Overdue Bookblogging
I had two reading goals for this year: blog at least one sentence for every book, and read more nonfiction. I haven't failed either - YET. But it's only a matter of time.
*dutifully posts*
Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Where to begin. First of all, this book is on crack. Cross between Christopher Moore (improbable madcap adventures, but with less focus on character POV) and Mark Leyner (nonstop jokes between the writer and the reader, but with less focus on author POV). It's very funny and, with a million literary and cultural references, very hip. More than either of those, though, it's very American, despite being set primaily in Laos.
Plot (if you want to call it that): the book is divided into four parts. The first one deals with Tanuki, his giant balls, his fondness for sake and women...there's some beastiality, if you want to call it that. The book is lighthearted enough (and non-specific enough) that this is more curious than gross: oh, some women prefer him NOT in human form? How...interesting. Although this is asolutely the Tanuki of Japanese myth (Kitsune shows up too), something about this section feels very American New Age. Maybe it's the attempts to fit Tanuki and Kitsune into a larger theological framework as "Animal Ancestor" embodiements of primal urges. Anyway, Tanuki sets the tone for the rest of the book: it's not about being the smartest or the prettiest or the most morally outstanding, it's about having the best time. The ability to let go and enjoy yourself is a virtue.
The next three sections deal with an overlapping cast of characters: three well-read American MIAs from the Vietnamese War, the village in Laos where they rule as Drug Lords, the circus they share the village with, and the FBI and CIA agents back in America whose job it is not to let the story of three American MIAs who would rather be rich sequestered Lao heroine traders than come home as "heroes" get out.
Although they are heroine traders, they are heroine traders FOR GREAT JUSTICE, men who stick by their own aesthetic sensibilities and don't let The Man bring them down. Their aesthetic sensibility is, and this is the part where I kind of roll my eyes at this book, the sixies counter-cultural movement. I haven't read any other books by Robbins -- although I plan to! -- so I can't tell you whether that's a function of the author or the characters. Differences in sensibility aside, this is a great book. It's entertainingly written, and the characters are uniquely memorable.
I will pretend that the second epilogue doesn't exist, however. My eyes rolled out of my skull.
Mark Fainaru Wada and Lance Williams, Game of Shadows
Nonfiction. A compulsively readable book. I opened to a random page halfway through, and couldn't stop reading until I got to the end -- despite having no real interest in the topic. If you watch ESPN or other major sports news shows, you'll probably have heard of this book: it's the one that blew the cover off mid-nineties steroid abuses in Major League Baseball.
Great, great example of investigative nonfiction. Unfortunately my feeling after having read the book is the same as my feeling after being sucked into watching ESPN or other sports news shows with my brother: I don't care about this stuff, why did I just waste three hours of my life on it? Sports news doesn't matter to me. (If sports news matters to you, you should read this book -- but then, you probably already are.)
James Meek, The People's Act of Love
Gave up after one chapter. The summary was promising -- Siberian work camp escapee stumbles into small town, causes havoc -- and I was hoping this book would mix what I think of as a male genre, poitical suspense, with what I think of as a female genre, small-town romantic intrigue. Unfortunately, The People's Act of Love doesn't live up to 1) its summary 2) its hype as an "international literary sensation" 3) its title (I am such a sucker for Red titles, it's not even funny).
The problem is that the writing is limp (not as incoherant as Scooter Libby's, but uninteresting) and the chapter is about how Special main character Samrin is -- except that he isn't special, the things this book tries to convince you are fantastic and unique and portend great or maybe omninous things are absolutely ordinary. The point of the chapter is to get the reader interested in Samarin, and it just doesn't work.
Typical line:
He had a way of devoting attention absolutely to one woman, which not only pleased her during their conversation, but left her with the feeling afterwards that the time they'd spent -- no matter how brief, and usually it was brief -- was time offered to her from a precious store, time which could and should have been used by Samarin to continue some great task.
Gag me. With a spoon.
