A "best of" collection of creepy tales from Eisner award winner and legendary horror master …
One of the less essential collections.
3 stars
The standout story in this is 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault', which is one of Junji Ito's most disturbing and iconic stories. Like his best stories, the horror is entirely in the premise and its strange dream like logic that can't be resisted.
There are some adaptations which are fine, but not essential. And not all the stories are horror. Venus in the Blind Spot is more horror adjacent, and there are a couple of mildly amusing comic stories.
Of the remaining horror stories. They're all fine, but second tier.
A pair of twisted siblings—Yuuma, a young man obsessed with the devil, and Chizumi, the …
Fun but slight
3 stars
Fun romp with two siblings who cause havoc wherever they go. The premise is clearly intended as a parody of Japanese public apologies, and it works quite well as that. Gives off a similar energy to early Alan Moore (his British stuff). Would probably have worked well as a Deadline cartoon in the 90s.
The art is fine, though not comparable to his best work.
All the stories in this are decent, and while there are no classics, there are still a couple of stand outs. The level of originality in this collection is surprisingly high, while of course the artwork is glorious.
Earthbound is a great weird anime, where the twist is both surprising and powerful. While Secret of the Haunted Mansion is a lot of creepy fun (the other stories expanding its mythos are also pretty good, including a story with one of the most disturbing cats I've ever seen). And who knew nails could be that disturbing?
Death Row Doorbell is messed up in all the right ways. And smashed with its predictable, but still very funny, ending.
An innocent love becomes a bloody hell in another superb collection by master of horror …
Creepy
4 stars
The first sequence of stories is a wonderfully surreal (but still creepy) story about a town where when the fog comes in, you stand at an intersection and ask a stranger for your fortune. This being Juno Ito things take a creepy (and bloody) turn, though there's a surprisingly optimistic ending. One of his best. The artwork is particularly effective at evoking the fog, and creating a sense of dread that lingers long after finishing.
Sadly the rest of the collection is less good. While none of it is bad, none of it is essential.
The next series (of 2) is a comedy about a murderous family of siblings (the Addams family, minus the sophistication) and their misadventures. It's fun, though pretty lightweight.
'Mansion of Phantom Pain' is fine, but is fairly forgettable.
'Ribs' starts strong, but ends as a monster story that doesn't really connect with the beginning.
And …
The first sequence of stories is a wonderfully surreal (but still creepy) story about a town where when the fog comes in, you stand at an intersection and ask a stranger for your fortune. This being Juno Ito things take a creepy (and bloody) turn, though there's a surprisingly optimistic ending. One of his best. The artwork is particularly effective at evoking the fog, and creating a sense of dread that lingers long after finishing.
Sadly the rest of the collection is less good. While none of it is bad, none of it is essential.
The next series (of 2) is a comedy about a murderous family of siblings (the Addams family, minus the sophistication) and their misadventures. It's fun, though pretty lightweight.
'Mansion of Phantom Pain' is fine, but is fairly forgettable.
'Ribs' starts strong, but ends as a monster story that doesn't really connect with the beginning.
And then there's the story about shit. Which is... better than it should be.
"Junji Ito meets Mary Shelley! The master of horror manga bends all his skill into …
The other stories are better.
3 stars
Got bored of the Frankenstein adaptation, but the Oshikiri stories are great. I want more stories about the unfortunate high school student who keeps getting dragged into baffling and annoying supernatural mysteries.
Beautiful art and well told, but the twists are predictable.
3 stars
The artwork in this manga is gorgeous, and the story telling is effective. But it suffers from poor characterisation (like a lot of manga), while the twists are fairly obvious. A couple of stories stand out, but over all a little disappointing.
Souin Gyokusai seyo! is a "semi-autobiographical account of the desperate final weeks of a Japanese …
Surprisingly readable given its bleak subject matter
4 stars
Japanese soldiers at the end of World War II die pointlessly in a series of pointless battles, culminating in a suicide attack that exists for no purpose other than the honor of the Japanese military.
Despite the bleak and depressing material, this is a compulsively readable comic.
Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our …
Escape the Rat Race
4 stars
A fun and rambling defense of doing nothing, and resisting our modern productivity culture. And unlike so many condemnations of our modern world, and all the problems within it, this book is calming. It may not give you the answers, but you may find you emerge from it with a better understanding of how to just 'be'.
[In this book, the author] draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, …
Powerful, but flawed, analysis of humans and our place in the world.
4 stars
This is a wide ranging philosophical analysis of humans, and how we engage with/make sense of the world. Much of it will be familiar to readers of Merleau-Ponty, but his background as an anthropologist and naturalist allows him to bring a unique perspective on this. And for people who are not familiar with phenomenology, he provides one of the better introductions that I've read.
