Views from Medina Road

I'm trying now to post more frequently, even if only a line or three. This past week Colleen Lindsay at Del Rey was kind enough to send me copies of the first four Del Rey manga titles, and so I dutifully browsed through them and listed them in my [ideally weekly] New Books page. I confess though that, aside from the very occasional graphic novel by Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware, I have no familiarity with the form, much less the Japanese flavor called 'manga'. And so I've commissioned Cynthia Ward, who knows about these things, to supply an article about manga for the clueless, like me. She assures me she'll have it done in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, I spent about three hours yesterday resolving all the write-in votes in the Locus Poll in order to establish the final results in all categories. None of them was squeakingly close. I do still intend to analyze the results and post some insights into voting patterns, without of course actually revealing anything about the winners, and hope to do that over the next week or three, or five.