Local indie bookstores are the best. It’s a place where community events celebrate reading culture, books and tangential reading items can be purchased for personal delight or as a gift, and everybody knows your name? Yes, well there are a few booksellers at my local bookstore that I’ve known for years both in a professional capacity and a personal one.
I was delighted during a recent visit that Cheryl remembered my love for the manga series Witch Hat Atelier and she mentioned that the spinoff series Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen was coming out. She said she’d order one for me if I wanted. Absolutely!
Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. In chilly upstate New York weather I drove on over after getting the call and I’m now the proud owner of the first volume in the new series.
Thank you to The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza for being a friend! Plus, for the cheap seats in the back, local indie bookstores are the best.
Amassed several weeks ago, I had five manga recommended and/or selected that have to do with witches that I decided to read Monday through Friday of the week prior to Halloween to get in season. Here’s a mini review of each of the five.
Monday— Wandering Witch by Jougi Shiraishi had an intriguing premise of Elaina journeying across towns and countries encountering unique people and living situations. However, each felt more like a vignette than a cohesive story.
Tuesday— Burn the Witch by Tite Kubo which was less about witches and more about dragons and a shadow realm called Reverse London. It was a bit of a bait-and-switch and therefore disappointing.
Wednesday— Daily Report About My Witch Senpai by Maka Mochida had an adorable love story between Shizuka and Misono. Manga is always fun when presented as a romantic comedy then throw in some magic with witches flying on brooms and I’m taken away. Plus, when I crush on a character’s style, I know it’s a manga I enjoyed.
Thursday— Little Witch Academia by Yoh Yoshinari, Keisuke Sato, and Trigger was much better as an anime having watched it several years back. There was a brightness to Akko in the anime that isn’t as pronounced as in the manga however I did fall back in love with her new classmate friends Lotte and Sucy.
Friday— Witch Hat Atelier volume 11 by Kamome Shirahama I purposely waited until Friday to read after picking it up from the bookstore two weeks ago after it finally came in after publishing pushed it back a little. I own the series because I love the world of the atelier and witches, specifically the effervescent Coco who I cosplayed at an event last year. As the series continues, there is a darker angle and this one was more filler for the subsequent action that will come in future volume. Nonetheless, there were some full page spreads from Silver Eve that remind me of the magic of previous volumes.
Do you have any favorite witchy manga for my TBR for next year?
More than a decade ago, I took on our high school’s Anime Club not knowing much more than I loved many of the students since they were library regulars and needed an advisor. This is when it was simply a club of otakus watching anime and needing a place to hang.
It has morphed more times than I can count over the last fifteen years including a name change last year to Japanese Culture Club. We were watching less anime and spending more time on other pursuits such as drawing, attending cons, and gaming. But there were years with plenty of Pokemon and others where we borrowed the gym to do some epic cosplay. We even survived a year and a half of virtual club during the pandemic (hello, Among Us).
During this time, my reading life morphed as well, as it does with most readers over time. I was reading more nonfiction for sure, but also diving headlong into graphic novels and manga mixed with YA fiction and children’s books. I have always enjoyed manga more than anime and like the best attempts at making a movie out of a fantastic book, I often do not watch the anime of manga I love for fear of the same issues that rear their head with books to movies. And in presentations with other librarians, I talk heavily about giving manga a chance for those that just “don’t get it.”
Enter my teenage son, Max. Both of my teen sons are bookish, but in different ways and this is evident in their divergent reading choices. Newfound friends, his love of origami, and a more popular culture lean toward anime and manga have driven him to copiously consuming both. He’s borrowing stacks of volumes of manga and squeezing in episodes of his favorite anime. He’s buying tshirts with iconography from his favorites as he moved into high school this year. He attended a Comic Con last year when I was there with a group of my Japanese Culture Club students. He wanted me to take pictures of our library’s manga collection to see if there are series he hasn’t read. He sought out the manga section of all thirty-six libraries that we visited this summer as part of a local expedition challenge in our area. And he’s definitely got thoughts on his high school library’s selections.
What matters the most are the conversations he and I are having about what we’re reading. If I borrowing a first volume of a series, I usually slide it over to him before I return it. He’s doing the same for me. And it benefits me in more ways because my clientele at school is now my son, just at a different school. I am indebted to him for making me look cooler than I am because he’s borrowing manga that I am now being asked to buy for my library. Plus, it’s the shared moments of dinner time or random conversations about plot, character, romance, or gore that I’m discovering more about him than I would simply by asking him how his day was.
I am a manga reader more than an anime watcher, which is only half useful for understanding all of the references my students have in Japanese Culture Club, but that’s okay. Reading is my jam so it’s natural to lean on manga more than anime.
For several reasons since school let out for summer, it’s become manga summer. I’m still reading many books for my committee work and plenty for preparing for upcoming presentations, but also plenty of manga. Thank God for the public library– several intensely stocked libraries who I lean on for filling up my TBR queue.
Here are three things I have learned about manga from the thirty I’ve read so far this summer:
The sheer volume of manga publications means that just like any genre, subgenre, or type of book, there are the good, the bad, and the ugly. I won’t like them all and that’s okay.
