Book-buying and the Leaf That Grabbed My Dad

Book-buying day, and there were some goodies that came out this week:

--Neil Gaiman's "Graveyard Book". I'd read his little stand-alone story, "The Witche's Headstone" from his YA short-story collection "M is for Magic", that eventually he expanded on. Lovely book: reads like how Ray Bradbury might have reimagined Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book", and the illustrations by Dave McKean are shivery and evocative.

--Richelle Mead's "Succubus Dreams". The third in her scrumptious Georgina Kincaid series. I utterly *love* this series: Richelle is like a female answer to Jim Butcher, in terms of their style of urban fantasy. Very down-to-earth characters who at first glance might seem like an ordinary bunch of thirty-somethings in modern-day Seattle... except that they're a fun-loving bunch of vampires and angels and demons. And I love how she never lets the sex scenes take over the story, but how they actually move the story forward: Laurell K. Hamilton take note...

--A little surprise: a "Ghost Whisperer" tie-in, and I'm woefully behind on the last episodes of that, which I just might buy through Amazon.com's new TV on Demand service.

And a little story from my dad: He was helping some friends of his set up their exhibit in the flower show section of the Topsfield Fair today. And while he was trimming some dead twigs off a weeping cedar, he noticed a leaf snagged on the top of the tree. So he carefully bowed the top of the tree down so he could grab the leaf off... and the leaf grabbed him back. Thinking a hornet had snuck inside the leaf and had tried to bite him, he flicked it away... And discovered it was actually a green praying mantis! Says my dad, "All the years I've been working with plants and trees, that's the first time a leaf ever grabbed me back!"

Look no further for good anime dubs...

Courtesy of my good friend and gaming mentor WGAnubis, this has to be one of the most extensive sites ever, with so many serieses that I've wanted to watch, my eyes are spinning like little spirals:

http://www.justdubs.net/index.html

I recently finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion (looong entry about that to come, but in a nutshell: If you were going to teach a class in Teilhardian eschatology, all you'd have to do to make it accessible to your students is have them watch End of Evangelion.... And also... will the real "end up in hell" ending please stand up???), which my buddy and kid-brother stand-in LinksLife had highly reccommended. Also watched the by turns hysterical and touching Hayao Miyazaki offering "My Neighbors the Yamadas", which I loved so much, I'm planning to share it with my folks and introduce them to the lovely world of anime. And I'm pecking away, by turns, at Trinity Blood, Blood+, Death Note, and Fullmetal Alchemist, with occasional forays into Chobits (the first manga I ever read), Ah! My Goddess! (with the most bizarre Celtic J-Pop opening theme), and -- yes -- Sailor Moon, which I probably would have watched as a kid/young teenager, except that I was probably doing math homework when it was on. No more having to search madly on YouTube!