April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Novels/prose books:

Christie, Agatha: The A.B.C. Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery
(I liked Roger Ackroyd better, but this was pretty good).


Graphic novels/comics/cartoon collections:

Barron's editors: Barron's Book of Cartoons.

Addams, Charles: The Groaning Board.


Spiegelman, Art: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History
(yes, it's everything it's cracked up to be. I am having an Eisner moment, where I have the rare experience of reading a classic work that has been so highly praised so universally that I've begun to doubt it can live up to my expectations...but it does.

Maus is such a personal, specific work about people with distinct personalities that it's in no danger of feeling generic, no matter how much other material exists on the same subject. It's both the story of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, and the story of Spiegelman hearing the story from Vladek. There's a bit early on, after Vladek has described an early love affair that predated his marriage to Spiegelman's mother, Anja, when Vladek asks Spiegelman not to put that part in his work. Spiegelman replies, no, that it's good material, and it will help to make the rest of the story more real.

He's absolutely right. It's the context of his parents' lives that make the story worth telling, and not just a stock rendering of historically recorded atrocities. Knowing about Vladek's textile business, his love affairs, the post-partum depression suffered by Anja after the birth of the elder brother that Spiegelman himself never met--this is the stuff makes them people.

Thinking about this helped me to finally make sense of something I'd read about while researching a paper on oral history for class this semester--the life narrative as a form of oral history. I'd dismissed it as being of little importance to my focus, which was the historical value of oral history as a source, but I realize now I made a mistake. Oral history as testimony on the recent past gives you focus on the historical events, which is useful and helps to bypass some of the issues with evaluation and reliability. But life narrative is about contextualizing history within individual people's lives. When you take any history, including historical atrocities, out of the context of people's lives, it loses power. Maus--which is, among other things, Vladek's life narrative as told to his son--has power because it places the overwhelming historical events of the Holocaust--events so massive and horrific they create a narrative that eats up everything else--within the context of Vladek's entire life. It is not the story of how Vladek survived the Holocaust, it is the story of Vladek. History is lived by people. That's important.)


Manga:

Kanari, Yozaburo, author, Fumiya Sato, artist: Kindaichi Case Files: The Legend of Lake Hiren
(Kindaichi Case Files are like popcorn--pre-popped popcorn from supermarket with the greasy bad cheese on it; not that good, but you keep eating it anyway).

Tamaki Chihiro: Walkin' Butterfly vol. 2.

Miki, Tori: Anywhere But Here
(I only wish I were smart enough to get these. I got maybe one out of ten, I think?)

Still watching:

Lucky Star:

Of course. A girl needs her humor fix. And while the status quo of a four-panel joke slash sitcom show may never change (Konata is an otaku, Kagami is her straight man--and for some reason, the darling of my heart--and everyone else is kind of dumb in a different way), the plot of Lucky Channel is becoming positively epic. Plus, various new takes on the show's joke of an ending theme are threatening to displace the show proper as a source of comedy.

Rurouni Kenshin:

This is sort of on a temporary hiatus, since I've been Netflixing this one, and I recently accidentally dropped juice on the DVD player's remote, and it turns out that it's impossible to adjust the language settings on my DVD player without that. I've been enjoying it, though. Oro!


Picked up:

Seirei no Moribito:

My god, this is so good. This show is so quiet and understated, and it's beautifully crafted in every respect. It's a little like watching Mushishi, both in its sort of moody, evocative, anti-history setting--it has kind of a feel of what I believe is supposed to be a particular era of Japanese history, but distinctly sets itself as fantasy--and in the way that while I don't burn to watch new episodes of this show, it is totally engaging for each and every minute of every episode. Even when most of the screentime in an episode is literally spent with minor characters standing around and telling stories about anonymous people, I'm enthralled.

Flash burns itself out, but real craft lasts forever. Like Mushishi, like Fantastic Children, like Planetes, this is a show that I believe will stand the test of time.


New section!:

Books being read:

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction:

Okay....Rasputin. Nobody ever did that before. Will I like the plot more in books that weren't co-written by John Byrne? This is stylish and different, and the art can certainly have all my babies, but volume one didn't rock my socks enough to explain why someone was inspired enough to make a movie based on this series. Hellboy himself, I like, but as of volume one, he's more image than person.

All sorts of Georgette Heyer: Does this really require explanation? Well, the last time I was at the library, checking out yet another set of Georgette Heyer frothy Regency romances, the library assistant noted that Heyer was classic, but that she herself had never read any, and asked were, they anything like Jane Austen? To which I immediately replied, "Yes, but more frivolous."

And there you have it. If you've ever secretly wished, while re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the fifth time, that you could get the same story, but just a little bit sillier and with more fun, go to Heyer. Her romances are certainly formula, but her plots are neatly crafted, and the characters do have distinct personalities--yes, you can probably guess each pairing within the first three chapters, even without the aid of the dust jacket, but her heros and heroines are not all alike, and that's better than you can say for most romance writers. If you like ton, you'll like Heyer.

The odd Agatha Christie:

...proving, I suppose, that Josephine Tey was not unique in her love of passing judgement on people. Tey is nothing short of brilliant as a writer, but her unyielding contempt for the common person always left a sour taste in my mouth, and I marked it up to her theater background--20th century theater, finding itself so much on the rarified end of the cultural divide, always seems to need to justify its unpopularity with the masses by condemning the masses. Christie, on the other hand, is as popular culture as book writing can get--genre, formula genre, and popular formula genre; she certainly should feel no need to justify her position to people. So why the disdain for people, common people, falling moral standards, etc? The repeated observation in Hallowe'en Party that there seem to be more insane people around today, casually murdering the innocent, where are the asylums, etc, etc, why aren't mothers looking after their daughters, is, well, so ahistorical as to be moronic. It also totally puts to shame Arthur Conan Doyle's digs at Americans for being judgmental puritans; nothing, nothing, I tell you, can beat out a British mystery writer when it comes to feeling superior to the rest of humanity.