Celestine Vaite, Frangipani
Wonderful. Marvelous. Refreshingly direct. As many kind words as I had for Tom Robbins, I actually prefer prose like Vaite's -- at no point does it kick the reader out of the narrative to admire itself. It's just as idiosyncratic, but it works with the narrative. Another compulsively readable book. Here's the first paragraph: When a woman doesn't collect her man's pay she gets zero francs because her man goes to the bar with his colleagues to celebrate the end of the week and you know how that is, eh? A drink for les copains! Then he comes home with empty pockes, but he's very happy. He tells his woman stories that don't stand straight to make her laugh, but she doesn't feel like laughing at all. She's cranky and she just wants her man to shut up.
Frangipani is about the relationship between Leilani and her mother Materena Mahi, who is a "professional cleaner" and the best listener in Tahiti. And it's about Materena's other relationships, with her man, her boss, her sons, her ancestors, her culture, and her insane extended family. There are stretches in the middle that are hard to get through, because the book is loosely focused and doesn't really have a plot, but each chapter stands beautifully on its own and is a pleasure to read. The prose is riddled with French words and Tahitian colloquialisms (some of my favorites are "girlfriend" as the preferred form of address and "full stop," like in a telegram, when a subject would be better without embellishment).
It's also heartwarming. Materena and her family are poor -- they live in fibro shacks on the coast -- but it's not an uncomfortable poverty, because no matter what happens there's the whole family for support, and in Tahiti even if you have zero money you can still survive on fruit from the garden. Materena is the best Mom ever. There's a lot of Girl Power in this book; Tahiti comes off as fairly matriarchal for a society steeped in Catholicism.
Also, the parts dealing with traditional Tahitian customs -- which Materena has an ambivalent attitude towards, and Leilani generally rejects -- are funny. The author lives in Australia, but loves Tahiti; Materena has a certain fondness for even the ones she admits are ridiculous. And there are a lot of genuinely good traditions, too, which she and even Leilani recognize.
I don't know, this book just makes me feel good about everything.
Emily Ruete b. Sayyida Said, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar
Nonfiction. Although my goals are to read more nonfiction and to blog about everything I read, it's hard, because I don't really know how to discuss nonfiction. Normally with books I talk about the author's style, or the central themes, or whatever, but all of that seems sort of irrevelent with an historical work like this; as a history student, I know that the flaws actually enhance the value of the work rather than detract from it.
For instance: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Said) glosses over certain things. She describes an extravagent lifestyle in glowing terms, without considering how such a lifestyle is possible (HINT: a completely ridiculous number of slaves are involved). She is never less than completely positive when discussing her father, the Sultan, or any of the older brothers who fought amoungst themselves for the throne after he died. She says she's writing her memoirs so that her children, who grew up in Germany (Emily Ruete left Zanzibar with a German trader at sixteen) will know something about her culture; but she generalizes a lot, saying that such-and-such is "a custom of the Arabs" or "what is done in the East" when really, it's a custom of the Omani court at Zanzibar in the 1860s. (Although there are also places where she is careful to specify that something is only something her family does, and isn't typical of Arabs of Orientals in general.) She remembers certain things, like the abundance of fresh fruit, but fails to mention key details, like the fact that there were no roads in Zanzibar, so that all people and good had to be conveyed either on foot or by ship around the coastline.
I recommend this book, by the way. Whether Emily Ruete is reliable or not, she is thourough and opinionated, and she has a lot to say, both about the phyisical realities of life in Zanzibar, and about its customs, and about how those customs compare to European customs. Not a dry book at all. And 1860s Zanzibar is a fascinating place: originally an unimportant outpost of the Omani trading empire, Sayyida's father realized that actually, because it allows control of the East African Coast, Zanzibar is much more profitable than Oman, and he relocated the empire. There's an attempt at a nod toward keeping the old customs -- in the Sultan's presense, everyone must speak Arabic -- but the culture shifts in a lot of ways, leading to this weird situation where the cousins from back in Oman feel themselves to be culturally superior but at the same time are much poorer. The memoir is also interesting because Sayyida's father had seventy-five concubines and forty children (although by the time he died, this number had been reduced to thirty-six), many of whom spoke completely different languages.
