A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I stare at it.

It stares back.

I stare at it.

It stares back.

I eat dinner and watch the first episode of Naruto, which is ever so much more poignant when you've already read thirty volumes of manga. Also-- yep, that was Urahara and Tsuzuki's voice actor, all right. Too bad he's not in the rest of the show, although I see why they wanted a good actor for that role.

I go back to staring at the project.

It goes back to staring back. Balefully.

I will now work on for another forty minutes without doing anything else, and will then knock off and continue reading The Black Stallion's Blood Bay Colt, which is excellent despite the total lack of aliens, vampires, or rabid vampire bats.

Spoilers through volume 31.

( It would be spoilery to even say what lies beneath the cut )

Massive spoilers for everything up to volume 31, which is as far as I've read so please don't spoil me for later events.

( Read more... )

This is why I was up till 1:00 am last night.

( spoilers through volume 11-- spoil me beyond that and I will kill you with my nine-tailed fox demon red chakra release )

I got all these at a thrift shop for six dollars total. Comment if you've read them/heard of them/hate them.

Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked it Over. I like her nonfiction food writing enough to overcome my reservations about buying an adult mainstream novel about "marriage, friendship, motherhood, and careers as experienced by a cast of endearingly eccentric Manhattanites,"-- a genre which I usually loathe.

Mollie Hunter, The Kelpie's Pearls. Obviously out of print kid's book with an appealing title. I think I've heard of the author, but can't recall the context.

Eloisa James, Kiss Me, Annabel. The sequel to Much Ado About You.

Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter. I wish I'd read these when I was a kid, but I still like them. They are very odd and Scandinavian.

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking. I remember adoring this, but who knows if I still will.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. coffeeandink convinced me to give it a try.

L. M. Montgomery, Mistress Pat, which is the sequel to a book I have but haven't read yet, and Magic for Marigold.

Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase. Because I keep meaning to read his novels.

Zilpha Keatley Snyder, And Condors Danced. Looks like a realistic YA novel about a lonely girl and her dog. The dog better not die.

Erik Weihenmayer, Touch the Top of the World. A memoir by a blind man who climbed Everest. I have recently become obsessed with climbing and in the last week, I re-read Into Thin Air and watched Touching the Void, even though I wouldn't personally want to do any of that sort of mountain climbing, which combines three things I detest: cold, high altitudes, and serious danger.

Jay Williams, Danny Dunn and the Fossil Cave. Oops, I already have a copy of this. Anyone want this one?

I am now in Walnut Creek hotel room with... drum roll...

Naruto # 6

Double Helix

Dogsbody

Angel Sanctuary # 1

A Great and Terrible Beauty

Tipping the Velvet

Stalking the Divine

I was afraid I might not have enough to read, so I overstocked. I knew that would happen.

My SuperShuttle to the airport was late. The flight was uneventful. The driver for the shuttle to the hotel had some of the stinkiest BO I've ever smelled. Every time he moved a wave of smell would attack me like a ninja chakra: "Body Odor of the Bear!"

Yes, I read Naruto on the plane. Also Double Helix.

Naruto # 6, with the kid ninja teams doing their practical final in a forest, was fun but not as funny as # 5, the written final. My favorite joke, a Spinal Tap reference, was probably an inspired piece of translation. The characters are really growing on me, though, and I was annoyed to see that # 7 won't be out for another two months. Why aren't they releasing one per month? I would buy one per month! Heck, I'd buy one per week. Especially since Gaara, who had intrigued me last time, is not in this one. I want to know what he and his team are doing.

