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Iron Chef battle Shanghai cabbage is showing right now, and oh, I am suddenly hungry, despite having glutted myself on peaches. I'm particulary happy because I don't see that many battles focusing on Chinese food. And, did I mention I have a sudden craving for Chinese food now? Maybe I will drag the boy to the little Shanghai place tomorrow, hee.

Moving is still going on -- now I'm starting to haul all my books over, because we got me two new bookcases (three shelves only, ergo I needed two).

Today was a rather stressful day off. Started out well (aka, I was not woken up by the leaf blowers), but then I went to the old apartment to move tons of boxes to my car, and proceeded to leave my keys in the apartment. Grrrr. Am a bit happier now that I have eaten peaches though! I love love love love summer fruits. Love. Had watermelon for the first time in a long, long time this week, and nothing is quite as summery as eating ice-cold watermelong in giant chunks, with juice running everywhere, and the sun burning through the windows. I think the little pearl milk tea place by the store should be serving watermelong juice now! Yummy.

Also went to the comic book store in search of Astonishing X-Men, which seems to be pretty sold out. Booo =(. So I ended up walking out with several issues of Emma Frost. I didn't know she had a mini-series! That's very cool ^_^. I like her mostly because she's bitchy and mean.

Gloating because I won an eBay auction for Judy Cuevas' Dance (along with Black Silk, which I already have, and will therefore sell back to the store). $7.20 for both books, including shipping and handling, and I'm quite happy because the cheapest copy of Dance I could find online was $12.50. I just know because I went ahead and bought something online, it's going to show up at the bookstore in about a week or two. Murphy's Law ;).

Yamamoto Naoki - Dance 'Till Tomorrow, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.)

First new manga I've read in quite some time -- it's kind of funny having several people on the reading list start reading manga (and meeting the girl in Hawaii who was very into it) after having sort of passed my glomming stage.

I picked it up because it was at the store and because one of the books had some sort of Editor's Choice thing on it. Must remember sometimes that trusting the summary on the back is a good thing. It seems to be a fairly typical shounen romance, ala Marmalade Boy and Tenchi Muyo and all those other ones. By fairly typical I mean the setup, in which a young, fairly normal, down-to-earth guy (sort of the male version of the gawky girl with glasses), Suekichi, is interested in a nice, good girl (in this case, the director of his theater troupe, I think), while being sexually tempted by a morally dubious, very open girl. At least, that was the set up in the first book. Granted, the next few could have changed the formula a bit, but from reading the backs, it didn't much seem like it, so I gave up. I don't know if there is a similar setup in non-manga fiction -- I can sort of see echoes of it in Robert Jordan (Rand has three girls chasing after him!) and in Elfstones of Shannara (Eretria and Amberle), and I'm sure others have it as well, but maybe not so obviously? But I think it's safe to say that it's a pretty well-established genre or sub-genre or trope or whatever you choose to call it in manga and in anime.

It's also a trope that annoys me, mostly because the girls are really stupid and fight each other constantly for the guy. And while I am generally all for women who are open about their sexuality, the type in these works tends to turn me off because they feel so gratuitous. You know, I wonder if this is how guys feel when they read romance novels. Good but boring guy vs. hot and slightly uncivilized stud is a pretty common formula (see: Sunfire romances). There's a lot of sex in this book, and it's fairly graphic. I was actually surprised at what was drawn at times, give the censorship laws in Japan. Maybe they've changed? I do remember that they aren't supposed to draw any sort of pubic hair or genitalia, but I distinctly remember seeing a penis or two. Maybe I am making it up. Generally, the attitude is very literal, so you see pretty much everything, except the girl looks like she's giving a blowjob to a cylindrical white space (and etc.).

Anyway, it wasn't really my thing. I think people who like Tenchi Muyo and Love Hina would enjoy it.

( On anime and manga in general )