Death Note

Seeing this increases the dopamine levels of your brain... Interesting...

When I was in mortuary school, I moved into a one bedroom apartment with a girl who was into anime, manga, and Japanese culture. She had this huge bookshelf with all manner of different mangas with only two small lower portions for other books (art books and her limitted regular fiction intake). She also had other books stored under her futon and in her closet. I stored all my books at my mother's house and in stacks around my bed... and stacks around the front room at random.

If a person were to put me in a room with a bunch of books I've never seen or experienced before, I would eventually get around to looking at them.

During this time period, I started reading Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Fruits Basket, Kitchen Princess, Mars (I think that's what it was called), Ouran High School Host Club, Death Note, and many, many others.

Some I liked and they really stuck with me for a long time afterwards.

Some, didn't impress me at all and I don't follow them at all anymore.

Now, Death Note, I liked so much I decided to watch the anime years after I'd finished reading the manga... twice.

I like it for the same reason I liked Frank Herbert's Dune and George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire... sort of.

See Death Note, for those of you who live in a hole is about a Japanese kid named Light (written with the character for "moon") Yagami who finds a Death Note this shinigami, Ryuk dropped because he was bored. Light, being quite bored himself, has an odd reaction to finding a notebook that will kill anyone who's name you write within the pages while picturing their faces. He decides he's going to use the Death Note to create an ideal world by killing criminals. In this new, ideal world, he will be God.

Yeah. You read that right. The notebook turns him flat out, bloody bonkers.

Well, the police quickly catch on that something is going on, but they can't figure out what it is. Meanwhile, normal people start thinking that someone named "Kira" (think bastardization of the English word "killer") is killing those he deems "unworthy".

Into this steaming pile of confusion and madness enters L Lawliet, the world's greatest detective. Half of the manga and the anime is the war between Light and L that proceeds. It's pretty much a speed chess-match where one person is playing chess to figure out his opponents identity and the other person is doing everything he can to obscure his identity. Oh, and the person trying to find his opponent's identity? He is a genius, but he doesn't know the rules.

Instead he figures them out as he's going along.

It's... fun and supremely satisfying to watch.

While posing interesting moral quandries and asking great questions about humanity as a whole.

Then, just when you think things can't get any better, the game changes! Something happens to L and he can't solve the Kira case anymore. So, the work is left in the hands of his successors: Near and Mello.  They don't get along and the rest of the half of the series is a three-way chessmatch between Near, Mello, and Light because Mello refuses to work with Near and insists that he'll find Kira himself.

The stakes rise and by that point the world will never be the same again.

I really liked this series in any form. The manga was really interesting and it has 108 chapters (an important number in Buddhism). The anime series is excellently done as well and I rather enjoyed watching it. Even the "I take this potato chip... AND EAT IT!" scene.

It's a bit strange for a shonen series because there isn't a lot of fighting. Most of the action happens in the minds of Light, L, Near, Mello, and the other characters.  The shinigami look... amazing and weird and just...out of this world.

If there are any more series like this one, I would dearly love to read it because it's... just really cool!

Now, go read it or watch it because you really need to do that.  Nowish would be good, but I understand you have a life to live and work to do. So... I'll give you a month.