, and as an introduction to that it was pretty interesting! But the actual manga itself wasn't particularly my thing despite it eighties charm. I've got a longer review coming up in November, so brace yourselves for that grumbling!
[This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
7. I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation by Natalie Nourigat [Top]
I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation is the autobiography of a cartoonist who – spoilers! – moves from Portland to LA to work in animation as a storyboard artist. I picked it up because I was expecting it to be more of an autobiography; it had the same casual tone and cartoony art I expect in other autobiographical comics. But it is mainly a how-to guide for how Natalie Nourigat started working in animation, and what the reader might expect if they want to do the same thing. It's quite cool to see more of the guts of an industry that I know very little about! And it talks frankly about pay expectations, unions, and living in Chicago, which I could see being quite useful.
A very cool touch though was that Natalie Nourigat specifically got other people working in animation to contribute to this book, to reflect the experiences of POC and non-American workers! It gave the book a bit more depth and showed different ways that people got into the industry, so might be helpful for people who are looking for other ways in. The comic mostly deal with people's experiences working in American studios and how they compare to studios in France and New Zealand (for example), rather than specifically talking about the industry in other countries.
All in all, it wasn't the book I thought I was getting, but it was entertaining in its own right.
8. Bee and Puppycat Volume 1 by Natasha Allegri, Garrett Jackson, Madeleine Flores, Frank Gibson, Becky Dreistadt, Anissa Espinosa, Tait Howard, Ian McGinty, T. Zysk, Mad Rupert, Coleman Engle, Aimee Fleck, Pranas Naujokaitis [Top]
I picked this up on a whim, because it sounded like a cute riff on the magical girl genre, where the protagonist is a cheerful magical temp worker who travels around dealing with Hijinks! It's kinda cute, although the humour nudged a bit closer to my embarrassment squick than I would like, but what I didn't realise before I read it was that this comic is a supplement to a webseries that I... Don't think I'd ever heard of before. So, it seems cute and funny, but I am jumping in further along in the story than I thought I was, which explains why I was confused.
Reading goal: 98/200 (8 new this post) Prose: 33/100 (24/33 short stories)
Nonfiction: 5/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 36/100 (1 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 39/75 (4 new this post; Midday Moon, Robots Vs Fairies, The Tea Dragon Festival, Mooncakes)
- Midday Moon Volume 1 by Yayohi Monzen [Jump]
- ADD-Friendly Ways To Organise your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen G. Nadeau [Jump]
- Robots Vs Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe [Jump]
- The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O'Neill [Jump]
- Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu [Jump]
- The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn Volume 1 by Waki Yamato [Jump]
- I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation by Natalie Nourigat [Jump]
- Bee and Puppycat Volume 1 by Natasha Allegri, Garrett Jackson, Madeleine Flores, Frank Gibson, Becky Dreistadt, Anissa Espinosa, Tait Howard, Ian McGinty, T. Zysk, Mad Rupert, Coleman Engle, Aimee Fleck, Pranas Naujokaitis [Jump]
1. Midday Moon Volume 1 by Yayohi Monzen [Top]
Midday Moon is about Amano, an ordinary human who started working in an inn for spirits after his best friend was drowned by monsters. It's a job he does excellently until Tsukiyomi, the king of the deathless, appears, bearing a remarkable resemblance to his old friend.
So yeah, it's a kinda sweet BL manga about memory and sacrifice, because the characters all think that the other person has sacrificed too much for them without thinking through the effects that those sacrifices (or
rejecting those sacrifices) has on them. The everlasting world – the domain that Tsukiyomi rules – causes memory loss, which means that for all that Tsukiyomi has more power than Amano does (he is the king after all), it feels unbalanced in the opposite direction. Tsukiyomi is shedding memories all through the book, to the point that he's forgotten things from the start of the book by the end of it, which means Amano knows more about Tsukiyomi's life and sacrifices than he does, and never tells him. Not only does Tsukiyomi not know that his attempt to save his best friend was all for nought, he thinks that Amano is the one giving up his life! The end result is weird and sad, which throws me when I look back at the sections that are supposed to be funny, or the fractious relationship that they have to start with.
I... I think it was good, and I'm somewhat interested in more stuff by the creator! Their art style is good and I like the silhouettes of their figures! I just maybe need to find out if all of their stuff is this bittersweet first.
