So I have gotten sick two weekends in a row! It is a skill. But more to the point, one of the ways I cope with being sick is by reading things. The weekend before last featured me devouring Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum, one of the few Discworld books I still hadn't read, rather than food. And so, some thoughts:

- I think that Carpe Jugulum, ( Read more... )

"All the little angels rise up, rise up
All the little angels rise up high
How do they rise up, rise up, rise up
How do they rise up, rise up high?

They rise heads up, heads up, heads up
They rise heads up, heads up high"

A glorious 25th of May to everyone.

"I've confessed to everything and I'd like to be hanged.
Now, if you please."

This is not, perhaps, the opening you expect from a young adult fantasy novel. But if Franny Billingsley has demonstrated anything in her work, it's that her heroines are refreshingly real, complex, and unexpected.

Chime is Billingsley's latest work. It's also her most ( Read more... )

So a little while ago I finally watched my box set of Ergo Proxy. It only took me...two years of owning it to get around to it. That is honestly faster than with some things I own.

Ergo Proxy is set in a future in which most of the earth has been rendered inhabitable, and people now live in domed cities where they are reproduced artificially. ( Read more... )

Another recently completed canon is Puella Magi Madoka Magica! Which means it is time for me to imitate bookelfe again and give you picspam. I will try not to include any major spoilers, which will probably make this post fairly short.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica's creators and marketing team would like you to think it is a nice magical girl show! They ( Read more... )

Kekkaishi is a completed canon! Which means the only excuse any of you have for not reading it is, um, that it is 345 chapters of completed canon.

And now, I shall talk to myself.

( EXTREMELY SPOILERY thoughts on some things in the last few chapters )

Well, Arakawa, of all the things you could choose to follow up Fullmetal Alchemist with, a slice-of-life about an agricultural school in Hokkaido is...definitely not what I expected. But range is good! And they do say to write what you know...

(For the record, the first two chapters of Silver Spoon aren't particularly striking, but they're ( Read more... )

Franny Billingsley's Well Wished is one of those books that I did not really like when I first read it, but which made enough of an impression that I decided to keep around and eventually give it another try. This turned out to be a good decision!

Well Wished is the story of Nuria, an orphan who after spending years with a less-than-desirable aunt ( Read more... )

anesidorian asked me for my top five OTPs! And I have finally gotten around to providing them.

( complete with pictures, of course )

I should probably post about the conference I went to, or life in general, and I shall do these things eventually, but for a while now I have been wanting to do a bookelfe style post with picspam about Kekkaishi, SO I AM GOING TO DO THAT.

Kekkaishi has a pretty generic shonen setup. For centuries, two families of kekkaishi ("barrier masters"), the ( Read more... )