After a month and a half of moaning and groaning, I’ve finally reached the end of my backlog — the last four books I read in 2009, for a grand total of 244.
I realize the problem now– reading the 244 books is easy; reviewing every one of them is another matter. I’d be happy if I can blog half as fast as I read, but try as I might, it’s a tall order. I can multi-task reading, but blogging about them takes my full attention, and I try to squeeze it in when I have time to spare, a luxury I haven’t had much of since the year started. I’m definitely not complaining; blogging has its own rewards, and I’ve enjoyed a whole year of blogging about the books I’ve read; but I think I’ll have to strategize better to achieve my next goal: to catch up on blogging my January and February readings by March.
Here are the last four books for 2009 (and a big sigh of relief from me!), all of them comic in nature. As you may have noticed, I steered clear of text-heavy books towards the end of the year, and this is the last batch of them: Chas Addams’ Half Baked Cookbook by Charles Addams; Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya (leftover from the October 24-hour readathon); and the first two volumes of the detective Conan manga, Case Closed 1 and 2 by Gosho Aoyama.
Chas Addams’ Half Baked Cookbook, subtitled Culinary Cartoons for the Humorously Famished, is a posthumous collection of macabre culinary cartoons from the Addams family creator and New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams.
The cartoons are grayscale, one-panel illustrations, including some never-before-seen art. Some depict the beloved characters of the Addams family, while some depict generic characters in morbid culinary situations. The cartoons are interspersed with several macabre-themed but totally edible recipes, such as Mushrooms Fester, Transparent Pie, Hearts Stuffed, Black Pudding, Influenza Punch, and many more.
Here’s the recipe for Mushrooms Fester:
24 small mushrooms
fresh lime juice
4 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons fresh parsley
1/2 clove garlic
grated onion, salt, pepper
2 tablespoons of the blood of a hare (or substitute sherry)
1/2 cup brown breadcrumbsRemove stems and sprinkle lime juice on each cap. Mince mushroom stems and saute in butter until cooked. Mix all ingredients except hare’s blood (or sherry). This to be added to moisten mixture. Put stuffing into mushroom caps and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Bake in 350 degree oven for 20 minutes.
Chas Addams is certainly a very talented illustrator, and his love for food and macabre humor go surprisingly well together in this one of a kind foodie book. Addams had been toying with the idea of the book, but never got around to publishing it in his lifetime, and so the collection is a bit rough, with a lot of sketches and unfinished works. Nevertheless, the idea is there, and foodie literature is so much richer with Addams’ art.
Next up is the first volume of Fruits Basket, a manga series that I tried out on the last 24-hour read-a-thon. The story begins as the orphaned Tohru is kicked out of her grandfather’s home because he is renovating the house, forcing her to live in a tent in the forest.
The forest is in the Sohma land, and when a landslide buries Tohru’s tent and belongings, the cousins Yuki and Shigure Sohma let her sleep in their house. Because of her housekeeping skills, they let Tohru stay on to help around the house. Here Tohru learns the Sohma family secret — thirteen members of the Sohma family embody the 12 animal spirits of the Chinese zodiac, and the 13th is the spirit of the cat who was, according to legend, left out of the Zodiac. The Sohmas transform into animals when they are hugged about the opposite sex, or are ill or emotional.
I found it a bit challenging to get into this series because the premise is a bit complicated and I had no background knowledge about the series before I read it. I also didn’t find it compelling enough — I was getting antsy towards the middle of the book, wanting it to finish already. I like shojo manga but I didn’t take to this one as easily as I did to the Kare Kano and Kitchen Princess series; it wasn’t necessarily bad, I just felt it lacked punch.
Maybe it takes a few more volumes to get into the story; I’ll check out the succeeding volumes before I make up my mind about the series.
Finally, the last two books in this review are the first two volumes of the Detective Conan manga series, Case Closed.
Case Closed is about the amateur detective Jimmy Kudo, a high school detective who earns the ire of a criminal gang because of his investigations. He is ambushed by the gang and force-fed with a chemical that turns him into a child!
Assuming the identity of a grade schooler named Conan Edogawa (inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle and Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo), he moves in with his childhood friend and longtime crush Rachel Moore and her father Richard, a bungling, out-of-business private investigator. With the help of ingenious devices invented by his neighbor and confidante Dr. Agasa, Conan uses his detective skills to help Richard Moore and the police solve baffling cases.
Each book is divided into casefiles for the mysteries that Conan manages to solve. Because I haven’t watched the anime series and I had no idea about the series before I started reading it, I was surprised at how adult the cases were — real criminal cases like murder, blackmail, impersonation, etc. The story is fast-paced and exciting, the mysteries unravel logically, and the humor sits well with me. It’s definitely one of the best manga series I’ve ever tried, and is now one of the few manga series I am setting out to collect.
Phew. That wraps it up for 2009, will post a very much delayed year-end writeup soon!
***
Chas Addams’ Half-Baked Cookbook, hardcover with dustjacket, bargain bin find from Powerbooks sale (P65), 4/5 stars;
Fruits Basket, paperback, local mooch, 3/5 stars;
Case Closed volumes 1 & 2, paperback, local mooch; both 5/5 stars
cover photo courtesy of sxc.hu
[amazonify]::omakase::300:250[/amazonify]