And! I bought manga! There was this going-out-of-buisness sale -- not at the bookstore, at the CD store, but I felt so good about saving 75% that I went and blew all of the money I'd saved on manga I wouldn't otherwise have bought. XD
Yun Kouga, Earthian (vol 1)
My feelings are mixed. The first volume is very episodic, which is cool, but a lot of the episodes are cliched, which isn't. Yun Kouga has a very stong design sense, which is cool, but there almost no backgrounds, which isn't (this reminds me of Clover, although Earthian is not as overdesigned as Clover). What's really getting to me, though, is the sense of mounting dread. ^^; Starting from the very first chapter, and definitely by the second, you get the feeling that something is VERY VERY WRONG here. The plot is that Angels, who come from a planet called Eden, are sent down to Earth in pairs. One member marks down everything good that humans do (plusses), and the other marks down everything bad (minuses), and if the score ever reaches -10,000, the earth will be destroyed. And this has been going on for five billion years.
The whole set-up is fishy. The first thing you wonder is why the Earth hasn't been destroyed already -- with purposeful acts of genocide stacked against policeman helping little old ladies to cross the street, isn't it obvious where the advantage lies? The next and more significant thing you wonder is, what gives Angels the right to judge humanity.
There are a lot of clues that they don't have the right. Both checkers, plus and minus, are flawed. They're far from impartial. Chihaya is too willing to see good and overlook evil, and he makes a lot of mistakes; Kagetsuya claims to hate Eartians (although I have my suspicions about this) and allows his feelings for Chihaya to influence his work. The system itself is questionable because it's not clear what standard is being employed to decide "good" or "bad" -- there's no rubric or anything, so everything in the Checker's reports is a subjective value judgement. Most importantly, it isn't clear that Angel society is inherently any better than human society. It has problems, I won't go into them, but they're obvious -- and "homosexuality is evil and a sin" is one of them.
Overall, I can't really say I liked this volume. But there are some really interesting things going on, especially in the way the author is gradually introducing these themes that the characters themselves aren't aware of/don't think to question. If there was one thing I really didn't like about this volume, it was some of that nonsense with Seraphim at the end. In most of the volume you get a subtle sense that something is wrong -- it's subtle because the characers (and consequently the author) don't comment on it. Then the last section takes all that wonderful subtlety and throws it out the window.
(canis_m and team7 both put this series on the their top-BL-series-of-all-time lists. I'd never even heard of it, it's old enough to be before my time (which also means I wasn't able to download it from anywhere, ahahaha). The first volume that's in stores is the deluxe edition, 400 pages long. The way this story is unraveling, the extra pages are definitely a good thing. )
Lee Young You, Kill Me, Kiss Me (Vol 2)
The art continues to be good, in an exaggerated BRATZ fashion-doll kind of way that reminds me of OEL manga. But WHAT THE HECK, THIS IS NOT THE MANGA I WANTED TO BUY. The author says it best, in this note at the end:
Because the story is completely different from volume 1, many of you might be saying, "What a betrayal! I want more crossdressing!"
YES, WHERE IS THE CROSSDRESSING? And it's not just that: the main character from the first volume hardly appears, instead the focus shifts to a completely new set of characters. It's like reading a totally different manga.
The story in the first volume was that Tae had a crush on male model Kun, who attends the same school as her (male) cousin Jung-Woo. The two of them look suspiciously similiar, so Tae convinces Jung-Woo to trade places with her. Eventually the switch is revealed to Kun (actually a cruel guy who doesn't like women) and his friend/fellow bully Ga-woon. I like Ga-woon, but unfortunately he and Kun and Tae get, like, five seconds combined screen time in this volume. Instead the focus shifts to Jung-Woo, his troubles with gang leader Ghoon-Hahm, and the ex-girl-gang member Que-min who has a crush on him (Jung-Woo).
If all these names are confusing to you, good, BECAUSE THEY ARE CONFUSING TO ME TOO. My tolerance for five new Korean names in a single manga chapter = nonexistant. I'm having a really hard time rememebering them. I think I need to read more Korean manga. The other problem with this chapter is that it is a youth gang saga, and I like gang stories much, much less than I like crossdressing to get close to your idol stories. Also, no offense, but when confronted with Korean gangs, in particular, my first instict is... to laugh.
