My Goodreads Review of My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lvl. 999, volume 3 by Mashiro

 First review of the year is one I have been wanting to talk on for awhile.

My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999, Vol. 3 by Mashiro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A winter storm and black-out means that it was a perfect time for my first completed read of the year. Which is not exactly a re-read, but sort-of is. This volume recounts episodes 7-10 of the anime. I ended-up following the manga and even going back and purchasing a physical copy of this volume because of chapter/part 30 of the manga that ends this volume. To me it is one of the most startling mature philosophical expressions of love that I have seen in anime or manga.

I won't do a full-recap, but to give some backstory: this series is a shoujo romance manga about about a college student named Akane whose life is sort-of a mess after a recent break-up as she falls in love with a professional gamer named Akito Yamada—the title character (her ex was a gamer as well). In this volume she and Yamada are not yet a couple, but we are all but assured by the end of the chapter that they will become a couple (I am currently on volume 8 in which a lot more pivotal things have happened).

I want to highlight this volume because of chapter 30. During the typical "sick day" trope where one love interest becomes sick and the other takes care of them. Akane overworks herself and becomes sick, so Yamada comes over takes her to the doctor and stays by her side while she is resting. When Akane wakes-up and her and Yamada are talking about what happens they come to talk about love. Yamada has never fell in-love with anyone and instead has turned-down many girls pretty-coldly during his life and as he does finally fall in-love with Akane—he feels intense guilt for the people whose feelings he has hurt. Akane, whose ex left her for somebody else he met while online gaming, surprisingly has compassion for Yamada and Yamada questions why given her experience with her boyfriend. She states that she was glad that her ex was up-front to her about the fact that he loved someone else and didn't try to just two-time her (most of what she says here we see in happen in volume 1/episode 1 where she accepts the breakup stoicly and with a pained-smile despite being hurt by it as we would see later, but now we learn what she was thinking as this awkward/painful episode transpired). What she says next is the moment I knew this was one of the best shoujo series I have ever encountered:

"No matter what I said, I knew it wouldn't change anything, so when he broke up with me, I accepted it right away.

If he ever thinks about me or feels nostalgic, I want him to remember me smiling not bawling.

I want him to think that he had a great woman, and that he regrets leaving me. Don't you think it's better that way?"

Yamada thinks over his past, and easily agrees. While Akane is not a perfect protagonist, she is the heroine required for this story. Despite this obviously being a story of the soujo demographic-category, our lead has a lot of shounen hero personality traits. I tell you I was knocked out of my seat when I first heard those lines from above, and I still get chills reading them now. A lot of "serious" novels can't give you insight on how to deal with the end of a relationship that is equal to this. I have much that I can say about this series in its totality, but I just wanted to highlight this pivotal scene which would be a foreshadowing to another scene that would occur later on in the story (view spoiler)[when the two finally consummate their relationship (hide spoiler)]. It was nice looking back on this early part of the story again.

Al Green - For The Good Times
The irony of posting a breakup song on a review of a book that is leading to the main couple actually getting together is unusual, but I feel it works on what I was talking about.

In the Afterword, the author says that this was the volume where it started being a true romance manga. Amen

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2024 on Goodreads for Me

 Happy New Years🎊

A lookback at what I was and was not reading in 2024:

2024 on Goodreads by Various


My 2024 Year in Books

Been wanting to do one of these again for awhile. Nothing fancy here, just going to do a staight report.

I read 13 "books" this year on Goodreads. After barely reading anything in 2023 and 2022, I wanted to get back into reading-shape. I started the year out strong by reading The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison. This book was penultimate book published during her lifetime based on a series of lectures and serves as a meta-bookend to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I had been wanting to read it for awhile and decided to do so in January.

I followed that major read with some lighter fair: Diana's Tree by Alejandra Pizarnik, Chihayafuru, Vol. 3 by Yuki Suetsugu, and The Malefector by Anton Chekhov. A volume of poetry, a volume of manga, and a short story, respectively. The poetry here and later in the year were to-do items that I got to cross off my list after a few years of wanting to get to them. I liked Diana's Tree, but it did not hit me with the same intensity that I got from reading here for the first time in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: An Anthology. Chihayafaru, volume 3 was the last book from the series that I decided to read befor watching the series' anime adaptation (I have watched season one, so far, and plan to hopefully watch season 2 this year) when I have finished the anime adaptations I will pick-up the manga from where the anime stops. Every year I read at least on Chekhov sort story on his birthday and this year I decided to read The Malefector. I can't say I really remember what it was about besides something to do with how the Russian Imperial judiciary treated Russian peasants.