The most powerful parts of the book are where he draws upon his anthropological background, to make some interesting arguments about how 'civilized' humans perceive the world very differently from our indigenous ancestors, due to things like their need to pay more attention to landmarks and the behavior of animals. And he makes some very novel (to me at least - this may be common place for anthropologists) arguments about how indigenous myths are really a form of memory palace (c.f. Francis Yates), rather than stories …
This is a wide ranging philosophical analysis of humans, and how we engage with/make sense of the world. Much of it will be familiar to readers of Merleau-Ponty, but his background as an anthropologist and naturalist allows him to bring a unique perspective on this. And for people who are not familiar with phenomenology, he provides one of the better introductions that I've read.
The most powerful parts of the book are where he draws upon his anthropological background, to make some interesting arguments about how 'civilized' humans perceive the world very differently from our indigenous ancestors, due to things like their need to pay more attention to landmarks and the behavior of animals. And he makes some very novel (to me at least - this may be common place for anthropologists) arguments about how indigenous myths are really a form of memory palace (c.f. Francis Yates), rather than stories in the way that we think of them. Ways for a culture to pass on remember cultural knowledge about the land, traditions, praxis and moral precepts. He also makes some interesting arguments about how written language changed how human beings thought and interacted with the world.
Unfortunately while his arguments are fascinating and highly original, many of them rely upon dated (or in some cases) questionable sources. In particular his analysis of Amazonian tribes relies heavily on a very questionable memoir by a Brazilian medicine man, that most anthropologists believe to have been largely made up. Some of his other arguments rely upon anthropological texts from the 70s and 80s, suggesting that his knowledge of the field probably ended when he completed his graduate studies. So I'm not sure how reliable a guide he truly is.
Despite these reservations, this book is well worth reading. It will challenge your assumptions, and may provoke you to look at the world differently.
A good book to read in addition to this would be Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk.
I think I agree with Latour's argument, but unfortunately the way in which he chooses to make it is obscure and hard to follow. There is a really interesting analysis buried in some really annoying prose. As someone who has greatly enjoyed many of his other books, this book was a huge disappointment.
I read somewhere that it was intended to be a parody of post-modernist writing. I don't know if that's true, but it certainly reads that way.
People often believe that we can overcome the profound environmental and climate crises we face …
An engineer's analysis of how screwed our societies really are.
5 stars
Too many books on the environmental crisis treat it as a problem to do with CO2 emissions. But this is just one of many crises. The ecosystems are dying, we're losing the ability to grow food and we are beginning to rely upon key resources that we need for our material intensive societies.
Philippe takes an engineer's perspective on where we are, what it requires to sustain us and how long we can keep going. Along the way he points out many problems with our assumptions about renewable energy (they use decidedly non-renewable resources, that require destructive mining), energy supplies (it is impossible to supply sufficient energy for our current needs from renewable energy). And then as someone who is familiar with the full process of production and maintenance, he points out that many of our complex systems will not survive if our outsourced supply/industrial chains breakdown, and that we …
Too many books on the environmental crisis treat it as a problem to do with CO2 emissions. But this is just one of many crises. The ecosystems are dying, we're losing the ability to grow food and we are beginning to rely upon key resources that we need for our material intensive societies.
Philippe takes an engineer's perspective on where we are, what it requires to sustain us and how long we can keep going. Along the way he points out many problems with our assumptions about renewable energy (they use decidedly non-renewable resources, that require destructive mining), energy supplies (it is impossible to supply sufficient energy for our current needs from renewable energy). And then as someone who is familiar with the full process of production and maintenance, he points out that many of our complex systems will not survive if our outsourced supply/industrial chains breakdown, and that we may not be able to sustain the skills required to keep complex technologies such as chips, or nuclear power, going.
Unusually for books of this type he also makes many recommendations for how we can escape our predicament - and he does so with considerable self-deprecation. His point is not that we need to follow him, but we need to take seriously limits, and reorientate our societies to think about true sustainability (all inputs, not just energy) and efficiency (energy and resource efficiency, rather than economic efficiency).
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But …
Fantastic survey of British Cybernetics
5 stars
A really nice book that digs into the work of the first and second generations of British Cybernetics. The author's background in Science/Technology Studies, means he approaches from a sociological perspective, but is perfectly happy digging into some of the more dense technical stuff (which he explains very well).
In a book of this size there will always be things left out, but he manages to provide enough pointers for the interested reader to dig into random art projects, or how exactly a pond could be made into a computer.
If you want an intro to the work of Stafford Beer (though all of them are interesting), this is the best primer for his work that I know of.
