#18: The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Sea by Fuyumi Ono

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Two of the most popular characters in the Twelve Kingdoms franchise are Shoryu, the king of En, and Rokuta, known as Enki, his Kirin, who is permanently an adolescent boy. Very often, I don’t particularly get into fandom’s preferred hotties of choice, as more often than not, they don’t particularly interest me. Here, I actually fell for Shoryu and Rokuta and their bickering, snarky relationship before I fell for my beloved Yoko.

The Vast Spread of the Sea is set in the early years of Shoryu’s reign. En was all but destroyed by it’s last king, and while things are improving under Shoryu’s rule, many are concerned by the fact that Shoryu regularly disappears to go gambling and wenching and who knows what else, instead of actually staying in the palace and ruling. Rokuta himself hates kings and rulers, and struggles with the fact that he knew almost immediately that not only was Shoryu the right king for En, but also that he would one day destroy it. Meanwhile, in En’s Gen province the regent, Atsuyu, proposes a plan that will place him above the king. At his side is Koya, a young man raised by a demon, and who once met Rokuta as a child.

From the first two books (or the entire anime, take your pick) we already know that Shoryu eventually comes to be regarded as one of the world’s greatest kings, and that he turns En into the most prosperous and forward thinking of the kingdoms. We also know he hasn’t changed much. The focus of the book is the exploration of Rokuta and Shoryu as individuals, and Rokuta’s slow acceptance maybe this king, at least, isn’t a bad thing. In direct contrast to Shoryu and Rokuta and Rokuta’s reluctance to have faith in Shoryu possibly blinding him to Shoryu’s good qualities are Atsuyu and Koya, with Koya’s absolute trust and faith blinding him to Atsuyu’s ambitions, and the possibility that Atsuyu may not be as noble and selfless as he thinks, with both youths learning from all three others.

All three books in the Twelve Kingdoms series that have been published so far can be read in order (they’re actually published in reverse chronological order) or independently. The next book, however, should be a sequel to the first, Sea of Shadow, and returns to Yoko’s story. It’s actually my favorite of the four anime arcs, and it will break my heart if Tokyopop cancels the series before that. Even more so because all the books after that will be new material for me.

Dragon's Gate by Laurence Yep

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Laurence Yep "Dragon's Gate" - 3.5/5

This is the story of Otter, a Chinese boy who joins his father and uncle in America to work on the railroad. It's part of the Golden Mountain Chronicles. The books stand alone, though, or at least this one does. I just picked out a couple from the series that sounded the most interesting (this one and one about the 1903 SF earthquake) to try it. The writing's pretty good, though, so I may eventually try to get the rest.

Sadly, I didn't actually know much about this particular bit of history. I knew that Chinese laborers worked on the railroads and was under no illusions about what the conditions must have been like, but I didn't actually know any of the details. So it's an interesting read for that alone, but the story itself is pretty good, too.

I am not a fan of translating names, but in this case since it's nicknames I'm willing to give the author a little slack.

Of interest - Annette Gordon-Reed

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (of Rutgers University and New York Law School) was recently announced as the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for history. The day of the announcement, she was in Australia, and was interviewed on ABC Classic FM by Margaret Throsby, in an hour-long interview that covered Professor Gordon-Reed's work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings as well as other topics, with a great deal of focus on race in the United States of America.

As a result of that interview (available here for approximately one more week: scroll down to 21 April, the 10.05am interview) I am definitely requesting the prize-winning book - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family - through the library. I thought that others here might be interested in hearing the interview.

(Her Sydney Ideas lecture, Barack and Michelle Obama: Re-writing the Narrative of American History, is also available as a podcast, which I'm going to be downloading when I get home tonight.

Angela Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Osamu Tezuka

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

18. Angela Johnson, Heaven

This is a sequel, of sorts, to Johnson's exquisite The First Part Last, and I was very happy to see Bobby and his daughter Feather again. Heaven lacks the urgency and immediacy of First, partly because the setting has changed from a pitch-perfect Brooklyn to a small Ohio town, and partly because our protagonist Marley's crisis, while earth-shattering, lacks the physical weight of, you know, a baby.

Sometimes Pops just doesn't get it. He even said a while ago that because I was fourteen I didn't understand about life, but I wasn't about to hear that.

I read Heaven hard on the heels of The Girls Who Went Away, a remarkable and masterly study of the effects of adoption and relinquishment upon a generation of mothers. That helped me see Heaven in the context of a decades-long seismic shift in attitudes towards adoption. One remarkable outcome of participating in this challenge is that I read the reference book with a certain amount of surprise and disapproval at its overwhelming concentration on the experiences of white women. Six months ago I probably wouldn't have noticed.

19. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother

That Thursday night when I heard about my brother through the telephone, from a friend of my mother's because my mother and I were in a period of not speaking to each other (and this not speaking to each other has a life of its own, it is like a strange organism, the rules by which it survives no one can yet decipher; my mother and I never know when we will stop speaking to each other and we never know when we will begin again), I was in my house in Vermont, absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself. When I spoke to this friend of my mother's, she said that there was something wrong with my brother and that I should call my mother to find out what it was. I said, What is wrong? She said, Call your mother. I asked her, using those exact words, three times, and three times she replied the same way. And then I said, He has AIDS, and she said, Yes.

