Wed Dec 23, 2020 9:00am
12 Favorites [+]
I’ve written here before about the quality of “I-want-to-read-it-osity” that some books have, a hard to define but easy to see quality which I am going to refer to as “grabbyness.” There are books you can pick up and put down and happily pick up again, and then there are books that seem to glue themselves to your brain, that utterly absorb you. There are books that are great when you’re halfway through them but that take work to get into. Right now, the kind you can put down and the kind that are hard to get into don’t cut it, because they’re hard to focus on while fretting. For me, grabbyness is a quality entirely orthogonal to actual quality. There are grabby books that are only OK and great books that are not grabby. It also has nothing to do with how ostensibly exciting they are, nor how comforting they are. There are just books that are grabby and books that are not. What I’m talking about is the power to bring you rig
Screenshot: TV Tokyo
A crisis is exhausting on every level, emotional especially, so following up on Jo Walton’s great post on Books in Which No Bad Things Happen, here are some good manga and anime where no bad things happen, to lighten your spirits without the risk of getting them down…
Yotsuba&c!(manga, usually pronounced “Yotsuba etcetera”): A charming energetic five-year-old girl has been adopted and brought to Japan by her new dad. As she explores the excitements of a new neighborhood, her loving father, his friends, and neighbors including several older girls of different ages (middle school, high school) enjoy her delight in exploring the world and getting to do the kinds of playful things that you do with little kids, like ride a hot air balloon or make cardboard toys. It’s an absolutely charming exploration of how friendships across age groups can be so rewarding to all.