Ahahahaha! Maybe this is terrible of me, but I can't buy the continuous macho posturings in these things. If it was just gangs, that would be one thing, but sometimes it seems like 90% of all male characters and 30% of female characters in Korean manga are outwardly perfect students and sons/daughters, but SECRETLY, THEY ARE BAD-ASSES. When it's that common, what's the secret?
My other major problem with this volume is that it feels like I'm being tricked into liking Ghoon-Hahm, who is a PSYCHOTIC MYSOGINIST. No kidding. He says lines like "girls should stay at home and do laundry" with a straight face. In his first appearance, he beats Jung-Woo into the hospital while his horrified subordinates tell him to: "Stop, that's enough already! He's barely breathing! Jesus Christ!" But the manga wants me to like him, because he is secretly a dork (see: Ryouki from Hot Gimmick, to a lesser extent Doumyoji from Hana Yori Dango). And the awful, awful thing is that it's working. *cries* My tolerance for jerks-who-are-dorks is lower than average, because in het shoujo relationships I tend to focus on the girl more so that guys who make girls unhappy are NOT COOL. But Ghoom has Ban-chan sunglasses and is so over-the-top vicious that he actually is cool, or at least there's a sick fascination. It's driving me insane. I can't keep reading this series, it's like BASHING MY HEAD AGAINST A WALL.
Also read:
-Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (memoirs, told backwards like Momento! Grrrreat stuff, the writing is hodgepodge but briiliant. Like Sylvia Plath with a dash of screwball family comedy.)
-Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (completely bizarre and totally great, obviously the inspiration for this fic)
-Haruki Murakami, Norweigian Wood (surpringly normal! I think this fic draws from it)
-Jasper Fforde, The Eyrie Affair (I don't think I like the Thursday next series, too many clever parts that, if you stop to think about them, don't make sense)
-The Complete Letters of Arthur Rimbauld (I love his letter-writing style, he's so bratty and demanding XD)
To-read:
-Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
-David Sosnowski, Vamped
-Amitov Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
*dutifully posts*
Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Where to begin. First of all, this book is on crack. Cross between Christopher Moore (improbable madcap adventures, but with less focus on character POV) and Mark Leyner (nonstop jokes between the writer and the reader, but with less focus on author POV). It's very funny and, with a million literary and cultural references, very hip. More than either of those, though, it's very American, despite being set primaily in Laos.
Plot (if you want to call it that): the book is divided into four parts. The first one deals with Tanuki, his giant balls, his fondness for sake and women...there's some beastiality, if you want to call it that. The book is lighthearted enough (and non-specific enough) that this is more curious than gross: oh, some women prefer him NOT in human form? How...interesting. Although this is asolutely the Tanuki of Japanese myth (Kitsune shows up too), something about this section feels very American New Age. Maybe it's the attempts to fit Tanuki and Kitsune into a larger theological framework as "Animal Ancestor" embodiements of primal urges. Anyway, Tanuki sets the tone for the rest of the book: it's not about being the smartest or the prettiest or the most morally outstanding, it's about having the best time. The ability to let go and enjoy yourself is a virtue.
The next three sections deal with an overlapping cast of characters: three well-read American MIAs from the Vietnamese War, the village in Laos where they rule as Drug Lords, the circus they share the village with, and the FBI and CIA agents back in America whose job it is not to let the story of three American MIAs who would rather be rich sequestered Lao heroine traders than come home as "heroes" get out.
Although they are heroine traders, they are heroine traders FOR GREAT JUSTICE, men who stick by their own aesthetic sensibilities and don't let The Man bring them down. Their aesthetic sensibility is, and this is the part where I kind of roll my eyes at this book, the sixies counter-cultural movement. I haven't read any other books by Robbins -- although I plan to! -- so I can't tell you whether that's a function of the author or the characters. Differences in sensibility aside, this is a great book. It's entertainingly written, and the characters are uniquely memorable.
I will pretend that the second epilogue doesn't exist, however. My eyes rolled out of my skull.
