Manga is pretty dumb. A few good pictures, then some oversimplified drawings that don’t fit the aesthetic theme or even remotely match the cover art. As for the stories, I do not find their adolescent slant at all appealing.

However, I do like Mizuki Shigeru’s series Gegege no Kitaro, about Japanese folkloric monsters or yokai.* When I saw Umezu Kazuo’s Cat Eyed Boy, filled with one-legged monsters, long-necked demon women and wives with disgustingly toothy joker grins, I knew this might be manga to my liking.

The Cat Eyed Boy of the title is a kid with claws, a cat nose and cat eyes. He can transform and he can talk to cats: at one point, he calls the neighbourhood cats to carry his wounded body on their backs to a local doctor. He lives in your typical Japan, where no one likes the deformed, forcing them to become evil. The Cat Eyed Boy straddles the point between humans and monsters, neither side accepting him. On his travels in search of shelter he gets involved with the humans he observes, though his moral compass does not necessarily lead him to help the humans out of their supernatural predicaments.

Indeed, though the drawings aren’t always perfect, they are consistent. The monsters are good enough for my tastes (except the ones that look like the Elephant Man). The patterns add quite a bit:

*I also bought myself some Doraemon in preparation for the day I can read Japanese. The Sazae comics are also fun, but those are newspaper comics, not comic book comics.

As part of my medieval obsession, I was most excited about reading about the Black Death. The medieval period is already creepy and smelly, adding a hemorrhage-causing contagion is like icing on a ghoul’s cake. I mean, who can resist the following symptoms:

• vomiting that eventually turns into bloody vomiting
• painful groin buboes that “gurgle”
• bloody mucous coughs
• delerium
• bloody anal leakages

Plus there are other fantastic images that come out of the Black Death (1347-1350):

• Dying villages flying the black plague flag to warn visitors away.
• Ships full of plague refugees sent from port to port across the Mediterranean by burning arrows.
• Deserted victims left in bed with a last meal beside them by fleeing family members.
• A deserted, hushed world where dogs, cats, birds, lions, camels, all died of the plague along with the humans.

I would be pooping my pants if I lived back then. Hopefully someone will start making more movies about the Black Death to freak me out some more.

A book called The Great Mortality by John Kelly is currently feeding this Black Death interest. I have to agree that, like reviews I’ve read, Kelly’s work is a smidge repetitive. At least I have a new stack of fascinating Black Death trivia I can use to drive away any potential friends at dinner parties.

Now that I am wrapping up my last book on my WWI reading list, I have been trying to catch up with some blog posts I have had in the works for three months now. It’s time to get the medieval obsession full-fledged already - and to do this I need to clear off the twentieth century history stuff.

I only read one fiction book as part of my WWI obsession: All Quiet on the Western Front.

I used to be a literary reader in my teens and twenties; for the last few years, I have really grown to love non-fiction. I like footnotes and put up with endnotes as I always make sure there’s a source for a statement, not the author just making things up. (Though I am surprised when researchers cite a Victorian work, all by itself, as the sole progenitor of some outlandish fact. Does anyone else not completely trust nineteenth century historians?) I scour the bibliography after finishing a book to see what else I can read on the subject. I even have a severe book dart obsession, now that a librarian warned me that post-its harm books and my brief period of dog earring made me feel like a vandal. I have to crosscheck facts, clarify information online and see pictures of whatever historical beauty or thug the author mentions.

Historical fiction bugs the hell out of me. Fascinating though the facts may be, I really can never know if everything I have been sold is a real fact or some convenient anachronism. Coworkers keep recommending such fiction to me. I have too many books already on my reading list without polluting the list with badly written romance. Ugh.

However, Erich Maria Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front based on his actual experiences fighting in the trenches and published soon after the war. Plus, by reading this book, I could right a wrong from childhood: my high school did not have it as required reading. For our literary education, we watched the Playboy version of Macbeth instead and the teacher left the room before each naked woman, to give the boys a chance to rewind and watch the naked women again. A lawsuit for corrupting us should have taken place. That’s another story.*

Thus, I can accept All Quiet on the Western Front as based in fact. I must have, unlike the rest of you, missed out on the high school discussions about this book. I zipped through my copy and could not get into the stories. I already had read a couple of books on real men’s trench experiences and seen real photos of disfigured faces and amputated limbs. I cannot feel so much for a fictional character, however much he is based on a real person, if I know he is still only something imagined. In other words, I did not get much from the book.

Not all is lost! There is one redeeming snippet to the book! It has a hamster reference near the beginning:

“He is as fat as a hamster in winter, but he trundles his pots when it comes to that right up to the very front-line.”

Of course a German would know about the European or black-bellied hamster (cricetus cricetus)! Europe swarmed with the cuties once. My parents’ adopted street dogs even gave me a tribute of a dead European hamster in 2003. These European hamsters are guinea pig sized, inflated versions of the small pet store inbreds. Remarque’s idea of a hamster and my dead European hamster may have been a swimmer, filling its cheek pouches with air when it swam (Spiegel says so), it may have left a burrow stocked with about “90 kilograms of grain, peas and potatoes” (according to University of Bonn researcher Dr. Carole Gee).

That quote of Remarque’s is going into my pop culture book on hamsters in history.