2. ADD-Friendly Ways To Organise your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen G. Nadeau [Top]
So you may or may not know this, but I got diagnosed with ADHD at the start of June! (This as a good thing, because it feels amazing to have an explanation for *gestures vaguely at mental health issues*) As part of my
figuring out how to work with/around it, I've been trying to do some reading, and it turns out that someone has written an entire book of advice for people with my exact problems!
First off, I feel very seen; the book describes problems and struggles that I have had, and it has some really good suggestions for how to work around them! The chapters on time-keeping and how to
organise your space were really helpful for me, and I think I did get a lot out of it. (Apparently "Constantly adding commitments without ever removing any" is an ADHD thing? And you don't magically get more time to do things just because they're on your to-do list? My entire life is a lie.) On the flip side, the advice feels like it's aimed at a more middle-class American audience, and the chapter on technology feels extremely Old Man Yells At The Cloud – its suggestions for how deal with the internet being distracting is to turn it off and hang out with a "real person"! So it doesn't really take into account that hi, most of us are using the internet to talk to real people! Or work! Or any number of things that mean "just turn it off" isn't an option for us! But there was enough good ideas in it that I'd still recommend it, just with caveats.
... But seriously, if you have any recommended reading for ADHD books, please let me know! I've had recommendations for Driven
To Distraction, Women With Attention Deficit Disorder, and Your Life Can Be Better, but I'll gladly take more! Especially if they're neither heteronormative nor focused on white collar workers.
3. Robots Vs Fairies edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe [Top]
I’ve started reviewing Robots vs Fairies for SFF Reviews! The round-up post is here, and I’ll link to all the reviews
in Adventures Elsewhere as they come out! The main things to take away is that it's an anthology where the gimmick is "are robots or fairies more awesome?" and it's somehow impressively bleak despite that premise? It's a good anthology, and the stories that I liked I liked a lot! But if you're looking for something hopeful, this is maybe not the collection for you.
4. The Tea Dragon Festival by Katie O'Neill [Top]
The Tea Dragon Festival is a prequel to Katie O'Neill's The Tea Dragon Society, which I read and loved last year. It focuses on a small village as it gets ready for their Tea Dragon Festival – especially Rinn, a wanna-be cook, who stumbles across a real, actual dragon sleeping in the forest while they're out looking for ingredients!
The Tea Dragon Festival is like the previous book in all the best ways. The art is cute and colourful, the cast is diverse, the story is gentle and peaceful, and similar themes run through it. The themes of memory and relationships are immensely important; from the desire to share memories of something that matters to you, to missing out on making memories, to making new ones; memory is incredibly important to the characters here. As for relationships, the way that the village bands together to support each other – even newcomers, like their dragon friend, or by the entire village learning sign language – is very sweet, and it was lovely to see how much these bonds mattered to the characters.
As for the storytelling, I found the narrative more cohesive, as the focus was on one specific storyline rather than split across four. I liked the way that the use of American Sign Language was introduced and depicted in the story, and I enjoyed seeing a pair of familiar adventurers show up! If you liked The Tea Dragon Society, I would definitely pick this up, even if you just want to revel in the adorable tea dragons some more!
[This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
5. Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu [Top]
Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu centres on Nova Huang, a queer teenage witch working in her grandmothers' magic bookshop, and her childhood friend(/crush) Tam Lang, a non-binary werewolf who's been driven out of their home by their abusive step-father, as they try to stop a horse demon that's roaming the woods!
It's very sweet in a lot of ways; Nova's family is supportive and charming, and I enjoyed the way that they welcomed Tam in with open arms! Especially how even though Nova's parents have died, they're still important to the family (and still have strong opinions on what she should be doing with her life). Nova and Tam falling back into their friendship after so long apart was lovely, and I was cheering for their romantic relationship pretty much from the beginning.
However, there is underlying seriousness beneath that sweetness; even without getting into the horse demon problem, Nova is an orphan struggling with the death of her parents and the expectation that she should be leaving home, and Tam has been driven out of their home by their abusive step-father. I felt that Mooncakes handled both aspects really well! It meant that while there was darkness and betrayal in the story, there was also hope, and I needed that. The ending doesn't resolve all of the characters' issues, but it does show that Nova and Tam are growing, and might be able to resolve them in the future!
