It’s always hard to ignore a title after someone writes an excellent post about it, but Solanin is also a highly attractive two volumes in length — perfect for my limited time and short attention span. And I guess there was also some masochistic curiosity to it because I knew Solanin would be painful to read. It’s about post-college life. It’s about life in general. It’s about still growing up even after you thought you’d already done so. And it hits very close to home.
Here is the review, and here is the MAL mirror.
Reading it was very hard in the beginning. Sixteen pages in and I could already relate absurdly well with both Meiko and Taneda, and hell, all their friends as well. It was depressing, but it got easier the further I progressed because they became their own people, rather than just ghostly representations of myself and people I knew. The story is how they choose to live their own lives, one path in a forest of many. Theirs aren’t the best choice, nor the worst. It isn’t an answer, but it’s there. Highly recommend.
As is my routine now, I reread Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night in preparation for the movie, which debuted at midnight, but which I’ll not be seeing until this weekend. It was either my third or fourth time reading it. I know I reread it two summers ago just before the final book’s release, but I can’t remember if I’d reread it another time between that and when the book itself released (HBP is the sixth book). I think Half-Blood Prince is probably my least favorite of the series. I’ve always felt that my opinion of Harry Potter started to sour a little after the fourth book, after which I felt that J.K. Rowling lost a lot of focus and inserted many unnecessary and pointlessly distracting things when she should have been focusing on more pressing matters — so I guess the sixth book would be an accumulation of those disappointments. I don’t think my impressions changed much during subsequent rereading(s) of HBP.
So I guess I’m kind of surprised that this time, I think I liked it much, much better.
(This post contains no spoilers for any Harry Potter book or movie.)
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Here it is, my review of Eureka seveN, which is a wonderfully obnoxious 2,000 words. (The MAL mirror is here.) The short version is that I didn’t like the series very much though it did have a lot of technical merits. As usual, the review is spoiler-free, but today, there shall be additional, spoilerific rambling in the rest of this entry, followed by some kind of epic fanboy/fanrage showdown in the comments because ghostlightning thinks there’s love to remember in Eureka seveN. How about that!
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So this has always bothered me. A lot of anime, manga, and Japanese video game characters are fourteen or fifteen years old. Makes sense, that’s the primary target audience. That in itself isn’t what bothers me — what bothers me is the huge, huge difference there usually is between the portrayal of the fourteen-year olds and the fifteen-year olds. At fourteen, characters are depicted as innocent, naive, and both childish and childlike. In some cases, I find their behavior applicable to people as young as eight, which is kind of ridiculous. At fifteen, characters become much more mature; they are tougher, hardened to some extent, and a little more serious. Usually, I can very easily imagine those characters being seventeen or eighteen, or sometimes even in their early twenties. Does such a dramatic shift really happen between the two ages?
One year difference? Riiiight.
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