Wednesday Reading

So I have finished not only The Invisible Library but also its sequel, The Masked City. At this point I am enjoying the series enough to continue. And yet, and yet ... I keep feeling that author Genevieve Cogman is not making as good use of her elements as might be. There are bits and pieces here that remind me of many other fantasy works, ranging from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comics series through Diana Wynne Jones' Multiverse books (both Magids and Chrestomanci) to Jim C. Hines' "Magic Ex Libris" book series, and as I mentioned last week, the tone and settings remind me somewhat of Martha Wells' "Fall of Ile Rien" series. That's not meant to be a negative: I feel pleased rather than otherwise every time I spot a resemblance.

Still ... we have a series set mostly in a parallel Europe (or rather, a series of parallel Europes), we have a recurring minor character from India, we have dragons that are mostly based on Chinese legend ... but I don't have a feeling that somewhere across the ocean are the Americas, that there is Africa off to the south, that east Asia includes also Japan and Indonesia. The Fae are mostly the British Isles Fae: we don't even seem to have any of the European mythological peoples. The settings we see are fairly well drawn, but I don't have a feeling that anything lies beyond them. I'm not sure what Cogman could have done about this, but it's a lack I felt.

I will say that the series does turn out to have a bit of wit I'd been missing when I wrote last week; still, Irene is not as amusing a viewpoint character as (say) Martha Wells' Tremaine Valiarde. I think part of it is that Irene takes herself more seriously.

I realize that I never wrote about the new-to-me manga series I'd started. Golden Kamuy is a seinen (young men's) series about a whole heap o' gold that's hidden somewhere and the people who are trying to find it. It's set in the early 20th century, right after the Russo-Japanese War, and the two main characters are Saichi Sugimoto, known as "Immortal" Sugimoto, a former Japanese soldier with remarkable powers of recovery, and a petite young Ainu girl named Asirpa who is a superlative hunter and tracker. Weirdly, the series also has a dash of cooking manga: Asirpa's cooking is described with the same enthusiastic reverence shown toward traditional Japanese cuisine in the famous food manga Oishinbo. The rest of the series reminds me of Blade of the Immortal more than anything else, although the artwork is not quite as gorgeous as that (it's still well-drawn, though).

Complex Age is about a cosplay enthusiast, Nagisa Kataura, who is starting to have second thoughts about her hobby. She's 26, older than most of the other cosplayers she knows, and she is keeping her hobby a secret from her co-workers at the office and even to some extent from her parents, with whom she lives. The second volume is mostly taken up with a possible cautionary tale about her stern supervisor at work, who also turns out to be a cosplayer. When people at the office find some pictures online of the supervisor in revealing costumes, the disapproving gossip and sidelong looks get to the supervisor, and she quits. I have to say that this really hit home for me: mainstream folks can still indeed be obtuse and unkind about fannish pastimes. I find myself rather worried with where the series might be going with Nagisa. Note that this is also a seinen series (this is something that confused the hell out of me when I first encountered the idea, with the girls' kendo team series Bamboo Blade), so there are a certain number of panty shots etc. — although the series is self-aware enough that this very subject becomes a plot point in the first volume (someone takes an up-skirt photo of Nagisa when she's in costume).