I've been a fan of Wendy Xu's art for a while; here it's really colourful and characterful, and while some of the bigger scenes felt a little jumbled to me, I did adore the art and how it handled the magic! Plus, Nova's outfits are amazing, and I really hope that they have real-world counterparts.
The tl;dr is that if you're in the mood for some urban fantasy with teenagers saving the day and falling in love, this is a really solid choice!
[Caution warnings: abusive step-parent, homeless teen, dead parents] [This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
6. The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn Volume 1 by Waki Yamato [Top]
I wasn't really impressed with The Tale of Genji: Dreams at Dawn. It's an adaptation of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, and as an introduction to that it was pretty interesting! But the actual manga itself wasn't particularly my thing despite it eighties charm. I've got a longer review coming up in November, so brace yourselves for that grumbling!
[This review is based off an ARC from Netgalley.]
7. I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation by Natalie Nourigat [Top]
I Moved to Los Angeles to Work in Animation is the autobiography of a cartoonist who – spoilers! – moves from Portland to LA to work in animation as a storyboard artist. I picked it up because I was expecting it to be more of an autobiography; it had the same casual tone and cartoony art I expect in other autobiographical comics. But it is mainly a how-to guide for how Natalie Nourigat started working in animation, and what the reader might expect if they want to do the same thing. It's quite cool to see more of the guts of an industry that I know very little about! And it talks frankly about pay expectations, unions, and living in Chicago, which I could see being quite useful.
A very cool touch though was that Natalie Nourigat specifically got other people working in animation to contribute to this book, to reflect the experiences of POC and non-American workers! It gave the book a bit more depth and showed different ways that people got into the industry, so might be helpful for people who are looking for other ways in. The comic mostly deal with people's experiences working in American studios and how they compare to studios in France and New Zealand (for example), rather than specifically talking about the industry in other countries.
All in all, it wasn't the book I thought I was getting, but it was entertaining in its own right.
8. Bee and Puppycat Volume 1 by Natasha Allegri, Garrett Jackson, Madeleine Flores, Frank Gibson, Becky Dreistadt, Anissa Espinosa, Tait Howard, Ian McGinty, T. Zysk, Mad Rupert, Coleman Engle, Aimee Fleck, Pranas Naujokaitis [Top]
I picked this up on a whim, because it sounded like a cute riff on the magical girl genre, where the protagonist is a cheerful magical temp worker who travels around dealing with Hijinks! It's kinda cute, although the humour nudged a bit closer to my embarrassment squick than I would like, but what I didn't realise before I read it was that this comic is a supplement to a webseries that I... Don't think I'd ever heard of before. So, it seems cute and funny, but I am jumping in further along in the story than I thought I was, which explains why I was confused.
Currently Reading
- Winter Wishes — I thought this was going to be an anthology of short stories, but it turns out that it's entirely novellas! The first one hasn't thrilled me so far (I am baffled by any story that requires the protagonists to be married within four days of meeting each other where that isn't the plot) but maybe the rest will be more my speed!
- Bury the Lede by Gaby Dunn — I've unfortunately committed the classic blunder, which is mistaking a thriller for a mystery! I'm intrigued by what's going on, and the protagonist is kinda entertaining in her fixed conception of what a reporter should be like, but thrillers make me twitchy so I'm having to read it slowly.
- Iron & Velvet by Alexis Hall — Kate Kane rerelease! Kate Kane rerelease! She's a lesbian disaster PI trying to navigate werewolf/vampire/mage politics and not fall in love with a vampire prince, and I love her. I read the original release, and this take on noir tropes and urban fantasy tropes brings me so much joy.
- Driven to Distraction by Edward M. Halowell and John J. Ratey — I had to tap out of this for a little bit, because I started three or four mental health books in one day and decided that I was not willing to deal with this much heteronormativity and middle-classism. It's an interesting book! I just need some recovery time before I get back to it.
Reading Goals
Reading goal: 98/200 (8 new this post) Prose: 33/100 (24/33 short stories)
Nonfiction: 5/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 36/100 (1 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 39/75 (4 new this post; Midday Moon, Robots Vs Fairies, The Tea Dragon Festival, Mooncakes)