Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/10

Welcome to another week -- if you're like many of us in North America (and possibly other parts of the Westernized world), you're counting down to a Christmas/Holiday vacation of some kind, and getting less and less focused on the work you're supposed to be doing.

And so here I am with something that might be yet another distraction in this festive season: some books, just published, that you might want to read instead of doing whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing today. I haven't read any of these books yet, but there's what I can tell you about them:

First up is the fifth book in John C. Wright's big saga of post-humanity, "The Eschaton Sequence" -- The Vindication of Man is a Tor hardcover that hit stores on November 22nd. The first chapter starts in AD 68,010, but it's still a book about a guy waiting for his girlfriend to come back from a mission into deep space -- so this is on the comfortably familiar side of post-human. (I don't think the title is meant as a two-hundred-years-delayed slam on Mary Wollstonecraft, but I could be wrong.)

Everything else I have are are manga volumes from Yen Press, so take that as read from here.

He's My Only Vampire, Vol. 9 by Aya Shouoto -- he's a vampire! she's a schoolgirl! together they...well, there seems to be another "him" at this point, since the first page has two shoujo-style cute boys, one of them biting his T-shirt soulfully. So she might just be left out in the cold at this point, if you know what I mean. There's also the usual magical-conflict plot, with seven big Plot Tokens and lots of Machiavellian players maneuvering to do whatever with them.

The Honor Student at Magic High School, Vol. 5 adapted into manga by Yu Mori from Tsutomu Sato's light novel -- our heroes are the elite students of the declared "First High" of magical kids, destined to rule zaibatsu and the entire country on graduation, like generations of their families before them. But some snot-nosed upstarts from Third High are threatening to win a major competition because they work hard! Um, yeah, we seem to be supposed to root for the super-privileged class in this book, so go for it if that's the way your sympathies lie.

Of the Red, the Light, and the Ayakashi, Vol. 5 by nanao and HaccaWorks* -- supernatural creatures are doing something, which the back cover copy boldly declares includes eating people. Again, these seem to be our heroes.

Strike the Blood, Vol. 5, adapted by TATE from Gakuto Mikumo's light novel -- Well, the bad guys here are the Black Death Emperor Front, showing that the creators here spare no effort to show how evil they are. And they've captured four of our heroes!

And last for this week is Ubel Blatt, Vol. 7, by Etorouji Shiono -- in a medievaloid world, two Marquis are fighting. I don't know if that means the army of evil elves from previous books has been defeated, or just run away from. Either way: death, destruction, angst, and a woman with really silly armor on the cover.