Schoolgirl milky crisis: adventures in the anime and manga trade, Jonathan Clements
A collection of essays. I ended up skipping around to read the ones on topics that interested me. The transcribed lecture to a class of language students on the translation business made me sorry that translators don’t get more respect. My favorites were the articles on Bewitched and Mothra. Three stars.

Japanese hot pots: comforting one-pot meals / Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat.
A book on nabe and oden, soups filled with big goodies to eat and then you soak up the broth with rice or noodles. Illustrated with lavish and delicious looking photos of the dishes which always motivates me to actually make them. While the book is nice, I may just need a matrix of the various possible ingredients and recommended combinations. Three stars.

Sayonara, Mr. Fatty : [a geek's diet memoir] / by Toshio Okada
Premise: diet techniques on Japan’s otaku king. Execution: mostly boring diet book in translation. Too bad. I think there is a market for good diet and life book for geeks. Especially if you could count calories with a RPG character sheet. One star.

(Hey, sports fans! Here are some of my reviews for work, kept in work review style. Usually I trim out the age rating and the less notable books and rewrite the reviews for a less specialized audience. What do you think? Do you like this way or the old way?)

Fiction
Not Recommended
Cat Burglar Black 978-1-59643-144-7
Sala, Richard First Second, 2009 $16.99 Grades 5-8
A teen girl arrives an an exclusive private school to find that it is, in fact, cover for daring heists by the students. Beautiful artwork by Sala is overwhelmed by clunky exposition and plot moving at the expense of character and involving the reader. The book ends abruptly at an unsatisfying place, with many characters still in peril and some threads left unresolved. Will it be a series? I was disappointed that Sala’s first work for teens was so poorly executed. Yet despite these shortcomings, the book is on YALSA’s 2010 Great Graphic Novels for Teens list.

Nonfiction
Recommended
Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs 978-1-59990-445-0
Gold, Rozanne Bloomsbury, 2009 $17.99 Grades 9-12
A cookbook inspired by the eat fresh, eat local, eat real food movement espoused by (among others) Michael Pollan (whose most famous work is now available in a teen-friendly edition). While the photographs and descriptive writing put the fairly exotic dishes in their best light, this is most definitely not a first cookbook. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the basics of cooking, have access to a well equipped kitchen, and have no difficulty finding fresh lemongrass, pine nuts, and specialty pastas. And while the introduction touts buying fresh local foods, the recipes don’t always follow through: one in particular calling for both freshly fallen snow and freshly picked strawberries, another reveling in the availability of both kiwi and melon in the winter. A marginal purchase unless students are both cooking enthusiasts and financially well-off.

Fiction
Recommended
Camp Fossil Eyes: Digging for the Origin of Words 978-1-55451-181-5
Abley, Mark Annick Press, 2009 $19.95 Grades 5-12
13 year old Alex and his 15 year old sister Jill attend a camp in the near-magical badlands: a place where the English language takes physical form in the surrounding landscape. During field trips they venture to the hills and mountains of the various languages that have contributed words to English and find the fossil origins of specific words. Many word histories are given in the text and sidebars of the book and the illustrations are charming and well chosen. I was disappointed that the magical-realism of the book didn’t allow for an exploration of how etymology is done in the real world, but the book is overall quite entertaining and informative.

Fiction
Recommended
The Great Motion Mission: A Surprising Story of Physics in Everyday Life 978-1-55451-185-3
Lee, Cora Annick Press, 2009 $24.95 Grades 5-9
Our hero is drafted by his journalist uncle to stop the local amusement park from becoming a physics research lab, but with the help of a summer guest and science enthusiast, finds out how vital physics is to his life, and interesting to boot. The large format might be the only potentially unappealing part of this beautiful package: the story is engaging despite packing in a lot of science detail, the illustrations are appealing (and in color throughout), and the sidebars highlight significant physics concepts, mind-boggling challenges, and people in the physics community both modern and historical. The science content is not dumbed-down (many of these concepts might not be understood in full until college) but is entirely accessible to the book’s intended audience. Care is taken to show students from varying backgrounds and with varying interests finding physics useful in their lives. This book would be an excellent class read to prepare students for learning physics basics and the necessary math. (Similar books from the publisher on math and word origins, also available in a lower-priced softcover.)

Nonfiction
Not Recommended
Justin Timberlake: Breakout Music Superstar (series: Celebrity Biographies) 978-0-7660-3566-9
Napoli, Tony Enslow, 2010 $23.93 Grades 3-4
Intended for young elementary students.
(Short review, since I’m only looking at suitability for a teen audience: actually fairly hilarious to read a story of his life omitting his dating history and his SNL films.)