The second major read that I completed this year was Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon. Though I always think myself too seasoned a bibliophile veteran to get caught in the expectations-trap, it still happens. I feel various intellectual-types and hoteps have sold this book as one thing, and it read to me as a very different thing and I was slightly disappointed, but I think I understood what Fanon was saying...I just didn't fully agree with it. One interesting thing about that review is that it got attention from some interesting places.

After that I took a break from Goodreads (and reading anything not manga-related) for about 10 months. I was persuaded to come back on here after the hype and controversy over what would become my favorite read of the year: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The outrage over this book is legendary at this point, but it convinced me to start reading again. Though I knew and agreed with much of what Coates talked about in the book already, reading it in journalistic detail on the page made me angry and as outraged as he was. It had been awhile since I read a book that struck me to care in such a way. I have to say that while I was keeping up at the controversies on this site over fake reviews, review-bombing, and sock-puppet accounts with the different YA books—seeing all three methods being utilized by right-wing trolls for this one book was startling and something I had never seen happen in real time since I first joined this site in December 2010. That's how you know this book was the read deal!

Since then I have been back on my reading grind. Not a lot of big literature was read by me, but more of the lighter-stuff as I gradually get back to using Goodreads again. I read Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa, the other volume of poetry for this year and it was decent. I had been curious to read Komunyakaa for awhile, and after reading his selections in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I decided to read a short volume of poetry by him and came upon this book.

Al the other books I closed the year on where comic books that I had in my backlog to read. I tend to mostly read manga that I like and find as they are translated. And I mostly read them digitally unless it is a volume I really like in which case I will buy a physical copy like I did with American comic books. I have a physical manga volume that I bought over the holiday and plan to re-read and review this year (a little preview for y'all). I don't keep-up with superhero comics anymore, but I have enough of a backlog in my Comixology Kindle archives that I will continue reading and putting out reviews when I get to them.

Of the comics I read to close-out the year, I will spotlight two here:

Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men, Volume 2 by Chris Claremount, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne. This is the second volume of Marvel Comics' special trade paperback collection of Chris Claremont's 15 year tenure on the Uncanny X-Men comics with illustrators/co-writers John Byrne & Dave Cockrum (among others). This was a good look at the stories that are now part of contemporary American mythology at this point (and bein saturized to death by Hollywood). It was good to read these stories myself as they were originally meant to be read and I look forward to reading more.

The Promised Neverland, Volume 20. This is the last volume of one of the best-selling manga of the century, so-far. Despite the catastrophe of the second season anime adaptation, the manga itself remained just good-enough to keep me coming back for more and ended on a bittersweet, but hopeful note. This manga, along with One-Punch Man and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to start reading manga seriously in the first place so finishing this was a special milestone for me. I do hope they include the actual epilogue chapter in an official English volume one day.

Well, besides a very cynical Christmas short story by Langston Hughes, that was my year in books according to Goodreads. I was glad to keep doing this and not totally give-up on reading. I am currently reading Black Theology and Black Power by James H. Cone and hope to have it finished by the end of January. Happy New Year.

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My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, Volume 20 (and the series as a whole).

 My farewell to this series. There is always a sense of reward and sorrow when a good series you read or watch come to an end and you are done with it. That is me now with The Promise Neverland. My love of manga is partly because of the franchise so I feel I owe a debt to it. So here are my thoughts:

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 20 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Around now, seven years ago...
I was drawing the prototype storyboards of The Promised Neverland that I would later submit to the Shōnen Jump editorial department. I was confident about my idea. But there were many elements of the story that didn't have the standard "Jump" traits. It had a female protagonist, and it was plot driven instead of character driven.
Even as I look back on it now, I strongly believe that depending on the editor, my submission could have been rejected on the spot." - Kaiu Shirai, October 2, 2020

Aquí se Puede

[I will get to the actual volume in this review, but this is the meta-portion:]

The Promised Neverland, along with One-Punch Man & Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to read manga after spending so long avoiding the format despite being an anime fan for most of my life. Now manga makes-up the near-majority of the sequential-art that I read. That was not true in April 2019 when I decided (very correctly in hindsight) not to wait for a second season of the anime and read the manga from where the first season ended. This story was a very interesting look into the dystopian/horror genre in anime/manga. It was also a very interesting look into two things that I tend to note on in anime/manga/light-novels: the depictions of Black people in the format and the use of involuntary servitude (e. g. slavery, serfdom, etc.). The use of those elements in the plot were different and predictable in this story.