Mark Fainaru Wada and Lance Williams, Game of Shadows
Nonfiction. A compulsively readable book. I opened to a random page halfway through, and couldn't stop reading until I got to the end -- despite having no real interest in the topic. If you watch ESPN or other major sports news shows, you'll probably have heard of this book: it's the one that blew the cover off mid-nineties steroid abuses in Major League Baseball.
Great, great example of investigative nonfiction. Unfortunately my feeling after having read the book is the same as my feeling after being sucked into watching ESPN or other sports news shows with my brother: I don't care about this stuff, why did I just waste three hours of my life on it? Sports news doesn't matter to me. (If sports news matters to you, you should read this book -- but then, you probably already are.)
James Meek, The People's Act of Love
Gave up after one chapter. The summary was promising -- Siberian work camp escapee stumbles into small town, causes havoc -- and I was hoping this book would mix what I think of as a male genre, poitical suspense, with what I think of as a female genre, small-town romantic intrigue. Unfortunately, The People's Act of Love doesn't live up to 1) its summary 2) its hype as an "international literary sensation" 3) its title (I am such a sucker for Red titles, it's not even funny).
The problem is that the writing is limp (not as incoherant as Scooter Libby's, but uninteresting) and the chapter is about how Special main character Samrin is -- except that he isn't special, the things this book tries to convince you are fantastic and unique and portend great or maybe omninous things are absolutely ordinary. The point of the chapter is to get the reader interested in Samarin, and it just doesn't work.
Typical line:
He had a way of devoting attention absolutely to one woman, which not only pleased her during their conversation, but left her with the feeling afterwards that the time they'd spent -- no matter how brief, and usually it was brief -- was time offered to her from a precious store, time which could and should have been used by Samarin to continue some great task.
Gag me. With a spoon.
Celestine Vaite, Frangipani
Wonderful. Marvelous. Refreshingly direct. As many kind words as I had for Tom Robbins, I actually prefer prose like Vaite's -- at no point does it kick the reader out of the narrative to admire itself. It's just as idiosyncratic, but it works with the narrative. Another compulsively readable book. Here's the first paragraph: When a woman doesn't collect her man's pay she gets zero francs because her man goes to the bar with his colleagues to celebrate the end of the week and you know how that is, eh? A drink for les copains! Then he comes home with empty pockes, but he's very happy. He tells his woman stories that don't stand straight to make her laugh, but she doesn't feel like laughing at all. She's cranky and she just wants her man to shut up.
Frangipani is about the relationship between Leilani and her mother Materena Mahi, who is a "professional cleaner" and the best listener in Tahiti. And it's about Materena's other relationships, with her man, her boss, her sons, her ancestors, her culture, and her insane extended family. There are stretches in the middle that are hard to get through, because the book is loosely focused and doesn't really have a plot, but each chapter stands beautifully on its own and is a pleasure to read. The prose is riddled with French words and Tahitian colloquialisms (some of my favorites are "girlfriend" as the preferred form of address and "full stop," like in a telegram, when a subject would be better without embellishment).
It's also heartwarming. Materena and her family are poor -- they live in fibro shacks on the coast -- but it's not an uncomfortable poverty, because no matter what happens there's the whole family for support, and in Tahiti even if you have zero money you can still survive on fruit from the garden. Materena is the best Mom ever. There's a lot of Girl Power in this book; Tahiti comes off as fairly matriarchal for a society steeped in Catholicism.
Also, the parts dealing with traditional Tahitian customs -- which Materena has an ambivalent attitude towards, and Leilani generally rejects -- are funny. The author lives in Australia, but loves Tahiti; Materena has a certain fondness for even the ones she admits are ridiculous. And there are a lot of genuinely good traditions, too, which she and even Leilani recognize.
I don't know, this book just makes me feel good about everything.
Emily Ruete b. Sayyida Said, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar
Nonfiction. Although my goals are to read more nonfiction and to blog about everything I read, it's hard, because I don't really know how to discuss nonfiction. Normally with books I talk about the author's style, or the central themes, or whatever, but all of that seems sort of irrevelent with an historical work like this; as a history student, I know that the flaws actually enhance the value of the work rather than detract from it.