*I suppose we never had to watch the Penthouse version of Caligula for history class. I corrupted myself with that later on in life. I can only blame myself for the horrid memories. Oh, that awful decapitating machine!

As I wrap up my WWI obsession, I am already two books underway with my new medieval Europe obsession. Matt made me read Pillars of the Earth, which in turn inspired me to finally begin my medieval project by taking out half a dozen library books. (It’s for work but a perfect excuse to learn about something to which I didn’t pay enough attention when I was in school.)

The first nonfiction medieval book was Queen Emma and the Vikings by Harriet O’Brien. A supposedly cunning and mean English Norman queen living in the early 1000s, Emma was renamed Aelgifu by her first husband Aethelred the Unready to match the 90% of Anglo-Saxon women who were called that. Her cool husband was the Viking king, Cnut, a teenager who conquered England and won a place in my heart.

Queen Emma makes the best of shreds of evidence. The author manages to overcome the meagre information on the queen by describing the fascinating times of Anglo-Saxon England. For example, did you know that England at the time had hares but not rabbits? The Normans - Emma’s people - brought over rabbits only after 1066 “as a useful source of protein.”

Then there are the carrots. O’Brien explains that the English had white and purple carrots, not orange carrots, which were a seventeenth-century development. The internet begs to differ: carrots made it to England only in the fifteenth century, far after O’Brien’s book suggests (see the Carrot Museum and others, all repeating the same information as the internet is wont to do).

But the crowning element of this book is poor king Edmund Ironside’s death on November 30, 1016. Cnut’s worthy opponent may have died on the toilet.

The devious nobleman Eadric Streona is rumoured by later chroniclers to have coerced his son or bribed some of Edmund’s men to ambush the king in the latrine. The twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon says that the attacker(s) were even hidden in the depths of the toilet itself. Edmund Ironside was stabbed in the butt or the bowels; Geoffrey Gaimar in the 1100s wrote that Eadric used a crossbow operated remotely to shoot an arrow that “went as far up as the lungs.”

Presumably, all of you, my dear little zombie fans, have already pre-ordered your copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. The book will be published this April:

[Grahame-Smith] and an editor at Quirk Books, an independent publisher, developed a diagram tracing connections between seminal period novels to cult movie genres, including robots, vampires and aliens.

“It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

(From the Times Online)

Here’s some more alterna-Austen for you: Pride and Predator. Predator as in alien like Schwarzenegger’s mud wrestling buddy in the 1987 film. Produced by Elton John of all people.

Written by Will Clark, Andrew Kemble, and John Pape, the film will have some sort of alien landing in England and slaughtering - please, oh, please - Mrs. Bennett and Lydia.

There are apparently other so-called Monster-Lit books coming out:

• Jane Eyre with Mr. Rochester’s bigger, creepier secret
• Wuthering Heights with Japanese ghosts
• The Mill on the Floss with human sacrifice

(On a less exciting note, there’s also a cartoon Gnomeo and Juliet being made, which is like the Shakespeare teen sob story with gnomes.)

Yes, I agree, Hollywood is getting desperate. Yes, this means my horror schlock film-watching society will have many more zombie crap evenings to come!

The most obsessive part of my current WWI obsession is reading a book called Intimate Voices from the First World War. Compiled by documentarians Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, the book takes on WWI chronologically with diaries, letters and oral histories. Starting off with Gavrilo Princip’s co-assassin, Vaso ÄŒubrilović, who recounts the day when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie met their deaths and set off the war, in a letter to his sisters, Palmer and Wallis amazingly found sources from both sides of battles, sometimes fighting opposite each other that very day. At one point, on November 5, 1914, diarists Dr. Ludwig Deppe, a Dresden doctor working in Tanga in what is today Tanzania, and Richard Meinertzhagen, a British officer, meet and each write about the meeting that evening.

After each diary cuts off, I flip hurriedly to the back to see if the writer lived. Most live, perhaps the reason why their diaries also survived. Yet, a couple have died so far.

First, my lovely Dr. Josef Tomann on May 16, 1915. Trapped in PrzemyÅ›l during the siege, Tomann had a sense of humour about the citizens’ predicament (”What is the difference between the heroes of Troy and those of PrzemyÅ›l? The Trojans were in the belly of a horse, while we have horse in our bellies!”) Two months before his death, he had commemorated an anniversary in his diary: “Mitzl, it is seven years to the day since we first kissed!” (Mitzl was his pregnant wife, back home in Eger, Hungary.)

Then my self-righteous Austrian - despite his confidence in the sanctity of his side’s mission, he remains a human and the chance to know him through his writing makes him precious - dies. His July 19, 1915 final entry is:

It is enough to drive you insane. Dead, wounded, massive losses. This is the end. Unprecedented slaughter, a horrific bloodbath. There is blood everywhere and the dead and the bits of bodies lie scattered about so that …

The compilers explain:

The diary breaks off here in mid-sentence as the Austrian officer unknowingly records the moment of his own death. A Hungarian officer finds the body when the firing dies down at the end of that day, adding to the diary underneath the Austrian’s last words: ‘I found this diary in the hand of a dead officer on the Doberdo plateau: God bless him.’

My poor nameless Austrian never met his Maria, his Italian love that the war turned into an enemy, again. I wish that Hungarian took care to note his colleague’s name so that we could find Maria and tell her descendants that he always thought of her.