This was a hard book to read, but I’m glad I did. Munther is a Palestinian Christian pastor, and his holy anger and hurt in this book really spoke to me. However, I have a lot of internalized resistance to what he has to say, and things feel so big, and I spent a lot of the book tensing up and feeling overwhelmed. I feel called to repentance by this book, and I’m glad I read it before next week’s Community of Christ World Conference, where a resolution standing against Christian Zionism will be debated.

This is the third (or fourth, if you count a quote-pulling skim) time I’ve read this book in the past 2ish years, and I do think that I need to give myself more of a break before trying to come back to it again. I really like the audiobook, though, and I’m glad I now own it in mp3 and epub. I also needed the read, since it’s a hopeful one, and I started it when I was in desperate need of something hopeful.

Tinker Tailor is a comfort listen for me at this point. This weekend, I also watched the two first episodes of the Alec Guinness miniseries, and I might like the radio adaptation more? It’s really good.

Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well! I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship.

I’m rating this higher than on my last readthrough. I couldn’t tell you why I held back last time, but this time, I was reminded of some excellent strips that have really made an impression on me, so full marks. Why am I rereading in the first place? I did two full(ish) archive binges of DoA in 2024, so I don’t strictly need to reread this. I did back the Book 14 Kickstarter, though, and I wanted to have some context for when that PDF arrives.

I may no longer be a practicing Latter-day Saint, but this is the kind of cultural artifact that keeps me thinking of myself as Mormon. Peck’s writing—see also Heike’s Void, which I’d love to reread—depicts a beautiful Mormonism that I still feel connected to and that represents what the religion can be at its best. That doesn’t mean I don’t have complaints about these stories. They’re very male-centered (I’m not sure any of them pass the Bechdel Test), and even though it’s one of my favorites in some ways, the story of the crafting of the Liahona bugs me for the way that it imposes Mormon theology on first temple Israelite religion, as Mormons tend to do.

“Came In From the Cold” may be Le Carré’s best, but I think “Looking Glass” is my favorite. That’s true of the book, but Ian McDiarmid as an incompetent agency director is also a lot of fun. Le Carré has a particular kind of plot that boils down to “stupid people making stupid decisions,” and I think this is the best of them. It’s a damning story of toxic World War II nostalgia, desperation to be doing something meaningful with one’s life, and manipulation by more competent cynics.

I know that “Tinker, Tailor” is good, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it for the nth time, but I really think this is the best of the Smileyverse. The most twisty, the most cynical, the most appalled at its own cynicism. It’s no surprise that the most recent additions to the Smileyverse have revisited this story—it’s the best.

I won’t pretend to be able to distinguish the very fine line that separates boring comic nonsense from amazing comic nonsense, but this is on the right side of things. Gary Mitchell elevates Kelvinverse Kirk to godhood so that they can play a game of multiversal chess using as pieces infinite Kirks in infinite combinations. The gender-flipped Enterprise comes back! There’s a Kirk raised by Klingons and a Spock (“Simon Grayson”) who’s rejected his Vulcan side!

In some ways this is the least interesting of the Smiley stories. There’s something fun about a retired Smiley doing detective work, and it’s fascinating to get glimpses at the British class system, but it’s not Smiley in his element (as it will later become), and it feels like a distraction in that sense. Yet, the radio adaptation is so, so nicely done that I can’t help but give it full marks.

I love these radio dramas so much. I honestly can’t remember if (an imagined) Ann serves as a narrator in the original book, but she does in the dramas to great effect. I can’t listen to Call for the Dead without thinking about the ambiguous continuity of the Smileyverse. On one hand, Smiley feels like a one-off character here, and it’s weird to start him off as resigning from the Circus when Le Carré will want to use that to greater effect later on.

This book reminds me of Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie, which feels insulting and maybe even heretical. L’Anomalie is a Prix Goncourt-winning, highbrow, Oulipo novel; this is by a guy who writes Star Trek parodies and kaiju books. L’Anomalie is relatively restrained in its conceit, with an impossible “duplicate” plane landing three months after the original one; this has the moon turn into cheese for a lunar cycle. Yet, both books are powerful in their exploration of how the world responds when something ridiculous and clearly impossible happens.

Once again, anthologies are fun. I almost didn’t read this, because it felt weird to read and review a single issue of a comic, but I’m glad I did! Q meets Decker who’s wrestling with what it means (along with Ilia and V’Ger) to be an all-powerful being! There’s a funny and great story about Data’s cat! Ezri Dax consults with past symbiont hosts in a way that makes it seem more interesting than DS9 ever did!

Anthology collections are fun, and this is no exception! Some stories are better than others, but short stories spanning Trek time and characters make for a good read.

I had an awful experience with the last Sam Vimes adaptation, so I wasn’t sure about this—especially since it is one of the longer adaptations in the collection I have. I think the key is the adapter, though, because Robin Brooks’s shows have been my favorites, and this one was quite good. I really got why people like Sam Vimes stories, I appreciated nods to Discworld continuity even if I didn’t understand them, and I am a real sucker for “time travelling into your own past” stories.

I have more Star Trek IDW comics to read, but I’ve completed this whole series! It ended on a good note, with a tribute to Leonard Nimoy and then some semi-fourth-wall breaking explorations of what it means for there to be two timelines in “main” Star Trek canon.