Oh, this was a devastating book, in so many ways. It is devastatingly honest. Kincaid does not spare the characters of her mother or her brother. The portrait she paints of Devon Drew is in many ways the portrait of a wasted life. Yet the writer is never petty; she is equally unsparing of her own follies, her own betrayals. How like a knife to the heart it is to read of the expatriate coming home from America, wielding her credit cards and her talents as an informed consumer as if they could do any good. How familiar her shame in the safe space, the warm life she has created for herself elsewhere; at the people she had to jettison in order to do it. It is this pitilessness that raises My Brother above the level of mere memoir. It is the plain grandeur of the language that accords it the status of myth.

20. Osamu Tezuka, Buddha, Vol 1: Kapilavastu

You have to understand that I grew up on Kimba the White Lion and wept over his parents' murder and his captivity; that I boycotted Disney's The Lion King because it plagiarised my childhood. I came late to Astro Boy and it never quite clicked for me; and by the time I had children of my own I was enthralled, body and soul, in the spell of Hayao Miyazaki. And then there is my deeply uncomfortable relationship with Disney himself. When I was small I found the anthropomorphic animals misshapen and frightening, and their jokes and gestures, drawn from completely alien American traditions of slapstick and vaudeville, impossible to interpret or comprehend.

As I grew older Disney princesses embodied the kind of woman I am not and can never be; Disneyland was a holiday only well-to-do Australian families could even contemplate, and my family was not well-to-do. There was a slight thawing of relations around the period of Beauty and the Beast and Mulan, when I would see practically any film just to satisfy my hunger for cinema, and then I found out about Disney's testimony before HUAC and decided to write him off altogether and that his notion of "the happiest place on earth" was a fatuous and corporatist nightmare. Which is where I stand today.

Encountering those Disneyesque grotesques - for Osamu Tezuka was inspired and deeply influenced by Disney - in a book about Siddhartha is, then, a very complicated and weird experience for me. I have to fight through layers and layers of loathing for Disney shot through with long-ago childish worship of Kimba, magnified by unfamiliarity with the source material and uncertainty about the tone. Kapilavastu is, clearly, a magnificent achievement, full of energy and remarkable human insight, and yet I am unquestionably not its target audience. Will I go on with the series? I am not sure.

#03 Nury Vittachi: The Feng Shui Detective

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Available here. 

I enjoyed this odd little book.  This is a mystery set in Singapore, but it also takes place elsewhere.  The main detective is C. F. Wong, a feng shui man, and he is assisted by intern Joyce McQuinnie, a third culture kid.  The book is written by Nury Vittachi, who is a Hong Kong writer writing in English.  There's quite a lot of word-play in the story: English as adapted by various cultures, classes, locales, and age groups.  The story is pretty simple: a couple of mysteries occur and Wong is more or less drawn into solving them.

The author uses mixed point of view.  Sometimes tight third person, sometimes omni, sometimes storyteller voice, sometimes switching from character to character.  I found it a bit odd at times, but it does add to the flavor of the novel, as most of the point (IMHO) is how different people view things differently.

This is a playful story and nothing is terribly serious.  There is a certain amount of tom-foolery and silliness, some insight into feng shui, a modicum of sleuthing.  Every so often, C. F. Wong writes an entry in the journal he keeps, where he records the stories of the great sages and provides some insight in Oriental wisdom. 

This is a fluffy, fun mystery about mixed cultures, different languages, clashing personalities and ages.  Recommended. 

Starship and Haiku: Somtow Sucharitkul

[teaotter.livejournal.com]

This book is very strange, and not at all the place I would've chosen to start this challenge! It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the events largely take place in Hawaii and Japan. Japan is the only country to escape large-scale destruction, but not the despair that followed. Japan has become obsessed with death and dying, and there is a vast social movement toward suicide. The main characters are trying to stop the people behind the suicide propaganda and join a project which is building spacships for people to leave earth.

I found the world of the book fascinating, and many of the images were hauntingly beautiful. But the plot is haphazard at best, and most of the characters are pretty flat. And I found the plot-point about the whales (which is a driving force in the book) to be somewhere between ludicrous and horrendously offensive.

All in all, I don't recommend this book unless you're willing to overlook a lot. I've been told that this is not the best of the author's science fiction, which reassures me, since I have several more of his books on my reading list.

Second Book: Stradbroke Dreamtime by Oodgeroo aka Kath Walker

[violent-rabbit.livejournal.com]

Second Book: Stradbroke Dreamtime by Oodgeroo aka Kath Walker


The first half details stories from her childhood, growing up in the traditional Aboriginal manner and the second half is a collection of Dreamtime stories.

This is primarily a children's book, but do not let that turn you off! There is a beautiful rich imagery to all though this and the simplistic writing only serves to further the wonderful visuals. There is a wistful and loving tone that creates a lovely warmth throughout the entire recollections. It is a a nice gentle introduction to what life was like in her childhood as an aborigine near the bush (for a clueless suburbanite like myself).

I was struck, personally, at how sad most of the Dreamtime stories were. I am of the opinion that one purpose they served was as warnings coded into tales- don't wander off or the bunyip will turn you into a vine- which it a tradition throughout all cultures with active children.


Well worth the read.

9: Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology

[hapex-legomena.livejournal.com]

Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology

in short: A new comics anthology edited by Asians, written by Asians, drawn by Asians, about Asians, for everybody.

( more )