There it is, Plain as Daylight

Crazy, crazy, crazy day. I wanted to link one thing, though, and that is my review of est em’s Red Blinds the Foolish that was posted at Manga Recon today. Several months ago, I reviewed est em’s earlier work, Seduce Me After the Show, here in my blog, and went on and on about how far superior I thought it was to most yaoi manga. And while not all the stories in Red Blinds the Foolish live up to the strength of that volume as a whole, the title story is, in my opinion, her strongest yet.

Even if you think you’d never be interested in reading a volume of yaoi manga, please give this review the opportunity to try to convince you why you might read this one.

One more thing, I’ve started here a page indexing all my reviews over at Manga Recon. Now that I’m posting news items and press releases there as well, I think it’s harder to pick out the reviews from my author page over there. So there it is! Later!

We’re snowed in again (sigh) but I was prepared at least, and brought work home with me yesterday. After a long morning of work, I thought I’d take a break. Probably I should have worked on the review I have due this week, but instead, I finally picked up volume 5 of Yotsuba&!, which I’d been holding off on since it’s the last one until forever (or something like that).

I swear, there is nothing that can make a person happier than a volume of Yotsuba&! There is truly nothing more delightful in this world.

And so I present a List of Awesomeness in Yotusba&! Volume 5: Continue Reading »

Oh Monday. How I wish you were Friday. I have one review in today’s Manga Minis at Manga Recon, for volumes 2 & 3 of Go!Comi’s Ultimate Venus. It is a silly, silly series that I enjoyed quite a bit more than expected. This initially led to a rambling post musing on the futility of assigning grades in reviews, but it sort of pushed itself into a corner so I’ve given it up for now. Instead, here are a few random links to things I’ve enjoyed recently:

Continue Reading »

I’m mostly recovered from illness, though I still want to sleep too much. My review wrestling is over, though, at least for the moment! That review I was having so much trouble with has gone up, for Vertical’s The Blade of the Courtesans in today’s Otaku Bookshelf column and Manga Recon.

The Blade of the Courtesans is a Japanese historical novel set in at the beginning of the Edo period by author Keiichiro Ryu. The book was nominated for a Naoki Award in Japan, but I found it incredibly difficult to review mainly because, to be perfectly honest, I really disliked it. You can find out why by reading the review, but… yeah. I try really hard to write balanced, objective reviews for Manga Recon, much more so than I do here where I figure it’s my place to talk about how things affect me personally. This time, though, it was really hard. Not that I had to scrape to find good things about the book to discuss. It does have good points. But the less good points were really difficult for me to get around, particularly those concerning the roles of women in the story.

Now that I’ve finished the review, I’ll be interested to look around online and see what other people thought. I really respect Vertical and what they put out there, so it actually quite pained me to grade this as I did. I wonder if other people would agree with my assessment, or if I’m just too picky about the wrong things. I guess I’ll find out!