For instance: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Said) glosses over certain things. She describes an extravagent lifestyle in glowing terms, without considering how such a lifestyle is possible (HINT: a completely ridiculous number of slaves are involved). She is never less than completely positive when discussing her father, the Sultan, or any of the older brothers who fought amoungst themselves for the throne after he died. She says she's writing her memoirs so that her children, who grew up in Germany (Emily Ruete left Zanzibar with a German trader at sixteen) will know something about her culture; but she generalizes a lot, saying that such-and-such is "a custom of the Arabs" or "what is done in the East" when really, it's a custom of the Omani court at Zanzibar in the 1860s. (Although there are also places where she is careful to specify that something is only something her family does, and isn't typical of Arabs of Orientals in general.) She remembers certain things, like the abundance of fresh fruit, but fails to mention key details, like the fact that there were no roads in Zanzibar, so that all people and good had to be conveyed either on foot or by ship around the coastline.
I recommend this book, by the way. Whether Emily Ruete is reliable or not, she is thourough and opinionated, and she has a lot to say, both about the phyisical realities of life in Zanzibar, and about its customs, and about how those customs compare to European customs. Not a dry book at all. And 1860s Zanzibar is a fascinating place: originally an unimportant outpost of the Omani trading empire, Sayyida's father realized that actually, because it allows control of the East African Coast, Zanzibar is much more profitable than Oman, and he relocated the empire. There's an attempt at a nod toward keeping the old customs -- in the Sultan's presense, everyone must speak Arabic -- but the culture shifts in a lot of ways, leading to this weird situation where the cousins from back in Oman feel themselves to be culturally superior but at the same time are much poorer. The memoir is also interesting because Sayyida's father had seventy-five concubines and forty children (although by the time he died, this number had been reduced to thirty-six), many of whom spoke completely different languages.
And! I bought manga! There was this going-out-of-buisness sale -- not at the bookstore, at the CD store, but I felt so good about saving 75% that I went and blew all of the money I'd saved on manga I wouldn't otherwise have bought. XD
Yun Kouga, Earthian (vol 1)
My feelings are mixed. The first volume is very episodic, which is cool, but a lot of the episodes are cliched, which isn't. Yun Kouga has a very stong design sense, which is cool, but there almost no backgrounds, which isn't (this reminds me of Clover, although Earthian is not as overdesigned as Clover). What's really getting to me, though, is the sense of mounting dread. ^^; Starting from the very first chapter, and definitely by the second, you get the feeling that something is VERY VERY WRONG here. The plot is that Angels, who come from a planet called Eden, are sent down to Earth in pairs. One member marks down everything good that humans do (plusses), and the other marks down everything bad (minuses), and if the score ever reaches -10,000, the earth will be destroyed. And this has been going on for five billion years.
The whole set-up is fishy. The first thing you wonder is why the Earth hasn't been destroyed already -- with purposeful acts of genocide stacked against policeman helping little old ladies to cross the street, isn't it obvious where the advantage lies? The next and more significant thing you wonder is, what gives Angels the right to judge humanity.
There are a lot of clues that they don't have the right. Both checkers, plus and minus, are flawed. They're far from impartial. Chihaya is too willing to see good and overlook evil, and he makes a lot of mistakes; Kagetsuya claims to hate Eartians (although I have my suspicions about this) and allows his feelings for Chihaya to influence his work. The system itself is questionable because it's not clear what standard is being employed to decide "good" or "bad" -- there's no rubric or anything, so everything in the Checker's reports is a subjective value judgement. Most importantly, it isn't clear that Angel society is inherently any better than human society. It has problems, I won't go into them, but they're obvious -- and "homosexuality is evil and a sin" is one of them.
Overall, I can't really say I liked this volume. But there are some really interesting things going on, especially in the way the author is gradually introducing these themes that the characters themselves aren't aware of/don't think to question. If there was one thing I really didn't like about this volume, it was some of that nonsense with Seraphim at the end. In most of the volume you get a subtle sense that something is wrong -- it's subtle because the characers (and consequently the author) don't comment on it. Then the last section takes all that wonderful subtlety and throws it out the window.
