Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 114

Boarding Schools

This week iknowcommawrite, osprey-archer, and littlerhymes all posted on Malory Towers, one of Enid Blyton's boarding school series. ( iknowcommawrite also posted on Enid Blyton and naked tennis.)

View Poll: #21998

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Manga May: Monster, by Naoki Urasawa, v. 1-2

Dr. Kenzo Tenma is a brilliant Japanese surgeon living in Germany in 1985, engaged to the daughter of the head of the hospital where he works. Sure, he's writing theses that others put their names on and directed to operate on famous and rich patients so his skills make the hospital look good, but overall life is sweet.

Then two patients arrive in quick succession, a young boy shot in the head and the mayor who's had a stroke. The boy arrived first and should have priority, but Dr. Tenma is ordered to operate on the mayor. He disobeys, sticking to his principles that all lives are equal and his job is to help people, and operates on the boy. The mayor dies under the hands of a less skilled surgeon, Tenma's demoted, and his fiancee dumps him.

Then a sequence of very strange events occurs, in which the boy and his twin sister vanish without a trace, and several people in the hospital are murdered. Tenma regains his position, though he stays single, and his principles remain intact.

Ten years later, Tenma discovers that the boy he saved has become a stone-cold killer, leaving a trail of murders and broken lives. Is it Tenma's responsibility to stop him?

This manga has a fantastic premise and is fantastic all-round: very well-drawn characters (including very minor ones), striking cinematic art, assured plotting, lots of suspense, and genuinely deep moral issues. Sure, it's not literally Tenma's fault that someone he saved is killing people, but it's really about how much responsibility we have to do the right thing. Should we do right if it costs us? How far should we go? If everyone agrees that something isn't our fault, but no one else is doing anything about it, what then?

I have no idea where this is going, beyond the obvious cat-and-mouse setup, and I'm very excited to find out.

( Read more... )

Links go to the current in-print English editions, which are 2-in-1 volumes. This one contains v. 1-2. (Annoyingly, this means I am going to have to buy v. 11 twice as I don't have # 12 and the 1-volume editions are now out of print.)

Monster, Vol. 1: The Perfect Edition[image error]

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Manga May

I have a problem with comics and manga and other long ongoing series that I start reading them and then either hit the point where I'm caught up to current releases or else can't find a volume, then by the time a new volume is released or found I've forgotten everything that happened previously, intend to start over from the beginning, am daunted by the sheer number of volumes, and never get around to it.

Also, I used to work for Tokyopop and so have a large quantity of manga I have not yet read or have read only in part for that reason.

This May I would like to read more manga, whether new to me or catching up with series I'd read part of but not finished. I really don't like reading manga online or on Kindles; please don't rec anything that doesn't have English editions available in print form.

View Poll: #21993

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The Grounding of Group Six and other strange YA novels

iknowcommawrite has a great review of The Grounding of Group Six, a deeply peculiar YA novel which I bet at least some of you read and were boggled by, and which I loaned her if she'd post on it. Go forth and discuss! (The Grounding of Group 6[image error] on Kindle.)

coffeeandink solves a decades-old mystery for me by naming the book whose name I could never remember, The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and The Splendid Kids[image error], and asks about subversive children's literature.

What books have you read where you thought, for reasons other than that it sucked, "How in the world did this get published?"

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Debunking food, fat, and fitness myths

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

I am NOT interested in basic articles about very well-known ideas like fat will kill you, carbs will kill you, meat will kill you, anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food such as everything but cabbage and turnips will kill you, etc.

I am also NOT interested in articles with a primarily political bent (i.e., "pushing diets on women is based on sexism/capitalism not science;") I agree with that, but I'm looking for stuff where the meat is science and the politics is the side dish rather than the reverse.

I'm looking for more in-depth, up-to-date information on topics including but not limited to...

- Do we actually know anything about nutrition, given the every-five-year swings between "eggs are cardioprotective/eggs are a heart attack on a plate," "fat is the Devil/carbs are the Devil," etc? If so, what is it and how do we know it?

- What is the actual science on grains (and no, I don't mean Wheat Belly)?

- What is the best and most cutting-edge knowledge on gaining strength?

- What is the actual science on the causes of Type 2 diabetes, why its prevalence has risen so much, and its association with obesity?

- What is the actual knowledge of the diet and health of "cavemen?"

- What is the actual science on being fat, thin, and in-between in terms of health? For instance, is it better to be fat and active than "normal weight" and sedentary? (I know the answer but I'm looking for something that goes into this in-depth.)

- What is the deal with "calorie reduction makes you healthier and live longer" vs. "dieting is bad for you?"

I'm already familiar with Michael Pollan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark's Daily Apple, Diet Cults, Body of Truth, and The Starvation Experiment. And lots more but those are the things I get recced a lot already.

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Wed Wabbit, by Lissa Evans

Ten-year-old Fidge is dealing with a lot, from her beloved father's death a year ago to being the only practical person in a flamboyant family to her four-year-old sister Minnie's refusal to pronounce Rs because it's cuter that way and frequent demands that Fitch read her favorite book, The Land of the Wimbley Woos, a cloying picture book written in clunky verse about a magical land of color-coded, dustbin-shaped people.