It’s rare to find standalones, but when I do, there’s something a little special about them that I cherish more than the serialized manga.
Fa-SHUN. I basically want the closets of more than half of the characters in the stories.
Last May, I wrote Pure Happiness at the Con about a busload of high school kids I took to the Saratoga Comic Con in Upstate New York. Well, dear reader, I did it again. This time MORE high school kids– thirty-eight in fact– and this, the day after a day off to spend about six hours attending a jam-packed Con full of cosplay, vendors, food, gaming, and panels. It’s no wonder a few of them fell asleep on the bus ride back.
There are several things to love about the Comic Con: while there’s always a need for more room, it is neatly packed into one section of a convention center to make it easier to keep them in one spot so as I travel around upstairs and downstairs I’ll run into small groups of them (especially the Gaming Room). I even run into graduates who were not only former students, but former club kids too now several years out of the high school enjoying what they loved then too.
The tight timeline to get the permission slips back, make sure teenagers are up and on time for the bus to leave from the high school, and that I have all of them on our return trip are enough to add a few extra grey hairs, but I wouldn’t do it for any other group. This is the same club that convinced me that I should take our Falcons to Japan and while that didn’t come to fruition (thanks, pandemic), I’ll do anything if it makes them happy. On the darkened bus, I was shown things they purchased and pictures of cosplay that they loved all while yawning.
Since I cosplayed Ms. Marvel last year, I figured I would need to up my game this year. I took a poll a few weeks back on whether I should play Alana from Saga or Coco from Witch Hat Atelier, so IYKYK, here I am as Coco in my “work in progress” cosplay (complete with a sylph my son drew on the bottom of my Peter Pan shoes so that if I had my witchy way, I could levitate.
In a convention center full of super fans, I was happy that I had several people recognize me and ask to take my picture– isn’t that the ultimate compliment of a cosplay well played? I know I have more work to add some extras, but for a few weeks of shopping, I think I repped Coco well (and added my brush buddy to boot).
The stress of the beginning of a school year always adds some extra pressure, but planning a field trip ups the ante and a short turnaround time even more so. Luckily there are some fabulous people to assist including a teaching assistant at the high school who runs the Con’s social media and also helps with Japanese Culture Club, though during the Con, she’s busy running panels and taking photos. Then there is a new intern at the school who has been helping out at our club, adding a Pokemon League for some of our students, who was the second chaperone.
There’s always May, however, I’ve got a plan for another field trip– something a little different if I can manage it before the year is out. It wouldn’t require cosplay, but it would include one of my favorite indulgences (and again, a busload of high schoolers!)
Our Falcons came, saw, and conquered the Con. Now, today, Sunday, I rest.
If there ever was a month to label as “mixed bag”, it would have to be October.
This is just a smattering of the books I read either in print, digitally, or audio and they range from a true crime audiobook of two women murdered in the Shenandoah National Park to the GOAT of horror manga, Juji Ito’s Uzumaki. Then there are middle grade fiction titles like Key Player by Kelly Yang and my continued obsession with Spy x Family. All told there were sixty-three books read for the month.
It was a result of several converging events, committees, and activities:
With a conference presentation a few weeks ago, at the beginning of the month I was trying to squeeze in some anticipated titles of 2023 while also reading a few 2022 titles to be ready to talk books.
Sitting on a “Best of” books selection committee for nonfiction so I had a few nonfiction titles that I didn’t know about to read to better argue which were the best!
A little countdown to Halloween on my Instagram, I read a spooky book a day for the last week that included the wacky spirals of Ito’s imagination to reliving the dramatic 1990 movie The Witches based on Roald Dahl’s The Witches which I had never read and decided to listen to the audiobook of today while traveling in the car. Plus I discovered the delightful Ghoulia.
And of course, fitting in the general love of certain series or titles that sit on my endless TBR that I pick up based on length, topic, and format.
November is my birthday month, so I’m planning a few personal reading challenges and organizing my own readathon. Any suggestions?
Since last week, I have been turning over a conversation I had with a student last week during summer school. She had dropped in with a pass from her class to borrow a few books.
I didn’t recognize her, but that’s not uncommon in a school of 2,600 students and a new pool of students who are attending the summer school program from one of our alternative school as well. Either way, I introduced her to the temporary library that we’ve set up in a science classroom to be closer to the summer school classrooms while avoiding the construction around the new library. I asked her if she was looking for something in particular and quickly shared that she wanted manga to which I pointed her to several book carts spilling over with it and told her that if she wanted specific recommendations I could help, otherwise, she was free to browse and could check out when she was ready.
It’s what happened after she checked out the three books that gave me pause.
I handed the three back to her telling her that during the summer, students can keep the books until the start of the school year or bring them back during summer hours to get more. She asked me to hold on to them. I looked puzzled since she had come in to borrow them and didn’t spend any time during available periods in the library to read while she was in the building. And her response was that she would pick them up at the end of the period because she didn’t want to walk back to class with books in her hand because “people don’t know I read”. She further explained that it would be embarrassing to go back to class with them.
