Naoki Urasawa, James Ellroy, Helen DeWitt: Pajiba March 2025 Book Recommendations Superpost

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by AA Goodman (@goodmanreads)

Many years ago, I remember reading a piece on a now-defunct pop culture website that rhapsodized about the underrated brilliance of The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. At the time, the book was out of print and largely confused with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. It would take a while for the novel to receive a reprint, by which point it had been reclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the 21st century so far. And hey, those people are right. This book is sort of amazing.

Sibylla is a brilliant woman who has never entirely been able to reach her immense potential. When her son Ludo is born, she decides to see how smart this kid can be. By the age of two, he’s reading full novels. By three, he’s read Homer in the original Greek. Before he turns ten, he’s taught himself Japanese, Old Norse, and Hebrew. But like many young boys, he just wants to know more about himself, mainly his absent father. Sibylla has decided that, rather than tell Ludo who his dad is, she’ll offer him a slew of better male role models through endless rewatches of Akira Kurosawa’s magnum opus The Seven Samurai. That only works for a while, and soon Ludo decides to go look for the man, or at least a suitable alternative for him.

The Last Samurai is a brilliant book about the limits of brilliance. The prose weaves in strange and often aggravating digressions of Ludo’s astonishing curiosity and Sibylla’s own mental spirals. She works a rubbish and underpaid job transcribing obscure publications while trying to sate Ludo’s endless thirst for knowledge well beyond her own capabilities. There’s a stark gap between the fantasy of being a genius and trying to live as one in a world where expectations are smaller and somewhat unfair. As Ludo goes on what plays out like a hilarious and sad series of blind dates with potential fathers - all of whom accept his claims of him being their son immediately, because brilliant men are all sluts in this book - the book finds a fascinating balance between cerebral and zany. This quest is ridiculous, Ludo’s entire life is ridiculous. But him wanting to find an explanation for his entire being through the almost Disney-esque desire for the perfect dad? That’s very real.

By the book’s end, and an emotionally crushing moment involving the final candidate, you feel as overwhelmed as Ludo. There’s more to life than just knowing a lot of interesting facts, but wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier if it were? The Last Samurai doesn’t have a lot of answers to the many questions Ludo and Sibylla ask themselves, but that’s the point. It’s a lot to take in, but what a satisfying glut of a novel.

Master Keaton and Monster by

I’ve said it before on this here website but I love Naoki Urasawa. He’s my favourite mangaka. Earlier last year, I absolutely devoured the entirety of his magnum opus, 20th Century Boys, in under ten days. I was so obsessed with his sprawling saga of friendship, conspiracy, and the apocalypse that I literally couldn’t put it down. It was only fair that I finally get around to reading the manga of one of my favourite animes, and hey, there’s a classic Urasawa manga I can get on sale. Behold my bounty.

Set in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Monster follows a brilliant Japanese surgeon, Dr. Kenzo Tenma, who works under the thumb of a self-serving hospital head. After choosing to operate on a dying orphan over a local politician, he finds himself ostracized by the medical elite, which dramatically changes when all of those people conveniently die. Many years later, Tenma meets that patient whose life he saved… and it turns out he’s a sociopathic serial killer. Now, Tenma feels the need to rectify his life’s biggest error, which means finding the mysterious Johan Liebert and killing him.

Monster is a stone-cold classic to those in the know. It’s a rare combination of all of my favourite genres: slow-burn and sprawling character study, post-war European psychological thriller, hyper-intelligent serial killer versus super-smart hero, and languid descent into total oblivion. Having seen the anime more than once, I can tell that it was a near page-for-page adaptation of the manga, and I am 100% cool with that. The above plot sounds super propulsive but Urasawa is not that kind of writer. He likes to take his time and go on multiple tangents, following new characters for chapters at a time before tying all of these seemingly disparate threads together. It’s all about creating a densely layered portrait of an entire world impacted by the main characters and the all-consuming battle of good versus evil that they represent. For such a bleak story, Monster is remarkably hopeful in its assertion that being a good person in the face of insurmountable evil is both worthwhile and necessary.

Master Keaton, an earlier work, is more episodic and light-hearted, although it’s still undeniably an Urasawa work. The Keaton of the title is a Japanese-English former soldier and archaeologist who has a profitable side-hustle as an insurance investigator. This largely gives him an excuse to be a nerdier Indiana Jones, travelling worldwide and dealing with issues of antiquities, war, and MacGyver-esque japes. Of course I also love this manga, although it definitely feels like an early work before Urasawa spread his wings and went buckwild. There is heft here but nothing as weighty as what he’d deal with in Monster or 20th Century Boys. Still, who isn’t into a story of a geeky Indy who figures out a way to survive the desert by drinking his own pee?

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Finally found a book to break my reading block.

[image or embed]

— Kayleigh Donaldson (@ceilidhann.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 9:26 PM

I must admit that I hit something of a reading slump last month, stuck in a cycle of picking up books and putting them down because they just weren’t scratching the hyper-specific itch I had. I couldn’t find the thing to satisfy whatever it was I was craving, which is especially galling when you have as many unread books as I do. So, blessed be to past me for buying a couple of James Ellroy books at some point in the past because that got the job done exactly when I needed it.

For some reason, I’d never read an Ellroy book before, despite his work being 100% my jam. I love noir crime novels, I love twisted retellings of history, and I love ‘the dark side of Hollywood’ narratives that delve into the irrevocable rot at the heart of the American dream. I also have a long-standing and complicated relationship with true crime, so of course I know far too much about the horrifying murder of Elizabeth Short, forever known as the Black Dahlia. In Ellroy’s brutal reimagining of the case, a pair of semi-crooked cops become embroiled in the investigation, which leads to a descent into the Los Angeles criminal underworld populated with corrupt businessmen, porno films, pimps, drugs, and further depravities that wouldn’t look out of place in a pre-Code silent film.

James Ellroy, a fascinating figure and known kook, takes inspiration from classic gumshoe detectives like Sam Spade and yellow-paged pulps of the ’50s with his merciless version of history. There’s no such thing as a good person, or at least one untainted by hypocrisy and violence. The main detective, ostensibly the good guy, still covers up evidence and finds himself sexually obsessed with the victim in ways that would paint him as the villain in any other story. It’s a fascinating book of anti-nostalgic power - no, things definitely weren’t better in the ‘good old days.’

This prose - hard-bitten, profane, blunt but still oddly poetic - could so easily slide into self-parody. I kept expecting it to, like how Frank Miller’s comics went from self-aware homage of noir to over-the-top joke. Maybe his later work does, but here, Ellroy is in total control. I was gripped, right until the unexpected ending. As a portrait of obsession and man’s penchant for embracing our species’ worst tendencies, it’s all sickeningly spot-on. I can’t wait to read more of his work.