To quickly address the former: Despite the standard-line of manga abiding by the artistic concept of Mukokuseki (無国籍), which is to say of no one ethnic o national origin, it has always been clear that in-practice this just meant making characters look generic and white (interestingly, you don't see a lot of characters drawn with "Asian" features unless they are from China or Southeast Asia). When Black characters did appear in the early days of anime & manga, it was usually in the blackface minstrelsy style. This only started changing in the 1980s—and it was a slow change. Nowadays, it is expected of Japanese illustrators to draw more realistic depictions of Black/dark-skin characters—but every so often there are relapses. While I think that the artist Posuka Demizu did a good job at drawing most of the Black characters in this book (this was a very ethnically diverse non-mecha series), I still can't get my head over why she retreated back to the old stereotypes for Sister Crone. The character was dead before I started reviewing the manga, but I was planning to lodge my complaint on that when I reviewed the series in-full.

I have to say I was more fascinated in how it depicted slavery. Technically, it does not really depict slavery as the kids are technically raised as livestock on farms rather than chattel on slave plantations, but the way that places like Grace Field were organized in the story were plantation-adjacent (especially when we learn what their true purpose was). I think The Promised Neverland, along with Shadows House (can't wait to review this book on Goodreads one day. Another dystopian/horror series that uses serfdom instead of slavery), are some of the better analogues to involuntary servitude as oppose to most depictions you see from series originating from light-novels (a Japanese media format with much less quality control) that tend to depict slavery through the lens of male power-fantasy. I think the display of how othered and de-humanized the humans in the demon world were was especially well-done.

[Ok, now on to the actual volume]

With all that said, the finale was less about a final battle, but with the final reckoning of the price of freedom for the stories heroine. While most of the resolutions for the characters are satisfactory (unless you're Isabella), Emma's luck of getting out of all obstacles in the story unscathed ends here, and she is forced to give-up something substantial (view spoiler)[her memories (hide spoiler)] to the deity that controlled the over-arching events of the story in order to obtain the passage of the humans from the demon world to Earth (which in the current day of this volume is uncomfortably looking like where our current world is headed). Despite this price, Emma agrees that the bigger goal of liberation is the most important. The last line from that other comic—The Complete Persepolis—rings true here ("Freedom had a price"). I may have wished for something happier and not bittersweet, but the ending we have here is solid.

I think that The Promised Neverland will always have a mixed reception because of the second season of the anime. If you only watched it through the anime, than you view it along with the Matrix sequels as the sequel tainting the whole franchise or season 2 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as one of the great disappointments of anime. But if you only read the manga, or like most people, watched season 1 then read the manga it is one of the greatest series of the 2010s. The "Goldy Pond arc" of volumes 7-11 was the highlight of the series to me (and why I was so disgusted with season 2 of the anime totally cutting it out). While I do think I have read better manga since I began this series (that I have not yet covered on Goodreads), this is the second series where I covered most of it on Goodreads after Demon Slayer which I finished last year and one of the best manga I have covered so far.


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My Review of Kimi ni Todoke - Season 3

[I originally posted this back in August to another site that I was using to track my anime & manga, but it got weird as it turns out the moderators there were out of control with their power so I am reposting this here. Maybe later on I will share my interesting experiment/experience this year of trying to interact with the online anime community after 10 years of not doing that.]

Few anime go as long between seasons as this one. In the time between season 2 and season 3, the landscape of anime romances has changed a lot—partly due to the influences of this series. The manga came to an end and a lot of the tropes utilized in this series would show-up in other series. I think the big impact is the way male-targeted romance series got better over time due to the legacy of this show. Shounen & seinen romances like Insomniacs After School, Call of the Night, and possibly the most interesting example for me—The Dangers in My Heart are just some of the series that owe at least a partial debt to this series. And we haven't even talked about other shoujo romance series. As much as I could talk about the legacy of Kimi ni Todoke, lets get to season 3 itself. 

