The sixty-first book: #50 The 120 Days of Sodom - Marquis de Sade
Let's start today's write ups with something salacious. The story of 120 days of libertine entertainment is legendary enough to be banned in several countries. Despite that reputation, only the first thirty days were actually written, the rest mostly only existing in notes, as the Marquis de Sade was moved out of the Bastille before he could finish it and he couldn't take the work with him. It took a century for it to be found and it gives a weird insight into the excesses at the time.
While I'm sure this was, in places, exaggerated, the Marquis writes about the extravagances in such a way that he's at least heard of people enjoying some of them and some people would at least have been interested in the worst parts. While there's some disdain in the tone about the novel's protagonist, the details and care of the writing make it feel like he also gets some thrill out of it. As a reader, it gets too much real quick - I suppose I am not the biggest fan of the faecal focus of the first month, but it was extreme here. The later months really take on a BDSM focus, and there's no penetration in the first month at all, and I'm glad I don't need to go too far in the details. Just the notes on how many of the victims are maimed and executed can feel stomach churning and I would hope this isn't actually seen as erotica - even if it's sometimes written as such, and the writer having participated in it anyway.
With that said, it's well written and there's something fascinating about these descriptions of what happened - a dispassionate look at these fictional characters and their actions - and so curiosity makes it mor einteresting to read. I'm just glad it ended when it did, really.
The fifty-sixth comic: #484 Dragon Ball
And now to something a lot lighter. Like anyone else my age, I was exposed to Dragon Ball Z in my teenage years and was both fascinated by it and vaguely put off by some of its endless arcs. The anime was based on the second arc of the manga, which is on the comics list, and for that reason we started by reading the first arc.
The comic starts out as a take on Journey to the West, with a more innocent monkey and a rather less innocent monk. They hunt for the seven dragon balls, which are said to summon a dragon that grants one wish. After that, they disappear for a year - a cycle that comes back a few times in the series, so clearly it's not as much of a limitation. In the mean time, it turns into a supernatural martial arts manga - there's a lot of training done to surpass your normal limits as well as levitation, psychokinesis and the infamous kamehameha blast that we've seen so often since. Once it settles into that, it flows a bit better - it retains some of the humor and slapstick elements, but it's also one of the best at portraying action and motion, making for some incredibly satisfying fight scenes. I hope the Z arc follows that as well, rather than just the plodding delays that the anime is knkown for in my mind.