But when Minnie is hospitalized in an accident, Fidge and her phobic-of-everything cousin get trapped in the Land of the Wimbley Woos... which has been taken over by a monstrous version of Minnie's favorite stuffed animal, Wed Wabbit.

An uneven but often extremely funny children's book. The best parts were Fidge's outrage at having to deal with actual Wimbley Woos and their terrible rhymes and hunger for hugs. The parts where it played the story straight, as a more sophisticated version of the picture book's message of love and learning, were fine but a story I've read a lot. The opening chapters, in which Fidge blames herself for her sister's accident and it looks for a while like Minnie's going to die, felt like they came from a different and much gloomier book than the rest of it; the understated way it dealt with their father's death worked much better with the overall tone.

The book was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and has some interesting reviews on Goodreads as a result from people who normally don't read fantasy ever and were appalled at having to read one if they were supposed to read the entire slate. This surprised me as a number of classic children's fantasies were Carnegie Medal winners or nominees, but I guess it's gone more toward realism, or at least very very serious fantasy lately. A couple rather hopefully suggested that the book could be interpreted as Fidge having a nervous breakdown and imagining the whole thing!

(I don't think this reading is supported by the text, as her cousin is also involved and also has objective personality growth as a result; I guess maybe he could have changed as a result of observing her total breakdown or just coincidentally, but that seems unlikely.)

Wed Wabbit[image error]

[image error] [image error]

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I'm so vain, I think this blog is about me.

Me at Passover/Easter/Game of Thrones viewing last night. We dubbed it Passeaster, which sounds like something Helena from Orphan Black would celebrate.





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She's Like A Sunset

I've had a hell of a year. I broke my foot and was wrongly told that I'd had a heart attack in the same week - and that was a typical week. So, now that I have learned that my heart is fine, and also that I do not have breast cancer and am not in fact likely to have a stroke (you see what kind of year it was), I decided to get my hair touched up to celebrate.

Since enough had washed out or grown out to switch up the colors a bit, I went with "sunset." Tea Cup, the stylist, literally used a photo of a sunset to choose the shades.

Ta-da!



I told Tea Cup that I'd wanted to have rainbow hair ever since I was eleven, and I'm finally fulfilling my dream. All the stylists were thrilled to hear that. It was a really fun atmosphere in the salon, as everyone was just so delighted to be there and be getting truly amazing hair.

Tea Cup said, "It's funny to say this, since obviously these aren't natural colors, but you really seem meant to have this kind of hair. Sometimes people come in and get looks that they thought they wanted, but then they have second thoughts and then the hair doesn't look right on them. But when someone's really happy and confident with what they want, then it always looks good on them. And that's what you got. It's a very bold look, but you're wearing it - it's not wearing you."

More below cut. ( Read more... )

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Update on various aggravations

1. Chef Nourish refunded my money (minus $23 for the two gross meals I already received.) Also, my Yelp review is still up. I'll take that as a win.

2. The bookcase saga continues. To refresh your memory, one of a set of two matching bookcases arrived without the unique bolts needed to put them together. The seller refused to send replacement bolts. Amazon said they were a third party and not their problem.

I finally got the seller to tell me the name of the manufacturer of the bolts, and inquired with them. They promptly replied to tell me to take it up with Amazon. I told them Amazon wouldn't help, and got this reply:

Yes, they are a third party and we do not sell products to Amazon. They sold it to you, so they take responsibility. They should send you a new bookcase.

ARRRRRRGH. I sent them an email repeating that Amazon told me to take it up with the seller, and the seller told me to take it up with the manufacturer. At that point, either taking pity on me or wanting to stop getting messages, they promised to send me more bolts. We'll see if they ever arrive.

3. In the meantime, I gave in and ordered a replacement bookcase from the same people (I know, but it's a matching set). They sent me the matched set (i.e., two).

While attempting to drag them inside, Alex bolted between my legs and was down the stairs in literally seconds. In a panic, I rushed after him.

I should mention at this point that it was late at night and I wore only a very skimpy nightshirt with nothing underneath. Also, since I'd been in my chair at that moment, I did not have my crutches with me, something whose implications only dawned on me when I was at the bottom of the very dirty stairs I had just literally slithered down bare-assed.

With no other choice, I slithered to Alex, who luckily hadn't gone far and was lurking under a nearby bush, grabbed him, and then levered myself back up the dirty stairs, still bare-assed and now with the additional weight of a cat. Let's just say it was not the most fun thing ever.

Goddamn cats! Anyone got any ideas on how to keep Alex from bolting again? Other than locking them out of the living room every time I open the outside doors, which is not remotely practical due to the layout of my apartment. I live near an extremely busy street, so I really don't want them escaping.

The bookcases are still outside my door, so I have no idea whether or not they came with the bolts.

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Decluttering Drawers: Bedroom

Learning how to fold things so they are in horizontal rows rather than vertical stacks is definitely the point where this tipped over into "hobby." However, it does make stuff WAY easier to find.

These are before-and-after aerial shots of my T-shirt drawer:





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