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July 12, 2004
Summer Reading
I got to this interesting list of what some webloggers are reading this summer via Warren Ellis's blog and I thought I should go into what I'm reading this summer.
Admittedly a lot of the reading I've been doing is related to my current research project, which is an investigation of artificial and cyborg women in Japanese anime and manga. (This is unrelated to any of my research projects for my Ph.D program, but will hopefully be my second book.) What I've been reading can be loosely lumped under the term "source material." I just finished Koji Suzuki's Ring, which posits an interesting relationship between spirituality and technology in the guise of a horror novel. This relationship is made even clearer in the manga version. I've been catching up on a lot of relevant manga I've missed (relevant to my project, at least) such as Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, Masakazu Katsura's Video Girl Ai, and Kenichi Sonoda's Cannon God Exaxxion. I've been spending most of my summer watching anime ("Hey, it's research" should be my personal mantra) and taking care of things around the house like painting. I think the next prose fiction I'll tackle will be Richard Calder's Dead Girls / Boys / Things trilogy.
Just so nobody thinks that I'm letting all of this popular culture rot my brain, let me throw out that I just started re-reading Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs.
Posted by brianruh at July 12, 2004 08:04 AM