Now this is how a comic book company uses a Star Trek license: Using a universe-hopping Q to take the Kelvinverse Enterprise to a bad future Deep Space Nine setting for plenty of extradimensional being nonsense and fanservice. Keiko O’Brien is a starship captain! Q merges with one of the Prophets! It’s not high art, but it’s exactly what I want from the medium.

Okay, I finally listened to one of these that convinced me how good Discworld can be. This is a clever, expert skewering of what religion so often is—but holds out hope for what religion can be. I ought to read the original book, because I imagine I’d be copying a lot of passages down.

I can’t claim to have read all of the “choose your own adventure” comics in the world, but I’ve read a few in my time, and this is a good one! (Though I really need to figure out how to finish Jason Shiga’s latest…) The art and the dialogue capture Lower Decks perfectly—I could hear the characters’ voices in my head as I read. I loved the puzzle-y bits, too, where you have to explore multiple paths (and also “cheat” at certain times) to get to a true ending.

This felt more consistent than the second season. The in-jokes and continuity nods continued to be great, especially the Deep Space Nine episode and its riffs on that series’s opening credits. I love so much that this is a Star Trek show about loving Star Trek (even its dumb bits).

I still want to read the original comic that this and the radio adaptation were based on, but the Internet Archive copy is hard to read, and I had some work to do this afternoon that made it easy to put this on in the background. I liked this a lot (well, “liked” as much as one can appreciate a black comedy horror story about nuclear war. Some of the experimental animation choices and blending of animated and film footage seemed odd, and I’m torn between appreciating them and finding them distracting.

As I wrote in my last review of this volume, this really steps things up. It better captures the ugliness and senseless brutality that The Sandbaggers also did—it also liberally cribs from Sandbaggers plot points, but I see it more as loving homage than plagiarism. I still don’t think it’s as good as The Sandbaggers, and the changing art style sometimes bugs me, but I think this might be the peak of the series.

I’ve read this before, so I knew that I would enjoy it this time, but I had forgotten just how good it is. The premise is bonkers: It’s a noir story featuring a detective from an alternate history where the U.S. made part of Alaska available to Jewish refugees in the 1930s. The story picks up in the mid-2000s, when a strange murder unfolds in the months before the “Federal District of Sitka” is returned to Alaska.

I really liked this season. Each of the actors feels perfect for their role, the writers had some good fun with us through twists and turns (I’m sure some of it was original to the source material), and I’m looking forward to the next season.

This is such a fun show. I am not as well-versed in Star Trek as I’d like, so I’m sure I’m missing some of the jokes, but there are still so, so many of them. It’s bizarre, it’s a loving homage, and it’s really good.

Despite meaning to reread this ever since I first read it, this is my first reread. While it’s very clearly related to Red Team Blues, it’s remarkable how different this book is. Rather than a tight thriller, this feels more like a meandering story that has a clear throughline but skips from event to event as more than a decade goes by. There’s a fun framing device that makes this work, though.

So, I actually finished this last week and am behind on bookblogging. It’s the third time I’ve read this book (twice on audio), but with the final book in the trilogy coming out next month, it was time to revisit the earlier ones. This book is fun in an action movie sense while also being a searing critique of wealth and of our society’s seeming inability to take care of the poor.

The book feels like fanservice, but not all fanservice is bad! Dan Moren recommended this at the tail end of a recent episode of The Incomparable, and I was surprised that I hadn’t heard that a new George Smiley story was coming out. In conversation with my partner later, she mentioned that she’d told me when she saw it in the news and that I’d brushed it off. That tracks: I had some trepidation about someone else writing in Le Carré’s world, but it’s quite well done.

Comics do a lot of dumb things to keep readers hooked, shake up the story, etc. When Saga does them, they work. I knew the twists in this episode were coming, but wow did they still land.

I say this about a lot of Saga, but this volume in particular shouldn’t be as good as it is. And yet…

Sometimes depressing art is the best art, and I felt that way about this volume. Saga is violent sometimes, but it never glorifies that violence, and that’s one of its strengths.

Like with my first readthrough, I’m noticing that every volume is good, but some volumes are just a cut above. This is one of them. What a series.

Ce n’est pas tous les jours qu’on trouve un bouquin en librairie dont on a entendu parler sur Mastodon—surtout quand il s’agit d’un bouquin francophone et qu’on habite aux États-Unis. C’est pour ça que j’ai su que je devais absolument m’offrir ce petit « tract » quand je l’ai vu en visite à Colmar. Et je suis bien content de me l’être offert ! Bien que je ne travaille plus avec les langues, la sociolinguistique a beaucoup influencé ma perspective sur le monde, et ça fait du bien d’en apprendre un peu plus.

Some of my favorite stories are those that are big and well known enough that they have invited us to retell them over and over in new ways. This is why I will never tire of new takes on Spider-Man even if I agree that cinematic takes on the character have been rebooted too many times recently (also, put classic Marvel characters in the public domain!). It’s also why, after reading The Future, I was drawn in by Naomi Alderman’s take on the four gospels, writing four stories that barely intersect with each other and barely intersect with Jesus, retelling the gospels in a new way.

Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this.

This is one of the first books I bought for a Kindle I got in 2010. I don’t know why, but it popped into my head recently and I decided to reread it. Filled with a post-election feeling of wanting to do something amid all this powerlessness, I decided to buy a DRM-free ePub off Gumroad instead of reread the Kindle version, since it was pretty cheap and I want to further reduce my support for Amazon.