Hey! Back again, and today I want to talk about books.
I just finished reading Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. It's a werewolf book (I'm a sucker for werewolves) about a girl named Vivian who defies the pack by falling in love with a human boy. It was kind of short, and I finished it in an afternoon. I'd seen the book before, but mostly because of the kind-of-lame title, I decided not to read it, but several people told it was good so I decided to give it a chance. (Now, of course you hear all the time not to judge a book by its cover. I completely disagree. Nowadays, in the modern, competitive, dog-eat-dog publishing world, sometimes if you want your book to be taken seriously you need to give it a good title and interesting cover art. Now, I am lenient about the cover art (that's not always up to the author) but I am NOT about the title. The author names her book, thank you, and that's the name she should be expecting the public to be seeing and, unfortunately, judging. If you have two fantasy books in front of you, you will mostly likely pick the most interesting looking/sounding one first. There. I'm done ranting now. :P) All in all, it was a little fast for my liking, but most of the story was all right. It was slightly young for me, but there were some original plot twists that kind of stay with you. It would have been much better if it were longer and more in-detail.

If you don't already know, I am a HUGE Stephenie Meyer fan. She's the author of Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse, three books of a series about vampires. (I'm even MORE of a sucker for vampires than I am for werewolves!) It's about a human girl, Bella, who meets a vampire, Edward, who belongs to a "vegetarian" coven of vampires who struggle to spill as little human blood as possible. I just watched a brief video on Amazon.com interviewing her, and she says she's working on a fourth installment of the Bella-and-Edward series "tentatively entitled Breaking Dawn." She said that this will be the end of this particular series, but she also says it's possible that she'll be writing more Bella/vampire books afterward. Which... doesn't make much sense, but hey! I'll take what I can get. If she wants to write more books about Bella and Edward, by all means. I would buy them all. I'm just happy there's one more until the series "ends." Eclipse came out very recently, in August, and when I finished reading it I got so depressed that I was finished and that it was over that I flipped the book over and started reading it over again, right then and there. :)

On the manga fronts, a listing of my favorite series:

Bleach. I love, love, love, love Bleach. I found two Bleach posters in Canada that I bought and they're in my room now. It's the best shonen manga I've probably ever read... maybe excluding Fullmetal Alchemist which I will talk about later. Right now I need to find Volume 10 - my library doesn't have it. I'll have to request it. There's a young guy librarian there who's my manga source. I love him ever so. Anyways, Bleach is about Soul Reapers, spiritual beings who harvest souls who are trapped in the physical world and return them to the Soul Society, where they can rest in peace. If the Soul Reapers are too slow on getting to deceased souls, they turn into Hollows, raging monsters who destroy everything in their path, desperate to reach peace in the Soul Society. And then the Reapers have to defeat them with various soul-weapons. It's very cool. My favorite character is Uryu, who is not a Soul Reaper but a Quincy, a different type of soul police, and carries a giant spiritual bow-and-arrow for dispatching Hollows. YAY!

Chobits. One of the best shojo mangas ever. It's about Hideki, a college student, who finds an abandoned persocom (human-shaped computer who can act like a companion and also do several handy technological stuffs) named Chi. Chi has lost all of her memory files, so she doesn't know what she is or who was her previous owner. Hideki eventually realizes that Chi may be a Chobit, one of the legendary series of persocoms who possess unknown but powerful abilities. Have yet to find a good Chobits poster. My favorite character is Freya, who's like Chi's dark alter-ego. I won't explain further than that, so as not to include any spoilers. :) The series ended at Volume 8. *sobs uncontrollably* Yes, I cried. I always cry when good stories end.

Fruits Basket. One of the sillier and girlier of shojo mangas, but it was my very first manga, and therefore has a very special place in my heart. It's about Tohru, an orphan who eventually moves in with the Sohma family, who have a dark secret concerning the zodiac (if someone of the opposite sex hugs them, or they experience moments of extreme emotional stress, they transform into their zodiac animal. My favorite character is Kyo, the cat! I've read up to Volume 16, although I think there's 24 out there. Not sure how many are presently translated into English.

Fullmetal Alchemist. Very, very, very good shonen manga. I haven't read the whole, series, though. Only up to Volume 10, methinks. About Edward and Alphonse Elric, two brothers and alchemists who tried to bring back their dead mother when they were younger. The process went terribly wrong and Alphonse's body and Edward's leg were consumed by the dark beast they summoned. Edward, desperate to save his little brother, sold his arm to the beast in exchange for Alphonse's soul, which he then transmuted into a giant suit of armor. So now Alphonse is a giant (cool) suit of armor, and Edward's got metal robotic limbs. And now they're out to get their bodies back. It's awesome.

Absolute Boyfriend. OK, probably even sillier than Fruits Basket, but I still love it. It's basically this ongoing love triangle between a girl named Riiko and two guys named Soshi and Night (who happens to be a robot, kind of.) Classic shojo manga, but good nontheless.

OK. I'm done. That was a superlong post. Sorry if you actually read all that. Heh heh. So! Those are the books I'm in to. Later!

Black Cat =^-^=

++ purred Black Cat at 3:20 PM | 0 comments

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