Comments like these are different than my interactions with undiscovered readers who are coming in with classes for upcoming projects who tell me they don’t read or don’t want to read. This was a very specific statement that she wanted to hide her reading identity and because I’ve never had this type of conversation before, I didn’t have a ready-made response. But I did respond.
I told her I could absolutely hold on to the books until after class, but did add that she could also be her awesome self and walk back to class with them because she might discover others who have read and like the same manga series and have something to talk about. She asked that I hold on to them. I told her I’d see her after the period was over.
She returned when the bell rang, however my one piece de resistance was that I inserted this Post-it into one of the books that I hope might give her just a moment to think about being proud of a reading identity because she is a reader.
It’s not particularly earth-shattering in its insight, plus I wanted it to be a positive message celebrating this identity and encouraging her to share it with others. Being proud of herself for having a world of entertainment and learning between the pages of books and finding her way to the library.
Now I’m thinking about the upcoming school year and all those readers who keep invisible. I don’t want to “out” their reading if they wish to keep it quiet, however there might be others who just need a bit of encouragement to join the many who read. How can I reach them?
Field trips give me grey hairs, but they’re worth it. It’s also been a minute because the pandemic had put events on a shelf. And actually, when it hit in March 2020, I was ready to take a busload of students to another Con at a local college. Before that I had taken them to an inaugural one close by as well. To say that we live in an area that appreciates the Comic Con culture is an understatement now that I’m writing this out. There are many options to enjoy the company and costumes of others who love to cosplay in addition to the vendors selling their wares and panels featuring celebrities and celebration.
Therefore this weekend’s Saratoga Comic Con in Saratoga, New York left most of the students I took from our high school in a frenzied state– feasting on the sights, sounds, and paraphernalia of the Con. We weren’t even off the bus, tilted to one side as they all rushed to shout out the windows to costumed attendees for their fabulous attire. As we waited in line, another student kept shouting that this was the best day of his life. Then don’t get me started on their excitement once we got in. I needed to count them once again and hand out their wristbands which was akin to herding cats. They were itching to get moving and no one knew that more than the two gentlemen standing at the front doors pulling security. Throughout the day they joked with me about my Mother Hen clucking and said a warm goodbye after I corralled them on the stairs for one last post-Con picture.
Circling our photo were a handful of former students who were also Anime Club members that I ran in to throughout the day warming looking on the 28 students that bussed it up from thirty minutes south. We caught up on what they were doing now and posed for pictures. My homemade outfit was a hit though with the temperature getting up to 80 degrees, I left the tights and boots at home. Nonetheless, I got shouts and posed for pictures with the best of them. But mine paled in comparison to other epic attire including some of my own students.
The Con wasn’t just about dressing up and being around like-minded individuals, but learning and being entertained. The bus was close to coming back to pick us up, but many of them finished the day with me in the ballroom at a dance showcase of J-pop, K-pop, Asian-themed dancing that featured the emcee of many of the panels of the day who also happens to be employed at our high school and helps with Anime Club. Her knowledge and personality made our high school proud and the students definitely made her more social media famous as they recorded away as she performed.
I’ll be ready for more grey hairs next year seeing how happy they were by days end.
Signing off as Ms. Marvel for the day which as I was on my way home, I realized, no one was going to pump my gas for me. Back to the real world. I guess even superheroes have to do that.
There is just one more day left in December that will be an homage to the reading and blogging in 2021, but for today I am finishing up the top tens– today graphic novels and manga.
What’s not to love about graphic novels and manga? Whether it’s a standalone or series, the varied abilities and styles of the illustrators and artists are equally matched by the writing of the authors (unless they’re one and the same to which hats-off for talent and skill. All of these titles bring sometimes special to readers from middle schoolers with Huda F Are You? to adults with In Love and Pajamas. There were superheroes and super sleuths, mysteries, and adventures. Plus one adaptation of a wildly successful historical fiction novel with Between Shades of Gray.
Regardless of what level you work at in a school library, as a librarian part of your goal is to have books in the library that students want to read. Popularity is sometimes obvious, re: Dogman and sometimes it’s geographical or site-specific. This was evident several years ago when Karen McManus broke out on the scene for young adults with her murder mystery One Of Us Is Lying. Students should feel comfortable requesting the purchase of certain books. And sometimes they make it loud and clear.
Enter Junji Ito, the GOAT of horror manga since he entered the field in 1987. His popularity in our library is a confluence of one of our senior electives called Horror Fiction and Film, the large showing number of students who attend Anime Club (of which I’m the faculty advisor), and that manga regularly makes the top circulated items in our library.
Ito is the GOAT for a reason. They are dark, mind-bending, frightful, and intelligent horror stories and short stories. I’m drawn to them as so many of our students are. We recently started getting in our newest order which is adding more of Ito’s books to the collection and replacing well-worn books that have been in circulation for several years. He’s someone that we will likely always have on order.
First, read at least one of Ito’s books if not all of them. Second, remember to listen to your students when it comes to what’s on the shelves.
Readers Be Advised 