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.

This is new Astro City material for me, even though it’s been around for a while. There’s still a lot of what makes Astro City great in the long “Dark Ages” story, but not enough to make it shine. I think I like Astro City best when it takes a quick dive into an interesting story, plays with some tropes, and just hints at a broader world and continuity. This tries to explain too much and be too connected, and in doing so, I think it loses a lot of the magic. I also felt nervous the whole time about a white creative team working with two black protagonists; it felt like it skirted the edge of stereotype sometimes.

This book took me a while to get into. I gave up on the print version a year or three ago, and even the audiobook wasn’t doing great at capturing my attention for a while—I had to rush to finish this before it was due back to Libby. I’m glad that I stuck it out, though, because I liked what I got. I never read the X-Wing novels from the old EU, but I wanted something like what I imagined they were. Alphabet Squadron ended up being the best kind of expanded universe book: Expanding on interesting ideas, filling in details, offering new perspectves, and capturing the original feel of things. This ended up feeling a lot like Andor in adding some grittiness and cynicism to Star Wars, and I was surprised how far Freed went in emphasizing that star war is star hell. I found pew pew pew spaceship fights that I’ve loved for decades to actually be quite ugly, and I’m glad for that new perspective.

Never change, Eurovision.

This volume isn’t quite as good as the last (mostly because of the filler material that it concludes with), and it has some of the same problems with trying to do diversity but sometime undermining itself. However, I still think the best superhero stories are the ones that pick at and play with tropes, and I haven’t seen anyone do that better than this series.

I love Astro City. It is definitely not perfect (the creative team is a bunch of white guys, and sometimes, that’s painfully obvious), but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the best wholesale reimagining of superhero tropes out there. I’ve read every single story in this volume before, and I read them now with a more critical eye than in the past, but I had a great time rereading them all. Glad that these large collections are on hoopla, and looking forward to reading the rest.

This afternoon, a DM let me use a firbolg’s “Speak with Beast and Leaf” ability to turn some stolen green onions into a thief detector. Not sure it’s supposed to work that way, but it was still D&D at its best.

A recent episode of The Incomparable covered this book, and even though the reviews were mixed, it seemed up my alley, so I gave it a try. It’s very obviously a book of ideas and is sometimes clumsy and didactic. That said, I wish I had taken more time to sit with those ideas; I rushed through the book to finish it before my loan was up, and I’m sure I missed bits. Even when it’s clumsy (or when I missed stuff), the ideas are interesting though. What’s more, the worldbuilding is fascinating—not least because it is so focused on the Global South to find the settings, characters, and ideas of this imagined future. Even when the plot felt arbitrary or forced, I was so delighted by a book where “the West” was so deliberately absent and the background was so detailed that I enjoyed the whole thing.

This is a fun concept—a teenager named Clark Kent who’s tired of the jokes about being named after the fictional Superman suddenly develops Superman’s powers and has to figure out how to live with them. Busiek strikes me as the perfect person to write a story about how a world familiar with superhero tropes would deal with their becoming real, but as much as I love little bits of this story, I just don’t know that it will ever stand out as a favorite of mine.

I haven’t read much on the coronation and don’t plan to read much more, but even if I were, I think this would still take first place. A surprisingly deep dive into internet culture.

I did not know until today how much I needed an Aardman Animation claymation Wedge Antilles in my life.

I really wanted to like this more than I did! North and Henderson are one of my favorite creative teams in comics, and North’s dialogue and Henderson’s art come together in perfect ways throughout the story. At the end of the day, though, I don’t know if there was enough to that story or to the worldbuilding to really interest me. There are neat ideas in here, and the plot comes together in smart ways at times, but neither feels fleshed out enough to really stand out.

This book is one of the mainstays of the old Star Wars EU. I hadn’t read it in years, but after exploring some of the new canon and hearing the news about a likely remixing of it into a Dave Filoni movie, it seemed like a good time to revisit. The audiobook production was great, and even if I’m not planning to finish the trilogy, I enjoyed checking this title out again.

I read (and listened to) a lot in the early months of this year and have hit a wall recently. This audiobook was a nice way to get back into reading; I’ve felt a hunger for Star Wars media recently, and this book came recommended on a podcast I’ve sampled. It’s fun to get more into the new canon: I thought this did a good job of setting up some of the Episode VII worldbuilding, and it reminded me of the fun I had reading through the old EU growing up.

One unexpected thing that I owe to my Mormon upbringing is my love for the weird band They Might Be Giants. That’s not to say that there’s something distinctly Mormon about TMBG in the way that there is something distinctly Mormon about the existential fear of not doing things correct way that I also picked up during these years. Rather, it’s just the fact that I learned about TMBG—more specifically, their famous cover of Istanbul (Not Constantinople)—from Craig Wilson, a youth leader in my local congregation. This is my main memory of Wilson, who moved away from Northern Kentucky shortly after the conversation in his car where he mentioned the song to me. The only time I’ve seen him since was at my wedding in Utah, about a decade later. I hadn’t even realized that my parents had invited him and was pleasantly surprised that he was there.

It sure looks like Star Wars is heading toward an Heir to the Empire remake, and even though I know it’s fan pandering, I am really excited about it.