recognito

I've been a fan of Takako Shimura's manga since reading the first chapters of Aoi Hana/Sweet Blue Flowers back in high school and have read a decent number of her professionally published works, mostly through scans. Shimura is a pretty consistent author in terms of her strengths, preferred narrative beats, and sensibilities. Her settings are usually contemporary, her narratives are often romances, and her character writing is unusually excellent, both within the genre and in the wider world of manga.

It was really exciting going through the last twenty years of Shimura's works. Her art and writing are great in the early days, and they get better as she continues iterating on similar themes and concerns over the years. The pacing of her works is pretty neat when you read them all at once… it's also pretty rewarding going back through someone's work and going, Oh, I get what you're doing here now!!! … I'm better at reading things… thank god I'm smarter than high school me…

The Sweet Blue Flowers review wound up being 2,000 words, so the Shimura blogging will continue at a later date. Please look forward to it!
 
Sweet Blue Flowers/Aoi Hana, 2004-2013 - Looking back on this series, I'm really impressed by how fucking dire Fumi's situation is at the start of the manga… oh, so you've moved back to Kamakura, you've been in a secret relationship with Chizu, your older female cousin, and you find out you've been dumped when your mom buys a cake wishing her a happy marriage?? In chapter one?? No wonder she's crying all the time.

Last book blog of the year! I recently read the first big story Janet Malcolm did for the New Yorker and… you know what, it rocks, lmao. Really reassuring that she published Psychoanalysis at the age of 47… never kill yourself, etc. I'm in the middle of The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter and The Purloined Clinic by Malcolm, both which I feel strongly positive on and will write up in more detail next time. Also in the middle of Laing's The Garden Against Time, which I feel generally positively on and lol one million novels I most likely am never going to finish.

Some quick notes on two recently read books, and then some reflection on the rest of the year:

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I had a good time reading this year on a whole, in part because I dedicated myself to two or three authors (44 completed titles, 31 unique authors) and every time I hated a book, I fled back to Janet Malcolm or Tanith Lee until I stopped being mad… I was about to reflexively start writing a whole morose thing about how my attention span has been blighted by the problem of "I love dicking around the computer and playing video games" (how about Hades 2 and Silksong, eh?) but I guess I don't care that much. I'm still growing as a writer and reader, I like writing my little book blog, and that's enough to keep me pretty happy about how things are going in my chosen dumb, meaningful, and penniless occupation. Viva la 3:00am book blogging, and see you all in 2026. 

Would you believe I picked up Scarry's The Body in Pain right before getting surgery and thought, "Sure, that's a great reading pairing?" Anyway, lol here are some thoughts on shounen manga I've read.

This post is so, so late... the good news is that I'm writing a lot for a new novel project, which means instead of channeling my frustrated writing impulses into book reviews, I'm back to being a genius writer. The bad news is, I am so, so, so so behind.

This post covers all my July reads and some of my August ones.