Order the series from Amazon: Naruto, Volume 1

Double Helix, by Nancy Werlin. YA suspence/spoiler. 6' 7" and brilliant-at-everything Eli has just graduated from high school, but didn't apply to college. After a huge fight with his father over that, he writes a drunken email to Dr. Wyatt, a famous scientist and former acquaintance of his parents, begging for a job at the lab. To Eli's amazement, Wyatt hires him and takes Eli under his wing. Eli's father hits the roof and demands that he have nothing to do with Dr. Wyatt and his genetics lab, but won't tell him why. Meanwhile, Eli's relationship with his girlfriend is foundering because Eli won't tell her his deep dark secret-- that his mother is dying of Huntington's Disease and Eli refuses to be tested to see if he's inherited the gene or not. But who cares about that when you're being wined and dined by the brilliant Dr. Wyatt, who introduces you to a gorgeous, sexy, and seemingly perfect teenage girl acquaintance of his, and lectures you over dinner with comments like, "We can't sit back and leave science policy in the hands of politicians and pundits or alarmist writers of science fiction. Face it, most people are unbelievable idiots."

You can probably see the problem with the book right there: the basic set-up, although presented as a mystery, is really, really obvious. Dr. Wyatt might as well wear a "Hello, I'm evil" nametag. Though Werlin's style is as page-turning as ever and I admire her willingness to let her protagonist be a real jerk at times, this one lacked the compelling set-up and oddball characters of Locked Inside or the intensity and creepy moral ambiguity of The Killer's Cousin. Though Werlin does come up with one genuinely shocking plot twist toward the end, it loses its potentially devastating impact because the supporting character it involves hasn't been developed enough. And it's not until the last few pages that Werlin seems to remember that genetic research is not the sole property of eeeeevil megalomaniac scientists. The situation at the end of the book, in fact, is in many ways more interesting and angstful and morally complex that the one at the beginning. I don't think she's planning a sequel, though.

My former orthopedist's office did indeed lose all my X-Rays. We hates them, we does, my preciousssss.

I am now up to the episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena aka Shoujo Kakumei Utena aka (for no apparent reason) La Fillette Revolutionaire, (the anime, not the manga) called "Nanami's Egg." I have concluded that Utena is not just the most whacked-out anime I've ever seen. No, it is the most whacked-out thing in any media I've ever seen. Whacked-out-- and also erudite, sexy, disturbing, thought-provoking, and very, very funny. I'll write more about it when I finish it, because right now I haven't a clue even where to begin.

One of the odd things about it is that patterns of imagery are set up very carefully and consistently, but in a way which doesn't give you a means of interpreting them. For instance, Nanami is consistently associated with or in opposition to or equated with or even turned into animals of various sorts. Why? What does that mean? I have no clue.

Naruto, a manga by Masashi Kishimoto, is about a kid named Naruto who lives in Ninja Land. Basically, everyone's a ninja, and so Naruto, a rascal with a good heart but not too much upstairs (he'd get along great with Saiyuki's Goku), wants to be the best ninja of them all. But everyone treats him like an outcast. Turns out that an evil fox spirit attacked the village, and could only be quelled by transforming it into a baby boy. That's Naruto-- who could turn back into the evil fox spirit at any moment.

(ETA: As pointed out in comments, the fox spirit was actually implanted in Baby Naruto, not transformed into a baby.)

Volume 1 was OK but not my kind of thing-- it really seemed aimed at ten-year-old boys. But I wanted to study some good manga fight scenes, so I jumped ahead to volume 5, which was about the ninja exams. I figured that would be wall-to-wall fighting. But it turned out that volume 5 was about the ninja written exam. It was friggin' hilarious. Like this part, from memory, of Naruto's classmates' thoughts as they contemplate questions like "If a ninja throws a shuriken from the top of a 23.3 foot tree at an average speed of 49.6 mph while surrounded by 16 enemies whose average height is 6' 1", what is the parabola of the damage? Show your work."

Sakura: Wow, this is kind of hard... I hope Naruto isn't tempted to cheat... Oh, he'd never cheat.

Sasuke: This is really hard... I wonder how Naruto's doing... Well, he's a stand-up ninja, so at least I know he's not thinking of cheating.

Naruto: THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE! I'M GOING TO CHEAT!

The moment I put it down, I was seized with the desire to dash straight out and buy volume 6-- a desire which so far I've only resisted because the store I dropped in on didn't have it.

Order the series from Amazon: Naruto, Volume 1