(canis_m and team7 both put this series on the their top-BL-series-of-all-time lists. I'd never even heard of it, it's old enough to be before my time (which also means I wasn't able to download it from anywhere, ahahaha). The first volume that's in stores is the deluxe edition, 400 pages long. The way this story is unraveling, the extra pages are definitely a good thing. )
Lee Young You, Kill Me, Kiss Me (Vol 2)
The art continues to be good, in an exaggerated BRATZ fashion-doll kind of way that reminds me of OEL manga. But WHAT THE HECK, THIS IS NOT THE MANGA I WANTED TO BUY. The author says it best, in this note at the end:
Because the story is completely different from volume 1, many of you might be saying, "What a betrayal! I want more crossdressing!"
YES, WHERE IS THE CROSSDRESSING? And it's not just that: the main character from the first volume hardly appears, instead the focus shifts to a completely new set of characters. It's like reading a totally different manga.
The story in the first volume was that Tae had a crush on male model Kun, who attends the same school as her (male) cousin Jung-Woo. The two of them look suspiciously similiar, so Tae convinces Jung-Woo to trade places with her. Eventually the switch is revealed to Kun (actually a cruel guy who doesn't like women) and his friend/fellow bully Ga-woon. I like Ga-woon, but unfortunately he and Kun and Tae get, like, five seconds combined screen time in this volume. Instead the focus shifts to Jung-Woo, his troubles with gang leader Ghoon-Hahm, and the ex-girl-gang member Que-min who has a crush on him (Jung-Woo).
If all these names are confusing to you, good, BECAUSE THEY ARE CONFUSING TO ME TOO. My tolerance for five new Korean names in a single manga chapter = nonexistant. I'm having a really hard time rememebering them. I think I need to read more Korean manga. The other problem with this chapter is that it is a youth gang saga, and I like gang stories much, much less than I like crossdressing to get close to your idol stories. Also, no offense, but when confronted with Korean gangs, in particular, my first instict is... to laugh.
Ahahahaha! Maybe this is terrible of me, but I can't buy the continuous macho posturings in these things. If it was just gangs, that would be one thing, but sometimes it seems like 90% of all male characters and 30% of female characters in Korean manga are outwardly perfect students and sons/daughters, but SECRETLY, THEY ARE BAD-ASSES. When it's that common, what's the secret?
My other major problem with this volume is that it feels like I'm being tricked into liking Ghoon-Hahm, who is a PSYCHOTIC MYSOGINIST. No kidding. He says lines like "girls should stay at home and do laundry" with a straight face. In his first appearance, he beats Jung-Woo into the hospital while his horrified subordinates tell him to: "Stop, that's enough already! He's barely breathing! Jesus Christ!" But the manga wants me to like him, because he is secretly a dork (see: Ryouki from Hot Gimmick, to a lesser extent Doumyoji from Hana Yori Dango). And the awful, awful thing is that it's working. *cries* My tolerance for jerks-who-are-dorks is lower than average, because in het shoujo relationships I tend to focus on the girl more so that guys who make girls unhappy are NOT COOL. But Ghoom has Ban-chan sunglasses and is so over-the-top vicious that he actually is cool, or at least there's a sick fascination. It's driving me insane. I can't keep reading this series, it's like BASHING MY HEAD AGAINST A WALL.
Also read:
-Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (memoirs, told backwards like Momento! Grrrreat stuff, the writing is hodgepodge but briiliant. Like Sylvia Plath with a dash of screwball family comedy.)
-Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (completely bizarre and totally great, obviously the inspiration for this fic)
-Haruki Murakami, Norweigian Wood (surpringly normal! I think this fic draws from it)
-Jasper Fforde, The Eyrie Affair (I don't think I like the Thursday next series, too many clever parts that, if you stop to think about them, don't make sense)
-The Complete Letters of Arthur Rimbauld (I love his letter-writing style, he's so bratty and demanding XD)
To-read:
-Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
-David Sosnowski, Vamped
-Amitov Ghosh, The Hungry Tide