forestofglory

Here are some thoughts on media I read and watched recently:

Danger and Other Unknown Risks by Ryan North and Erica Henderson—I was excited to try this graphic novel by the team from Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! This darker and less fun than Squirrel Girl – its set in a post apocalyptic world, and it is a lot less about friendship. I still enjoyed it but I think it would have been better not to start reading it right before bed.

Our Song Season 1 episodes 1-8—I consider myself to be very unmusical so I was surprised by how much I love this Chinese singing contest! It’s set up so that older singers and younger singers pair and compete as pairs. I really enjoy the mentorship element, some of the pairs are so cute together! I’m also finding myself enjoying the music a bunch. This is a good thing to watch in small chunks which is for taking hand brakes. (Though its too intense to watch while I’m trying to write) Sadly for me the episodes after this have vanished from youtube so I hope i’ll be able to track down another source for them.

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, Vol. 1 by Sakaomi Yuzaki, trans Caleb Cook— This is an f/f manga about a woman who loves to cook but doesn’t have a big enough appetite for all the things she wants to cook teaming up with her neighbor who has a very big appetite. This was cute with a little bit of very pointed social commentary, but a bit less of the characters talking about how go the food was than in some other food focused manga I’ve read and I missed that aspect.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster— Read this out loud to the kid. I read this as a kid and remembered it being fun and absurd, but I didn’t remember the extremely colonialist back story! It’s still mostly fun and absurd, but I was rather taken aback by the colonialist part. (ETA since I have several comments about this already: The colonialist bit is not given a lot screen time but there is a back story about how the first king sailed over the sea of knowledge, laid claim to the land, drove out the demons and founded the kingdom of Wisdom. It's pretty short an probably skip-able if you know its coming an aren't caught off guard like I was)

Ghost Book by Remy Lai —I really liked this middle grade graphic novel about a girl who can see ghosts! The ghosts were so cool and weird looking! There was friendship and adventure. It does lose points for being a dead mom book – the main character's mom dies giving birth to her in the prologue.

The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities by Dolores Hayden —For Urban Planning book club. This was really interesting, and featured a lot of experiments in “collective housekeeping” that I’d never heard of. It was also neat that this overlapped several bits of history I knew about from different angles. As is almost always the cause with books for urban planning book club I wish this had discussed race in more depth

Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold—For my ongoing group read along of the Vorkosigan Saga. This book still has all the problems that I’ve been noticing rereading these books, namely imperialism and Miles being gross about women. However like the other books in the series I found it very pacy– it drew me in and made me want to keep going even though I mostly knew what happened. Also this book contains some scenes that I really loved, and they are still great.