Books for March

Didn't get to as much as I'd hoped to last month, due in large part to an agonizingly slow read, one which I didn't even manage to finish up in March and will be on next month's list. Still, this was a moth with a lot of new and a lot of GOOD. I was very pleased :)

As always, there may be spoilers behind the cut.

Comics
First and foremost on the list was the Hawkeye trade "Blindspot." I've sort of vaguely liked Hawkeye for a while, but the recent Marvel animated shows Superhero squad and the superior Earth's Mightiest Heroes piqued my interest, and his appearance in the Thor and Avengers movies didn't help. So I picked this up out of curiosity about his circus performer background and his sometimes evil brother Barney.

I liked it. I really did. I don't think it's all that great technically speaking, but from a character perspective I think it captured a lot of what I like about Hawkeye - the quip wit that's not always as clever as he thinks it is, the sometimes overinflated ego and sense of his own abilities and, of course, his ability to sometimes prove that ego perfectly justified. It was definitely a fun read.

I also read the first collection of Emerald Warriors, featuring red lantern Guy Gardner. I love Guy, and I love red lantern Guy, and I find this book entertaining for him. But that aside, there were just some serious problems with the book. I wish it could have been better, but given my thoughts on a lot of the contemporary stuff to this, I guess I should be glad I at least got a well-written Guy from the deal.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a beautiful, perfectly drawn comic book. Perfectly written? Not so much, not always. But the art alone really captured the essence and feel of Oz for me, and I'll not only definitely be reading more, but recommend it to anyone with a bit of a soft spot for the Baum books.

The month's comic reading was rounded out with a lackluster Doctor Who Annual which largely bored me and the first volume of the Game of Thrones comic, which might have been more enthralling if I hadn't already both read the books and seen the series. Both are, unfortunately, better versions of the story than the comic is.

Manga
I continued reading Toriko this month with Volume 4 - would have gotten farther but I haven't gotten around to a library visit in weeks. After just being ambivalent about the series in the first three volumes, I really thought it fell into its own here - maybe because the characters head out on an adventure, maybe because we're growing the cast and I'm liking a lot of the additions, maybe just because the writer's hitting his stride. Either way, looking forward to more.

I started two series this month as well, both entertaining but in very, diametrically different ways. First was The Color of - series, staring with The Color of Earth and then going to The Color of Water. These are completely lovely - the art is sweeping and beautiful, and the story is a tale of a girl growing up with a single mother, learning about life and love and sex. It's fairly organic and very sweet, as the main character begins to try and figure out her feelings and her relationships both with the boys she finds attractive, and with her mother as she becomes more and more a woman. I hope to pick up the final volume very soon and finish out this lovely trilogy.

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum I also read the five volumes of The Gain Saga by Kaori Yuki. These are over-the-top, gory, bloody gothic horror-style manga full of unhappiness and twisted characters and pretty boys making veiled passes at one another. It's not necessarily quality, though the art is as always very beautiful and at the end, most of the plots turn out to make some semblance of sense (not a given in horror manga I've found). It remains a guilty pleasure :)

Books
I started the month with Timeless, the last Parasol Protectorate book. Another solid entry in that series. I thought, some small nitpicks aside, it was a really great ending and I loved the way many of the characters god to develop. I'll have to keep an eye out for more by Carriger.

I read not one but two nonfiction books this month as well - more than I sometimes read in an entire year :). First was the classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which managed to be hopeful even when it was discussing terrible things. The voice in this book was simply marvelous. And second was King Peggy, the account of a woman from Silver Spring who was named King of her home village and the troubles she had to go to to try and address problems both natural and man-made that plagued it. It had a slow start, but Peggy has an amazing voice and the lengths to which she went to try to clean up the corruption and address her people's needs was inspiring.

The second Incryptic novel Midnight Blue-Light Special by Seanan McGuire came out, and I found it surpassed the first in just about every way. One minor hiccup aside, I thought it was a really great, really tense story and the widening cast of characters who have real stakes made it a really fast and gripping read. Stakes! It's funny how much just adding real, identifiable stakes to a book makes things really tick along.

Book club read Shades of Gray, a strange little dystopian book about a world in which people are arranged by the colors they can see, spoons are used as heirlooms and technology keeps getting rolled back by the powers that be. I'm still torn about this one - I think though, as I get more distance on it, I do like it and may reread it at some point. It was a good book - one of the best new books I've read so far this year - but my personal taste led to it being a bit of a tough one for me to categorize.

My only reread this month was The Waste Lands by King, but hey, if I have to pick one, this would be the best one. I love this book - my absolute favorite novel right now, and has been for over a decade. The setting, the characters, the action... just love it.