I was originally going to call this post “My favorite things in January” as that’s how youtuber Super Eyepatch Wolf names his videos that serve the same purpose. Obviously he didn’t invent the concept of recapping media you consumed, but it does have a very nice ring to it. If that’s the title of this post, I decided that some light borrowing was fine after all. I’ll be talking about manga, books, music and other media I enjoyed in the past two months. I’m including some things from December because I can and you can’t stop me! That was childish of me. Let’s begin with music.

Music

I want to talk about two things in this section. One is a live performance and the other is an album release. I’ll start with the live performance of everyone’s favorite Twitch streamer: T-Pain. In 2023, T-Pain did a set called “on top of the covers.” He covered several well known songs in a performance to a small audience, the recordings of which he put on both Youtube and Spotify. And they’re fantastic. T-Pain is known for popularizing excessive autotune with his music. Despite that – and most people are aware of this by now – he is an incredibly talented singer even when the autotune is less intense. If you listen to one song from his set, the cover he did of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs is probably one of my favorite covers of all time.

Now then, can we start over? I’m sorry, that was unclear. Can we start over is the debut album of one Charlotte Sands. She’s a pop-punk singer who has been making music for a few years now. Some of her best work are songs like ‘dress’ which is about Harry Styles’ fashion sense and ‘bad day’ which is just a bop. With can we start over, Charlotte has created a fantastic pop-punk album that checks all the boxes. From the title track to deliciously spiteful spite to the sad but beautiful blindspot, this album has it all. If you check out any songs on this album, I recommend either spite or teeth, but honestly, I don’t think there’s a bad song on this album.

Books

I admittedly haven’t read as many books in January as I planned. In my defense, I’ve instead read a lot more manga, so it’s not like my new year’s resolution of doing more reading has completely failed. Despite not having read much, one of the two books that I did finish this month was excellent. Patrick Rothfuss is a very talented writer who has written three amazing books before writing The narrow road between desires. He’s written more than that, but these are all set in the same universe. The narrow road follows Bast, a fae and the friend/student of Kvothe. He spends his afternoons in the nearby village, messing with the two children and living his best fae life. It’s different, it’s whimsical but it’s also quite focused when it wants to, culminating in a much more serious story than you initially think you’re going to read. If you’re a fan of Rothfuss’ other work, I highly recommend you pick this one up. The hardcover is also gorgeous, so if you like looking at books like me, that’s another reason to pick this one up.

Manga

Understandably the longest part of this post is going to be dedicated to the manga I’ve read. I’ve read quite a lot, with December being a month where I didn’t read a ton of manga, but I did buy quite a few and waited for the full series to come out. Let’s talk about some of them, shall we? I will skip over a few since this post would become far too long if I mentioned everything, so in quick succession:

• You can find my thoughts on the One Piece volumes that I’ve read here.
• Eden’s Zero’s latest volumes puts a nice twist on the existing storylines that surprises just enough to not make the plot too boring (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, so it sounds less interesting than it actually is).
• Wave, listen to me still follows Koda Minare’s journey with radio and strange cults. It’s witty, it’s surprisingly human at times and Minare is a mess of a person running solely on self esteem throughout all of it and it’s actually working out for her.
• Skip and Loafer deserves its own post, so I won’t talk about it too much here. There are now eight volumes out and they’re all great, the story only picks up in quality after where the anime ended.
• I’ve been wanting to talk about Durarara for ages and it’s coming, I promise. To get excited to dive back into the wild world of Ikebukuro and the dollars I read the first three volumes of the manga, up to the big dollars reveal. Great stuff, I might check out the novels soon as well.

Are you tired? I feel like I’m tired after rushing through those. Let’s slow down a bit, because there are a few more things to talk about.

Although I didn’t buy the physical volumes for this one, and I used the good old seven seas to find myself the chapters, I did finally get started on Berserk. I know it’s a classic that everyone should have read at least once, and as much as it has been hyped up, I never really felt like it was a show for me. Regardless, when I was bored in late December, I did decide to give it a shot and I was pleasantly surprised. It definitely took me a little bit of time to get into it, and I will fully admit that the dark fantasy genre isn’t my favorite genre of all time, I found myself getting quite invested in the story as it continued. I didn’t like the first few dozen chapters, but now I’m curious to continue reading. I should probably do that at some point, but I got distracted by a bunch of other manga and shows.

Let’s move on from Berserk to something a bit more toned down: Mononogatari. I did a review for the anime a while back. You can find this review here if you’re interested. I’ve wanted to read the manga ever since then, and I’m glad I did. It tells the same story, of course, but the art is great and the pacing of the story feels good too. What really draws me into this one a little bit extra is the amazing cover art. I have a lot of well designed manga, but these ones are definitely up there. If you’re into action series that are a little bit slower and have some more depth and character growth than your average shonen, this one should be at the top of your list.

Moving on from Mononogatari we get to the last entry on this list: Zom100. With an anime racked with production issues and delays, I was hoping to get a more consistent experience when picking up the manga. There are also already 12 volumes out, which is plenty of material to read up to where the anime covered and well past it. For those unfamiliar with the series, it tells the story of Akira Tendo, a disillusioned office worker that wants nothing more than to be done with work and have some free time. Stuck in a hellish company he wishes for work to end and to his surprise, he gets his wish when the zombie apocalypse shuts down society. Akira then meets up with his old college buddy Kencho and eventually teams up with the calculating Shizuka and the German weeb Beatrix to travel back to his hometown and onward to finish all the items on his bucket list. This manga is silly and keeps getting sillier as it continues. Despite the silliness it has quite a few real moments that talk about the human condition and the things we crave for in life. This is where this manga seems to shine. Watching a disillusioned archeologist revitalize his dreams of discovering a new species or watching an old man build a treehouse with some strangers since his son died before he could ever build one with him. Humans only live once so we shouldn’t put our dreams on hold in favor of making money for some other schmuck. This manga knows when it needs to be funny and when it needs to be serious. I highly recommend you pick this one up. The cover art is very cool as well, the colors really pop which makes for a cool addition to your manga shelf.

And that’s most of the interesting things I watched and read in January. I also spent a lot of time watching Lethal Company stream vods, which I would highly recommend. I completed the pokedex in Pokémon Let’s Go and I got started on Child of Light (again). It’s been a pretty good start to the year for me. I hope you had a good start to 2024 too, and thank you so much for checking in on this blog!