100 books like Blue Period 1

I cannot forget this book, even though, at times, I am desperate to do so. Ishiguro, one of my chosen authors and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is beyond masterful in the unique way he portrays quotidian events before a horror that is almost theatrical in its grotesquerie.

I was deeply disturbed while reading it, yet I could not put it down. Years later, I continue to find it a source of disquiet regarding where our culture/society is going and how we must stop a very particular trend. The trend is increasingly toward science and technology that utterly and completely disregards human feelings, individual rights, and the spiritual qualities of all sentient beings.

It’s simply an unforgettable story about something unfolding in an all-too-real fashion out here in the world outside the author’s mind.

I truly believe that video games are the art form that defines our present and, at least, our near-ish future. So, it was a great pleasure to encounter Zevin’s novel about the relationships behind a video game studio’s origins, which both elevates and scrutinizes the medium’s potential to revolutionize narrative storytelling.

Zevin deftly translates gaming's embodied perspective, including one stand-out moment in the back half that is perhaps the book’s defining triumph. Through her expansive prose, Sam, Sadie, and Marx play out their lives: their moments of intense and sometimes myopic creativity, their intricate interpersonal joys and devastations, and the fantastically rendered worlds, some built from reality and others from pixels which bring them together, push them apart, and might just bring them together again.

Based on the title alone, I knew Yi’s debut novel would hit me like a crossbow to the heart. “Y/N” Is a prevalent shorthand for a particular kind of self-insert fan fiction, and having grown up in online fandom spaces, I have a lot of nostalgia for (and now plenty of necessary distance from) the passion that often explodes within and beyond those communities.

And still, I wasn’t prepared for the journey that Yi took me on. Nominally about one woman's spiraling obsession with a Korean pop idol, Y/N charts the inexplicable journey between a “regular person” and a “fan" before morphing into something sinisterly, beautifully, and singularly unhinged.

I was so moved by Hua Hsu’s memoir, an elegy to a college best friend whose shocking murder forever haunts him, because it spoke to a certain kind of young friendship. One of the things that bound Hsu to Ken was the art they did (and didn’t) like but which they always talked about.

I was reminded of the chance encounters of my most important friendships—the Sunday nights spent watching Mad Men in a dorm room or the hours spent swapping Photoshop edits of anime characters—and transported back to those days of limitless dreaming. How big the world seemed then, and how much art we were so desperate to make for, and about, each other.

The Nobel-prize winning laureate has written many more famous books dealing with the human condition, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go, but this is, to my mind, his best rumination on humanity's familiar ache. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a flawless book and similarly themed, but there is something about the post-war regrets, delusions, and self-justifications of the aging Japanese artist Masuji Ono that just slay me and make me want to weep. Ishiguro is of course the king of unreliable narrators, so I don't want to give away the big reveal here, but how denial of the truth and self-delusion can misdirect us in life, is at the core of this masterful insight into the human condition.

A girl gets a letter from her future self, telling her to do everything she can to save a suicidal classmate, even if that means falling in love with him. A sweet love story with a hint of time travel that helped me understand the sacrifice love demands. I would love to be able to write a romance like this someday. 

A story about two high school friends trying to make it in the manga industry. The twist: our hero can't be with the girl he loves until he makes his dreams as an artist come true. A series that helped me understand the inner workings of Japan's comic industry.

This book came out only a few years after my first encounter with anime and just blew me away, introducing me to a completely different world – a world that at the time was mostly out of reach because Western translations were still rare. 

Having been published in 1983, it may be considered outdated, but manga translator and historian Frederick Schodt is a master narrator and does a great job of explaining how Japanese comics evolved during manga’s golden age. Now we can find any kind of information on the internet, but Schodt’s thorough analysis and engaging prose are second to none. 

If you are into cultural history and like to go beyond simple manga talk, this is still a must-read.

A Japanese light novel, manga, and anime, Kyo Kara Maoh! is perhaps the foundation upon which my obsession with trope-defying fantasy humor was built. I will admit to watching the anime first (as an impressionable young teenager) and being hooked. It wasn’t like any show I had seen before. It was funny because it made fun of itself and the genres and tropes that normally constrained such a series. And as soon as I found that such a thing existed I wanted it. Tropes are great, but I love them so much more when they’re turned upside down or inside out or stretched out of shape completely, because then you get to see what they’re really made of.

In this book, Alt sets out a convincing argument as to how much of the modern world, the culture and products consumed, as well as niche but dangerously influential areas of the internet and modern politics such as ‘4chan,’ trace their birth and or roots back to Japan. It is full of facts that are commonly overlooked or ignored but are true nonetheless. I could not stop reading this, and I suspect that if you are reading this list, you won’t be able to either.