Like the last Tony-authored book I reviewed, I want to concede that there’s a bit of unfairness coming into my review. In some ways, I think it’s an important work that just isn’t what I’m looking for right now. What’s more, it’s kind of a reference work that I tried to read cover to cover, and that affects my thinking, too. However, I also have some grumps about it that I think are valid.

I like blending the mundane and the fantastical (Jedi should absolutely be sent to negotiate trade disputes), so I ought to like this story about the fae and influencers (especially since it has some pro-co-op vibes), but it just didn’t land as well as I’d have liked.

Eh, it felt like this was a continuation of some of my least favorite parts of Autonomous. I am also struggling to enjoy “robots’ rights” stories in our LLM era, which is dumb, but that’s how it is.

The story itself didn’t captivate me much. I felt like there were sudden developments for the sake of the plot moving forward, and even an twist that comes partway through the book felt like [insert sudden development here] rather than the surprise it was supposed to be. I also didn’t catch some of the character connections and payoffs at first, though I suspect that’s due in part to my own inattention.

Finally getting back to the Newitz and Anders Humble Bundle collection I recently came into! This was a fun, cozy, quick read, and its throwaway reference to a David Graeber book and last-minute praise of platform independence to avoid Apple-style skimming off the top made me smile.

I’m still struggling a bit more with these story arcs than I did with earlier ones, but I can’t put my finger on why, and I don’t think it’s because they’re any less good.

It is also very interesting to be reading these books at a time where I’m digitizing journals from my college years, worrying a lot about grades and relationships.

Still good, but I’m still ready to wrap up this reread and turn my attention to some other things.

This review is slightly more negative, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m ready to move on to something else to read, because I don’t like all of the subplots in this part of the story, or something else. It’s still good, though!

Post-timeskip Dumbing of Age is good; some parts feel rockier, some parts feel even better.

Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy this particularly dramatic, action-packed sequence, but Willis does an excellent job of it—and of making it fit within the broader world and story he’s built.

Still enjoying this! I really appreciate Willis’s charitable, nuanced take on non-fundamentalist religion that comes out here while Joyce is wrestling with her faith.

I really ought to scan back through each volume as I read it so that I can give it a more thorough review, but these go fast, blend together, and just make a generally good impression. I’d like to wrap up the reread so that I can turn my attention to other stuff, but sometimes you also just need a quick, easy rebinge of a high quality webcomic.

DoA is funny because its plot takes place over a few months, but the story has been told over years and years. That makes it hard to remember what happened when. I feel like this volume has some of the changes that most lead to contemporary characters and storylines, and yet that all happens earlier than I expected.

Still blurring together in my head, still enjoying the read.

I wrote about this on my first read through (I think), but it’s very interesting to read this take on the college experience when mine was so very different. It’s interesting to see Joyce, for example, grow in ways I didn’t until a decade or so later in life.

These are such fast reads (and I’m waiting so long to review them) that I can’t say I remember the specifics of this volume, but I’m continuing to enjoy this reread, and that’s what counts, I guess.

I’ve noticed this throughout the reread, but this collection really got me thinking about the connections between Willis’s previous work and this reboot/remix. It’s also amazing to me just how long this series has been going on! I’m reading material that came out when I was just starting grad school.

Still enjoying this reread!

I had been trying to read some of Willis’s other work, making it through the whole Shortpacked! archive and trying to go through Roomies!, etc., but ultimately I realized that what I really wanted was a Dumbing of Age reread, and so here I am. I enjoy this series much more in collected form than I do one strip at a time, and it was fun to start again at the beginning.

Ce n’est pas souvent qu’on tombe sur un livre en français en visitant la bibliothèque ici au Kentucky, et j’ai donc du emprunter celui-ci. On l’a lu ensemble en famille. C’est une jolie idée avec du joli art.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this series, but I like it so far! Interesting playing with hubris, imaginative story and art, and compelling characters (even if I have trouble remembering who’s who, but that’s my fault).

My one annoyance is that there are a lot of two-page splashes that do not work well for reading PDFs on my phone. I get that that’s on me, but it’s still a pain.

Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

For about the first half of this book, I was convinced that it was better than the movie and that I had gravely sinned by not rereading it in the past decade.

I am glad that I reread it, but after finishing it, I’m a bit more reserved in my judgment. I can see the seams in the book, there are some comments that feel stuck in the early 2010s, and the scenes that the movie skipped aren’t as interesting as the beginning and end of the book.

This volume seemed to depart so drastically from the first that I had to make sure I hasn’t skipped something by accident. The stories are mostly recognizable as part of a shared universe, but the worldbuilding feels overly ambitious and underserved by the actual plot. The topless Galatea robots are unnecessary, and the lampshading of their luridness by attributing it to an in-universe pervert doesn’t help. I was willing to give the first volume in this series the benefit of the doubt, but I’m glad I don’t have any more of this to read.

Interesting art, and some interesting ideas (like a foulmouthed human being transported to a land of animal wizards). I think there’s something here, even if I’m not totally hooked.