I always thought it would be cool to like anime, but most of what I’ve seen over the years left me unimpressed.  Either I was too post-pubescent for the material (Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist), I was too wedded to the notion of stories making sense (Akira), or maybe I was just one of those people who prefer not to be bored for long periods of time (Ghost in the Shell).  Then there were some (Cowboy Bebop comes to mind) that weren’t notably immature or dull or incomprehensible, but didn’t grab me in any meaningful way. 

Death Note. It's about a death notebook. Odd.

Then there’s Death Note, which rocks.  I won’t get into the details of the story, which will sound silly if I try to summarize it, and because watching it unfold is one of the show’s real pleasures.  Suffice to say that over almost 40 half-hour episodes you have a truly great cat-and-mouse story as Light Yagami – given the power to kill any almost any human being he chooses decides to wipe out all crime by destroying criminals.  This has the side effect of making him into a mass murderer, which the police don’t like, and he is forced to match wits with “L,” the world’s greatest detective.  There are brief periods during the series’ run when it becomes a little confusing or opaque, but at the end you’ll discover those parts that seemed to make no sense or where you thought you weren’t paying attention do make sense and you were paying attention.  That’s always nice.  I give it a very strong recommendation.  If you are going to check out only one anime series, this is really the way to go. 

Freaky. Right?

It’s been a lot of back and forth in my reading on the romantics.  Mostly Byron and Blake these days.  At the moment, I’m steeped in research on Blake.  That guy was freaky.  I wanted to post some pictures of animals together with Kindles, but the internet  — usually so reliable – has let me down this time.  Feel free to send me pictures of your pets with your Kindles.  Or better yet, if you have a picture of your Kindle with a wild animal, like a lion or a capybara, for instance, I’d like to see it.  You  bet.  You may think the obvious move here is to talk about the Kindle Animal Farm, but I’m trying get Amazon to send me a free one, so I will pass on the low-hanging fruit, thanks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 6:07 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.