Daily Thoughts 1/3/2010

Stan Sakai at WonderCon 2009.28 February 2009(2009-02-28)This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License by Brokensphereon on Wikimedia http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stan_Sakai_at_WonderCon_2009_1.JPG Stan Sakai is the author of Usagi Yojimbo.

Daily Thoughts 1/3/2010

Usagi Yojimbo Yokai by Stan Sakai

Miyamoto Usagi is a ronin, a roaming unaffilitated samurai in this graphic novel. The character is loosely based on Miyamoto Musashi. The setting is a medieval japan populated by mythical creatures and anthropomorphic animals. Miyamoto Usagi is a rabbit. The graphic novel by Stan Sakai has been running for 25 years. This book was specifically produced for the 25th anniversary of the comic. It has won a variety of awards including the Eisner Award, the Inkpot Award, an American Library Association award, and many others. The writing and drawing is very entertaining.

This edition is a standalone edition. The colors are done with watercolors which is not like most American comics. Stan Sakai is from Hawaii. It adds a different feeling to the comic. The lines are also very strong and fluid. This makes the characters well defined. The background is a medieval Japan with some unusual touches, oversize mushrooms, some strange animals, it transports you to a mythical place.

The story takes place on the night of Oborozuki-Yo (the hazy moon) at the same time it is tied with the Yokai (haunts). This gives the author license to introduce ghosts, demons, and spirits from Japanese mythology as well as some of his own fanciful creations. Some of there are silly like the tentacle beast, and some of them are mythological like the fox spirit and the fire breathing salamander.

At the end of the book, there is an interview with Stan Sakai. He details the design, panel layout, writing, and research into Japanese folklore to create the story. He also talks about his work with Sergio Aragones as a letterer for the comic Groo.

This comic was fun to read with plenty of color, action, monsters, and folklore.

I wrote this review while I was sitting in the laundromat. Then I rewrote it a bit while I am sitting at the computer.

I also had time to read a little bit more of In The First Circle. Right now, I am at the point where Stalin is a character in the book. He is rather self important and more than a little deadly in an uncompromising ironhanded way. If Stalin is insulting the other characters, they will live, otherwise if he is quiet, they die. Every couple of chapters the main characters change. This is a very hard thing to do.

Stalin makes several literary references inside the book which is different. He praises the book, Iosif Vissaronovich Stalin: Short Biography and he describes how he made sure that the book portrayed him in a positive light. Later Stalin also praises the book Tito: Traitor In Chief by Renaud de Jourenel one of his rivals.

I watched a bit more of the BBC production of I Claudius. I am up to Chapter 6 which is called Reign of Terror. Tiberius is running the Roman empire with an ironhand and accusing many people of treason. Soon, Caligula will be in power.

Daily Thoughts 1/2/2009

Russian writer and Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn looks out from a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, before departing on a journey across Russia. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev, 1994, Gnu Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

Daily Thoughts 1/2/2009

I am reading In The First Circle, The First Uncensored Edition by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. This is the first posthumous book after his death in 2008. So far, the writing is entertaining and extremely well crafted. The title, The First Circle, refers to Dante Alighieri's first circle in hell where virtuous pagans are sent when the die in his book Inferno. Most of the action occurs in a sharaska, a minimum security prison in Russia.

Today is a day to work on the displays. I put up a new display of books which we have in storage for horror genre books. I picked out some titles by Robert Bloch, Graham Masterton, Kim Newman, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and H.P. Lovecraft. I also added the complete short stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Horror is very popular. More popular than science fiction in the library I work in.

We also put up a display of books and videos on African American leaders. We might also add some audiobooks to make the display truly multimedia.

Right now, I am also going to update the current events and people in the news display. I went through and updated the lobby display for gardening and added a few books to the oversize art books in the display cases in our gallery. We have a small art gallery supported by a local arts organization in our library.

Some more books came in for me to read, I now have a few more books added to my to read pile; Usagi Yojimbo Yokai by Stan Sakai. This is one of my favorite comics, it is a furry samurai comic book. The main character is based on Musashi and is an anthropomorphic rabbit. There is a lot of fighting and many mythical creatures from Japan as well as ninjas, samurais, thieves, gamblers, and outlaws of various persuasions in the stories. The next book is Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford, Jane Austen as a modern day vampire. The last one is The Cartoon History of the Modern World Part II from Bastille to Baghdad by Larry Gonick. I enjoyed his previous books on ancient history, The Cartoon History of the Universe, Parts I, II, and III.

I am preparing for the next graphic novels club which is on January 25, 2009. I am hoping to focus on Watchmen and other comics by Alan Moore.

I just put in my new day by day desk calendar and threw out the old one. It is one of the first things to do during the new year.

Having read some more of The First Circle, I am beginning to realize that this will take me quite a while to read. It has the depth of thought and feeling of the great russian novels like Crime and Punishment. There is a strong sense of ironic realism. This includes a lot of philosophical ground which is already starting to reveal itself; Dante, Goethe, Lenin, Stalin, mathematics, liberalism, nazism, totalitarianism, communism, the secret police are only a few subjects that the novel has touched on in the first fifty pages.