Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Remember me?


Okay, so it's been forever since I've posted anything- after all the posting in December I'm definitely slacking off so far this month. I have a review coming up soon but here's the thing. I'm trying as much as possible to stick to reviewing current things, and my stream of new books is slower than it was in the fall so likewise my current-books reviews are going to be fewer. So should I start reviewing things I'm reading that aren't necessarily hot off the presses? I also don't to review a lot of books with which I think you may already be familiar. Let me know.

I've been reading plenty, but mostly manga- I read volume one of Ai Yazawa's Nana and plan to read the rest of the series, and I started volume one of Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, which has its merits but has a deeply flawed and somewhat unlikeable heroine and I'm having a hard time connecting to it. I hear it gets better in later volumes but we'll see if I stick around that long. I have a whole list of manga series I'd like to try out and over the next few weeks I'm sure I'll be sampling many of them.

Volume 1 of Nana introduced two characters, both named Nana- Nana Komatsu, struggling to put her life together after a bad breakup, and Nana Osaki, who's got it all together but worried that it's falling apart. Both women move to Tokyo at the end of volume 1 and later volumes find them meeting and becoming best friends. This series appeals to me because the heroines are both likeable and interesting and the series is going to focus on their friendship as well as their relationships with men. Shigeta, the heroine of Happy Mania, is so far coming across as kind of desperate and pathetic, unable to enjoy her life without a man at her side or feel good about herself unless she's surrounded by admirers, and women like that don't appeal to me in fiction any more than they do in real life.

I've been struggling with War and Peace, or, if I'm being honest, I'm ignoring it. I think I made it too much work by doing the whole blogging thing alongside reading it. I joined the Yahoo discussion group and then promptly starting ignoring that as well, since I missed the first deadline and in any case there were plenty of people who couldn't abide by the guidelines and refrain from discussing spoilers before they were supposed to. Maybe I'll go back to it soon, maybe I won't. We'll see. Reading should always be fun first. And right now I'm having fun reading and learning about manga, so, so be it.

2 comments:

Juliette said...

Hi Marie
Just to let you know that I have been 'watching' your War and Peace journey. Sorry to hear you are going to ignore it for the time being. Enjoy your reading meanwhile, I'm sure I will keep lurking, in the best possible sense!

Marie Cloutier said...

:-) thanks!