Nonfiction
Not Recommended
Cape Hatteras National Seashore: Adventure, Explore, Discover (series: America’s National Parks) 978-1-59845-086-6
Reed, Jennifer Enslow, 2009 $33.27 Grades 5-8
Disjointed and choppy agglomeration of factoids and legends around Cape Hatteras. The choice of emphases seems questionable: Blackbeard the pirate got many pages, the Wright brothers got only a paragraph. Color photographs, but about half are screen captures of the web sites you can get to with the accompanying web resources (but the addresses are not in the book). An interesting note about the MyReportLinks.com Books: the links will only be maintained for 5 years after the book is published, far fewer years than a library-bound book will last in a school library.

Nonfiction
Recommended
Robert L. Johnson (series: Life Skills Biographies) 978-1-60279-072-8
Buckley, Annie Cherry Lake Publishing, 2008 $20.95 Grades 7-12 (high-low)
A high-low biography of the founder of the BET cable channel that highlights the life skills he used to succeed and the challenges he faced because he is African American. Many sidebars explain in detail each life skill. It might work best in a class focusing on life skills or some other reason for students to absorb this information.

Nonfiction
Not Recommended
Lively Plant Science Experiments (series: Real Life Science Experiments) 978-0-7660-3146-3
Benbow, Ann and Colin Mably Enslow, 2009 $23.93 Grades 3-4
The publisher recommends this book for grades 3 to 4, and I agree.

Nonfiction
Not Recommended
Sid Fleischman: An Author Kids Love (series: Authors Kids Love) 978-0-7660-2757-2
Parker-Rock, Michelle Enslow, 2009 $23.93 Grades 3-4
Intended for elementary readers.

Nonfiction
Recommended
Dinosaur Scientist: Careers Digging Up the Past (series: Wild Science Careers) 978-0-7660-3053-4
Holmes, Thom Enslow, 2010 $31.93 Grades 6-12
Generally, I dislike with the fire of a thousand suns Enslow’s mad-libs-style fill in the blanks research series books that seem to be published only to extract money from school library budgets and suck all of the fun out of a topic for the young reader. This book, however, is astoundingly good. The author clearly has a passion for paleontology, found some excellent professionals in the field to profile, and did a wonderful job conveying the passion in the field, structuring the book, and providing useful and authoritative citations. The tips for students wanting to enter the field were practical and achievable. I loved it. The Enslow-style large type and boldfacing of vocabulary words seem out sync with the thoughtful content. On 2009 Science Books & Films Best Books for Junior High and Young Adults list.

There were four of them. The number increased as more men joined the group.

I also have to wonder whether, in a conversation set in the asteroid belt, when a character from the asteroid belt says “We’d have to take it to one of the rocks,” I can blame the editor for compelling “Anton turned to Lucky, explaining suavely, ‘We always refer to the asteroids as “rocks,” you understand.’” or only for leaving it in.
Very much of its time, the series has a simple optimism unlikely to be captured again:

In this age of Galactic civilization, with humanity spread through all the planets of all the stars in the Milky Way, only scientists could properly cope with mankind’s problems. In fact, only the specially trained scientists of the Council were adequate.

More Information Than You Require (audio), Hodgman
Why listen to the audio after I’ve read the book? Because it’s full of super neat extra features and fabulous guest stars. I think it also helps to get this re-read when I’m healthy, I enjoyed it that much more. Five stars.

The Wordy Shipmates (audio), Vowell
Also star studded audio production, but more serious content this time: the influence of the religious shifts among the pilgrims on the nascent United States. I always learn a lot from Vowell’s books, and imagine that her guest readers are all madly in love with her powerful intellect. Four stars.

Cat Burglar Black, Sala (Y, review copy)
I love Sala’s artwork (and lettering, though it seems to be a personal font) and the premise of the book: girls at a boarding school used to commit daring heists. I do not love that the plot took precedence over developing any of the characters and that the book set itself up for a sequel to the extent that the book ends with only one of several mysteries resolved and many characters still in peril. What ever happened to the stand-alone book? Two stars.

Moyasimon. 1 : tales of agriculture / Masayuki Ishikawa
Premise: New student at an agriculture college in Tokyo can see microbes with his bare eyes. Awesome execution: the microbes are utterly adorable and he meets many people who discuss the importance of microbes and fermented food in Japanese life. So interesting! Did you know that the lactobacillus used for yogurt in Japan is different than the ones used in Europe? Me neither! I do hope that the future volumes are published in the US. Four stars.

Lost on planet China : the strange and true story of one man’s attempt to understand the world’s most mystifying nation, or how he became comfortable eating live squid / J. Maarten Troost. (audio)
A travelogue of China by a man who is quite well traveled, looking for the essence of the country to see why it seems to be poised to dominate the world. Answer unclear, however, but I liked that he was willing to try strange foods and visit out of the way places despite not speaking or reading Chinese. Three stars.

Crime beat : a decade of covering cops and killers / Michael Connelly (audio)
A selection of Connelly’s newspaper articles on law enforcement and crime. Not only some interesting cases, but his writing is quite engaging and the narrator did a very good job. Three stars.