arden's asides

january 2025 reading journey

Carrying over from December, I was really into reading Manga this month. Like, devoured an entire series (minus the volume that hasn't been released in English yet.) Of course, that's not all I read; I even found my first five-star book of the year!

As with all of my reviews, I aim to keep these as free of spoilers as possible. The information included can usually be found within the first few pages, chapters, or on the advertised information for the text.

  1. Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE Omnibus (1-3)

I had a big cheesy grin on my face reading these books. It took me right back to high school, browsing volumes in Barnes and Noble (RIP to my local one because you are sorely missed), and getting sucked into all of the cool character designs. I've been reading CLAMP since I was probably too little to be reading them when my mom scored some copies of Cardcaptor Sakura and Magic Knight Rayearth at a swapmeet.

Anyway, Tsubasa features some of my favorite tropes: memory loss, deep yearning love, a protagonist driven by determination/love/friendship... plus Mokona is one of the cutest mascots (Sorry Kero-chan T_T) There were so many scenes when I was laughing really hard and others where I genuinely moved. This shounen-shoujo borderline works very well for CLAMP. Plus, as a teen who was never able to play Kingdom Hearts since I didn't have a Playstation 2, this is MY multiverse series and I'm so happy to be back in it and reading volumes that I'm experiencing for the first time.

  1. My Work by Olga Ravn

Ooof. This was a painful. Ravn's novel is told in a series of diary entries arranged, intentionally, out of order, from the protagonist's pregnancy through to the first couple years of her son's life. The effect is a deeply intimate window into a woman's reflections on identity, mental health (depression, anxiety), and relationships (inter-personal, societal, etc.) We can observe, entry-to-entry, the contradictory nature of these relationships. How at once we can deeply love our partner and then also feel like leaving - especially if we already feel abandoned. The way that starting a family fundamentally changes our relationship to others and ourselves.

At this stage in my life, I don't plan on having children. Ravn's narrator is blunt about the ways in which others cannot relate to this aspect of what she has gone through (physically, mentally, emotionally) and critiques the language that we often use to co-opt the experience of people who have given birth (such as comparing creation of a work of art to birth.) But there are also so many other ways in which I relate to her panic, shame, and grief from my own history of undiagnosed depression, especially through grad school.

It was a depressing, challenging read. I can imagine this hitting hard for some of my friends who have struggled with postpartum depression and their shifting identity post-pregnancy. Just as with The Employees, Ravn's writing is poetic, sharp, and halting.

  1. The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood

What a fascinating novella. Blackwood's narrator, J, composes letters in her head to an imagined audience after her husband, Arnold, suddenly abandons her to live with his affair partner in Paris... which leaves her in Manhattan with their daughter, her stepdaughter from Arnold's first marriage, and their au-pair. Understandably, J's world has been flipped upside down and she is full of rage and confusion. However, these feelings are viciously directed toward her stepdaughter, Renata (who is only a teenager, mind you.) Oscillating between victim and aggressor, J candidly voices her every dark, judgmental, and depressed thought.

It's simultaneously hard and easy to empathize with J. We all have dark, cruel thoughts that go unvoiced -- absent of any kindness, sympathy, full of twisted and displaced frustration. Unlike, J, however, most of us can acknowledge that our thoughts are misplaced, unfair, and reflect on what is underneath those initial feelings. We can give ourselves grace, in part, because those ugly qualities of ourselves go unshared. But we are privy to all of J's ugliness and that impacts our ability to trust the details of what has happened -- not to mention how she elects to portray the girls living in her apartment.

  1. Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies by Catherine Mock

I'm going to be honest: I probably should have DNFed this one. It received so much praise on BookTube, and I keep trying to find the right cozy mystery for me, but there were a lot of elements that just were not for me with this one. While I love a good footnote gimmick, I found myself getting increasing annoyed by the frequency and shallowness of the comments. The protagonist, a woman in her late 30s, used so much slang that I found myself physically cringing at times (fam, tay-tay, Swifty - there are a lot of Taylor Swift references, FYI.) The premise itself was interesting to me, and that's what kept me going, but I was let down by the writing and the reveal at the end. I won't continue with this series and I am going to hold myself accountable to DNF more books this year.

  1. A Condition Called Love by Megumi Morino (Volumes 1-15)

This was the light, fluffy manga series of choice after I finished My Work and The Stepdaughter back-to-back. Recommended by shoujo/josei connoisseur Laura Neuzeth, I was interested in the book's initial premise of a girl, Hotaru Hinase, who is completely uninterested in romance being courted by a boy, Saki Hananoi who is overly forward. As the two agree to a trial relationship (in which she will try to be open-minded about what it means to love someone else and be in a relationship and in which he will loosen his obsession to account for balance and partnership), they both slowly change over time and it's quite lovely to see.

A few caveats: this is not a slow burn but also not quite instalove (at least for Hinase!) and Hananoi is a LOT at the beginning of the series. We do learn about why each character views relationships the way they do (especially via their families and early friendships, or lackthereof), but if you are someone who does not have the time and patience then this might be a skip for you. But if you can hold out through their respective growing pains (especially Hananoi, and the series does not shy away from calling him out on the ways in which he needs to change) then this is a really cute, fluffy high school romance series.

  1. Flight of the Flutterbies and Gobo's Adventure adapted by Courtney Carbone from Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock episodes

I love puppets. I grew up watching the trifecta of Henson shows (The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and Sesame Street), but I also watched just about every other puppet show that I could. My younger brother bought me tickets to watch Fraggle Rock: Live and I had such a blast. I really wouldn't rate either of these books, since they are designed for early readers, but it did remind me that it's still fun reading children's books out loud, slowing down, reviewing the pictures.

  1. Private Rites by Julia Armfield

With this novel, I am comfortable declaring Armfeild one of my favorite writers. This book was haunting and had everything going for it that I enjoy in a horror story: siblings, relationship tensions (including genuine love!), questioned memories, slow-building dread, claustrophobia, the backdrop of speculative social horror (in this case, an apocalyptic England sinking slowly under a near-constant falling rain), and it is very queer. Add intentional parallels to Shakespeare's King Lear and, oh, I just gobbled it up.

We follow the lives of three sisters grappling with the death of their father, an adored public figure who was also their emotional abuser: Isla (a recently divorced therapist who obsessively clings to the role as older sister to anchor herself despite being relatively estranged from her sisters), Irene (a theology grad school dropout living with her partner, Jude, who resents only being viewed as an antagonist), and Agnes (a half-sister from her father's second marriage who has been coping with the state of the world with risky behavior until Stephanie, a would-be-one-time-fling, slowly starts changing her direction in life.)

I wrote down so many passages from this novel into my commonplace book that it might warrant a longer blog post in the future so for now I'll just say that I love this book so much. Abuse and forgiveness are both core themes in King Lear as an indiscriminate rain thunders down upon the crown of a man who once ruled over the land. The rain is equally brutal in Armfield's book, and the shared abuse of the sisters does little to unite them together. Forgiveness of their father might not even be relevant in the wake of his death, but how do they forgive one another -- if at all -- for the things they have in common and the ways in which they've been driven apart?

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