(no subject)

[oyceter]

29. Gawande, Atul - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
    As noted in the subtitle, this is a book about bettering performance in the medical sphere, though Gawande's findings can be applied to more general situations as well. He covers hand-washing compliance in hospitals, medical professionals and legal executions, the standardization of child-birth, the increasing rates of success for medical procedures in the battlefield, and many other topics. (more)


30. Yang, Sunny - Hanbok: The Art of Korean Clothing
    I think this is a fairly basic introduction to the history of Korean clothing from the Three Kingdoms (57 BCE - 668 BCE) through Westernization (~1800s). It's hard for me to tell, given that I know zero about Korean clothing outside of what I've seen on kdramas. Yang gives a brief history of Korean to contextualize what was going on with changes in clothing, though I am somewhat wary of its scholarly accuracy, given Yang's prose and attitude in the rest of the book. (more)


31. Liu, Marjorie M. - The Last Twilight
    Doctor Rikki Kinn is treating what looks like an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo, but she soon gets tangled up in something much bigger. Enter Amiri the cheetah shapeshifter from Dirk & Steele, who is returning to Africa for the first time since being kidnapped by the Consortium. (more)


32. Gawande, Atul - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
    I ran to get this after I finished Gawande's Better. I think I may like it a smidgen better than Better, even though this is an earlier book, but most of that is simply subject-matter preference on my part. Both books are very well-written, compulsive reads. (more)


33. Lee Kyung Ja, Hong Na Young, and Chang Sook Hwan - Traditional Korean Costume
    I think the only bad things I can say about the book is that none of the samples have dates (I particularly wanted to know for the eyeglass cases and the rubber-soled shoes), that it only covers Joseon (as expected, given the fragility of clothing), and that it has no little cloth samples (some day...). Other than that, this is a costume nut's dream. (more)

19: Love as a Foreign Language vol 1 by J. Torres and Eric Kim

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

19: Love as a Foreign Language volume 1 by J. Torres and Eric Kim

I first saw this as single comics issues, ages ago; I lost track of the series, as I so often do (I can be kind of lackadaisical when it comes to keeping up with miniseries), and was delighted to see it collected. This is the first of two collections, gathering together the first 3 96-page single issues; the unusually substantial format was one of the things that drew me to the title -- I'm always interested in new and different comics formats, and this was one that worked well for what Torres and Kim were doing. LaaFL is a kind of story that would be totally unremarkable in Japan and is a bit of an oddity in the American comics market: it's a straightforward romantic comedy about a young Canadian named Joel who's teaching English as a second language in a private teaching institution in Seoul. Joel doesn't like Korea much; the food is too spicy, he doesn't speak the language, he doesn't understand the customs, and everywhere he goes he feels like people are laughing at the crass, dumb foreigner.

What's wonderful about LaaFL is that the way Torres and Kim tell the story makes it perfectly clear that there's nothing objectively horrible about Joel's situation; it's not that Seoul is a bad place or the Koreans he meets are bad people (actually, they're all really nice), it's just that he's lonely and homesick and doesn't fit in. It's not really his fault, but it's not really anyone else's fault either. It's just a mismatch. The fact that Joel's colleagues at the school, a Korean-American and a white British woman, have different attitudes and experiences in Seoul, and tend to think that Joel's being silly, makes it clear that it's a personal issue for Joel and not some generalizable East/West clash. Further, although there's quite a bit of Korean dialogue that Joel doesn't understand, we get to read the translations at the back of the book, and so we can see (as Joel can't) that the Koreans aren't actually talking about him most of the time, no matter how paranoid he feels.

As of the end of the first volume, the romance part of the comedy has barely got started, though even that aspect of the story features a lot of intercultural angsting, since the girl Joel's fallen for is Korean. There are all sorts of crazy awful things a writer can do with an intercultural romance, but given how deftly and cleverly Torres has handled the issues so far, I feel like I'm in good hands.