Books

Book 955: My Love Mix-Up! (Vol. 2) – Wataru Hinekure & Aruko

Book cover of "My Love Mix-Up Vol. 2" with Amazon Affiliate linkI can’t with this series, it’s just so wholesome and adorable and the type of manga I’ve been looking for. Don’t get me wrong the more intense (aka sexual) has its place, but the sweet/clean romance of this one is exactly what I didn’t know I wanted at the moment.

Volume 2 picks up right where Volume 1 ends with Aoki trying to figure out wtf is going on inside his head. The big cliffhanger is answered right away with Hashimoto and Aoki continuing their conversation. If anything it makes Aoki even more confused and sends him through yet another emotional ringer. If you’re here for the rom-com/comedy of errors aspect, don’t worry it keeps going in this one 😀

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Books

Book 952: My Love Mix-Up! (Vol. 1) – Wataru Hinekure & Aruko

Book cover of "My Love Mix-Up! Vol. 1" with Amazon Affiliate linkI ended up with this one from the library after seeing My Love Mix-Up! (Vol. 4) on NetGalley. It wasn’t an immediate OMG I must read these, but more of an awww that looks cute, I haven’t read a good manga in a while I wonder what it’s about. And then when I found out it was a comedy of errors, so I checked to see if my local library had it, they did and I requested it.

Thankfully, it became available in between two books and I could do a slight schedule modification to squeeze it in and not miss any galley deadlines. We’ll see if the next volume does (my library does have through volume 4!).

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Books

Book 679: Our Dining Table – Mita Ori

book cover of "Our Dining Table" and Amazon Affiliate linkThis is another great introduction into manga in that it’s easy to follow the reverse (for western readers) style of reading any type of book. The lack of explicit sex and (often internalized) homophobia also make this more appealing to western audiences that might not necessarily want to read/see something that explicit.

I think I’m narrowing in on a type of yaoi that I enjoy reading. This is a lot like Go for it, Nakamura!, in that there’s a purity around 95% of it. It’s so stinking adorable and this is definitely one of those books where you read a page/panel and put the book to your chest and sigh with a goofy grin on your face.

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ARC, Books

Book 649: A Hero Born (Legends of the Condor Heroes #1) – Jin Yong

Book cover for "A Hero Born"I was already thinking about requesting this on NetGalley when I received an email from the publisher, so I thought “why not?”* I might’ve been sucked in by the advertisement that this was the Chinese The Lord of the Rings, but I can neither confirm nor deny that. (It totally was—we all know it.)

I wasn’t sure what to expect going in to the book, I honestly kept putting it off because I assumed it would be way too hard to read. When I started the book to find dozens of pages of prologue, character lists, and historical information I started to get worried this was going to be more tome-like (i.e. Dickens; This was also initially published serially in a Hong Kong newspaper) and less like the martial arts movies that made huge splashes in the late-90s/early-00s in the US (think “Hero”, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “House of Flying Daggers”, etc.).

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Books

Book 632: My Brother’s Husband, Volume 2 – Gengoroh Tagame

My Brother’s Husband, Volume 2, if possible, is even more perfect than Volume 1. We pick up with the story where Yatchi is continuing to digest what it must be like for LGBTQ+ individuals to come out and not be accepted. He’s internalizing everything and applying it to his own relationship with his daughter.

As Yatchi is doing he comes to the realization that he may not have fully accepted his twin’s sexuality. He finally acknowledges that they grew apart and that it wasn’t Ryoji’s growing distant and physically moving to Canada, but that he became distant with his twin as soon as he came out.

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