Books: Otaku, Binti, Shadows, & Magic

[woodwardiocom]

Wotakoi: Love Is Hard For Otaku by Fujita

A manga series, about a group of office workers/otaku (geeks)/friends in Japan, dealing with the stigma of being otaku, and their different ways of approaching geek-dom. In the opening chapter, Narumi enters into a relationship-of-convenience with childhood friend Hirotaka, so they can both stop fielding awkward questions about their relationship status, and be geeks together. They spend the rest of the volume completely failing to communicate their actual feelings for each other, whilst bickering about different genres of manga, and who can get the highest scores in video games. Their far-cooler friends come out of the closet to them about their geekiness, and hidden relationship, and two more corners are added to the fan-wars. Mildly recommended, mostly as an interesting window into Japanese otaku subculture.

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

Third in the Binti trilogy, in this volume our teen protagonist, an alien from her birth culture in spirit and in genome, very nearly brokers a peace between warring factions, and learns a great deal about the universe, and her place in it. Books in which authority figures are grossly unfair to kids are very rough for me to read, so this took me a while to get through, but it was worth it. Recommended.

She Walks In Shadows, edited by Moreno-Garcia & Stiles

An anthology of Cthulhu Mythos stories by and about women, providing a much-needed alternate perspective. Varied, and quite good.

More Magic, edited by Larry Niven

A short anthology of stories in Niven's The Magic Goes Away universe, where magic is a consumable resource, and follows something resembling physical laws. A bit dry, but still worth the read.