While the hard work of becoming a couple was resolved in season 2, this season was Shouta and Sawako trying to discover what that means. While they come to terms with that by the end of the season, you could argue that the real focus was the deepening ties and relationship re-evaluation between Chizuru and Ryuu. We already knew about Ryuu's feelings, but now Chizuru was made to starkly and painfully reflect over her relationship with him and it's evolution over the years. This dynamic is the near-highlight of the season. And then we get to Ayane. If Gimai Seikatsu thinks that they have anime's saddest gyaru, Ayane here was trying to give her a run-for-her-money. Her ongoing issues with her self-esteem was given much-needed help by season two's ensemble darkhorse turned (male) hero of this season Kento Miura who was the only person capable of getting through to Ayane (well...almost the only person). As Shouta was in his feelings for most of the season, Kento stepped-up as the only sane male character in the show. Shouta was really out of it in this season as he seemed to not understand how to cope with just being the emotional support for Sawako and nearly destroyed their relationship out the gate before he gets some much-needed wake-up calls from some very unexpected places. This group went on shaky-ground this season, but all came out stronger than before. 

Getting back almost all of the original voice actors was a miracle and it really put me back into the series. The series music was good and always matched the mood of the show. Having the staff from the first two season work with modern equipment really makes a difference and I was always impressed that the composition of the series did not lose the aesthetic of the first two seasons. They could've gone for a more "contemporary" look given they had Netflix money to play with, but one always appreciates keeping the original manga's vision. I also noticed that because each episode was an hour, the story lines could be told in intersecting ways that we normally don't get in your usual thirty minute episode.

All-in-all Kimi ni Todoke uses it's simple, to the point, but sincere storytelling to remind everyone why it is still the gold-standard of shoujo romance in the 21st century. Where other series have done too little or too much, it gets the recipe perfect. I hope they adapt the whole manga and the sequel, but until then I am happy with this.

My Goodreads Review of One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

 Haven't read a Christmas story or any LAngston Hughes in a while, so "two birds with one stone." This story reminds me a lot of At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me of growing up poor in rural Virginia. While the rest of the United States was in the come-up of the post-WWII economic boom, her community was as poor as they ever been. The youngest of 10, her mom would tell her and her siblings that Santa Claus tried to get there gifts in the house, but accidentally left the. In the fields and hillsides around the house and they had to search for them there. Of course there were no gifts, but they would look in vain anyway.

While we don’t have an explicit location, by context clues the short story here takes place in small-town central Maryland. The only major city named is Baltimore where they could actually afford to build a movie theater for Black people, this town that the story is set in only has a whites-only movie theater. A severely over-worked & underpaid mother is trying to by something for her son to have for Christmas despite being cruelly-underpaid by her white employer whose home she worked in on Christmas Eve! It is her young-son who has an unfortunate run-in with a Santa at a whites-only movie theater lobby that learns the harder lessons of Christmas in the Jim Crow Great Depression era.

This was a short, but bitter story. Nothing big-traumatic happens, but we do get a little loss of innocence here. One does wonder if Hughes meant for this to be a cynical comedy or serious which I can’t tell, but this story does give me a little to think about.

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My Goodreads Review of Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1

 With all the sorrow of this month, I still haven't forgotten to take some time to honor our Indigenous family this month and I have an excuse to read American comic books again—something I hadn't done in a long time. 

Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven’t read an American comic book since 2021, so I know I was going to be a little rusty on reviewing one now. I am so use to manga now that several times while reading this I had to stop myself from reading the speech bubbles and text box from right to left. The fact is, I still have fairly substantial back-catalog of western comic books that I need to read and given this is November, good reason to read this short-anthology celebrating Marvel Comics’ Indigenous heroes. This is not the first time reading a comic anthology about Indigenous people as I previously read and reviewed This Place: 150 Years Retold an excellent historical narrative anthology on the history of Indigenous people in Canada. Like in that book, the illustrations vary in quality, but the stories are a good introduction/sample. I really wish there was more here to read, but better than nothing.

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My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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