I find memoir (and other non-fiction) comics to be hit or miss; I’ve even passed up Gharib’s earlier memoir a number of times because I just wasn’t sure. I don’t know what stood out to me about this one, but I went for it and I loved it. I love getting a taste of meaningful events in someone else’s life, and Gharib does such a great job telling her story. It even made me wish I’d taken more Arabic classes in college so I could follow some parts better.

I read these books ages ago, but I can hardly remember any of the details, so it’s been fun to revisit this world with flashes of familiarity but mostly just waiting episode to episode to figure things out. The set design is great, the acting is good, and the music is compelling. I don’t know exactly why I’m not giving it full marks (it feels a bit strained and overcomplicated sometimes, but I think that captures the source material from what I remember), but I’m looking forward to future seasons!

I’m continuing my journey theough Le Carré, and I thought I’d give his last, posthumous book a listen while waiting for my hold on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to cone through. It’s so interesting to compare this last book of his to his earlier works: There are more women (though I still don’t think it passes the Bechdel Test), more cell phones, and more swears than his early stuff, but the sense of inevitable plodding toward a disappointing end (for the protagonists at least) is just as strong as ever. I found that this ending wasn’t quite as strong as the buildup, but it was a fine last novel from an excellent author.

Parfois, quand un.e Dijonnais.e s’en fiche, on peut entendre un bof bourguignon.

I guess this is interesting enough to keep reading, but my verdict is still the same. Great art, interesting premise, but I don’t know if it goes further than that.

I stumbled upon this series on TVTropes and was happy to see it’s available through Hoopla. I get why it gets the praise that it does, but it just didn’t land with me. The art is gorgeous and the premise (a noir detective in a 1950s America populated by anthropomorphic animals) is bold and compelling. I don’t know that noir is my genre, though—it feels more like tropes strung together than an actual plot, and it sometimes goes out of its way to be lurid. I also get frustrated reading BD in translation: Sometimes the language feels like French struggling to be liberated from an English straightjacket. There’s also something off when Europeans write American history; we heartily deserve to be criticized for our racism, but sometimes the critiques perpetuate prejudice in trying to confront it (this happens in XIII, too).

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

Ce matin, je prends un petit voyage ferroviare entre Bâle et Strasbourg grâce à YouTube.

I read through this with kiddo this morning, inspired by our recent discovery of Shiga’s new Adventuregame Comics. I was surprised by how little I loved it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s an amazing concept, an interesting story, and it deserves the praise it gets from folks like Gene Luen Yang,Scott McCloud, and others. However, revisiting it after his newer work in this subgenre, I think he does better with Adventuretime Comics! Still happy to have this on my shelf, though.

Il y a quelques années, dans les premiers mois de la pandémie du COVID-19, j’ai décidé de mettre mes ordinateurs (y compris mon smartphone) en français pour m’entrainer un peu. C’était une belle expérience, mais il y a quelques mois, pour une raison dont je ne me souviens plus, j’ai décidé de tout remettre en anglais. L’anglais, c’est ma langue maternelle, mais entre quelques années d’expérience de tout faire en français et ma passion pour cette langue, je trouve qu’il est parfois difficile de m’habituer à ce changement.

In early May, I decided to give tea a try. I’ve enjoyed herbal teas over the years, but I grew up never drinking actual tea (or coffee, which I still have never tried), so this has been a new(ish) experience for me. Over the past two months, I’ve acquired a couple of tea infusers as well as a variety of different teas that I’ve been trying, and tonight I felt like writing about some of the teas I’ve tried so far:

Aujourd’hui, j’ai appris que James Bond avait une mère vaudoise.

There are Aquabats songs that I like because I know they’re dumb, but there is zero irony in my love for “Pizza Day.”

I checked this out from Libby after hearing about it on The Incomparable, where all the panelists had good things to say about it. The premise of the book is fun: an orc warrior in a D&D-type adventuring party retires to start a coffeeshop, coffee here being a gnomish delicacy that isn’t well known. I don’t drink coffee and I don’t really patronize coffeeshops, but this book kind of made me wish that I did! It’s a fun and cozy read with interesting characters, interesting takes on tropes, compelling descriptions of tasty food, and good themes. Perhaps most importantly, when it talks about its analog to chocolate croissants, it keeps them crescent shaped (one of my pettiest peeves is when pains aux chocolat are called chocolate croissants).

The movie adaptation of this book is what really got me into Le Carré. It’s twisty and cynical and compelling—just a great book. Not perfect, of course: Its age shows uncomfortably in some places, including the way it entirely fails the Bechdel Test. I can’t help but give it a full rating, though.

Currently listening to an audiobook where the British narrator has to do the voice of a German character who speaks in English with a Canadian accent. It’s so convoluted that I can’t tell if it’s good or not.

This week, it felt like it was time to revisit George Smiley. Smiley has been something of a comfort read these past several years, but it’s been some time since I visited the actual books, instead preferring the BBC Radio 4 dramatizations. They are superb, but I decided to listen to the “full” audiobooks this time through. Not all are available through my library, but the best ones are, and that works just fine for me. This book shows its age in some uncomfortable ways, and it’s not fully polished, but it introduces so much of what I love about George Smiley and the books built around him. I like Mendel in particular, even though he never plays a huge role. The story is interesting, it’s attentive to morality, and it’s a good read all around.

I recently read a lot of Saga, it’s not too long ago that I gave Y: The Last Man a readthrough, and I’ve tried this series before, so I was expecting to like this. I did see enough in there to see why it’s so often hailed as a classic, but I found it too edgy for the sake of being edgy or editorial when opportunity allowed. Lind of disappointed, and not planning to read further.

I am not normally a fan of the comic strip genre of comics, but this was a good and important read.

I’ve skimmed the archives for this webcomic several times in the past, but I’ve never gotten this far in the story, and it was a delight to do so now. I was not sure this would live up to the first book, but it’s so, so good at using superhero tropes to explore philosophy and ethics. I really, really like this series.

Good reflecton here. I’d been wondering if Apple’s Journal app would hold up to Day One, but I was never inclined to betray Day One, and I do NOT like the idea of algorithmic journaling.

I hadn’t realized this webcomic had been released in print volumes, and I honestly couldn’t remember how far I’d made it through the webcomic archives, so I leapt at the chance to read a collection. I think I might like this deconstructive “realistic” take on superheroes more than any other. The questions are interesting, the art is uneven but compelling, and the characters resonate with me. It’s a great read.

Vive la dictée !

This was an uneven final season for a show I really enjoyed. I wish they’d made it tighter and better structured, and maybe it doesn’t deserve the score I’ve given it. I’ve enjoyed the whole of these three seasons (and so many small moments in this one) too much to rate it any less, though.

I did not know that “wholesome Batman” was a genre I needed, but Wayne Family Adventures is a lot of fun.