This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

Had to watch this after finishing Andor, and I spent the first half of it being disappointed??? I thought I remembered this being one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but after the depth and maturity of its tv prequel, it feels kind of superficial.

The last few sequences won me back, though. Andor is the superior story, but this is a fine action movie and a marvelous piece of fanservice. I don’t think I’ll ever like it as much as I used to, but for the Battle of Scarif and Vader’s terrifying hallway scene, I will still give it full marks.

This was Star Wars at its best, and there is (unfortunately) no better time than now for it to come out.

I’ve wrestled a lot recently with the tension between my love for Star Wars and my aspiration toward non-violence. I don’t know that I agree with this series’s implicit argument that sometimes ugly things are necessary to make a better world, but I appreciate that it deals with that ugliness rather than just letting Luke blow up the Death Star without counting how many people that act of self-defense killed.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to read this—not that I wasn’t interested, but so many books, so little time, etc. However, a friend introduced me to NetGalley, where she was reading it prior to publication, and that pushed me into following her example.

I did wait until the end of my time limit with the book to really make progress, and between that rush and my familiarity with Smith’s life, I still wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it. In the end, though, it was a fascinating read. Like his take on Brigham Young, Turner is unsparing in his description but without being unsympathetic.

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. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as I did the first few times I read it, but I think that’s from story fatigue—it remains one of my favorite books of all time and one that I will reference over and over again throughout my life, I’m sure.

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. It’s the fun kind of fanservice, and while I hope this doesn’t go all Tom Clancy in its posthumous franchization, I wouldn’t mind another from Harkaway.

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’ve also been doing a lot of comics rereads in 2025, so even though I definitely don’t have the energy for another archive binge, I thought I’d revisit everything post timeskip.

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. It plays out like a train wreck that you know will end in disaster but you can’t help but watch. I love it so much, and I wish it got more references in later Smileyverse stories.

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! Everything is bonkers (I didn’t even mentioned the gas-based Scotty), but I appreciate a big swing.

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’ve listened to a lot of radio dramas recently, and this series is avoiding all the sins of the medium while providing some powerful strengths. Top notch.

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. At the same time, this sets up so much of the world that Le Carré will later flesh out, so it’s a fantastic beginning of the franchise.

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. This one is also a quick, easy, funny read in a way that prize-winning French books aren’t always.

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! These are fun.

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. It was even not terribly problematic for a cop story, which was nice. I am finding some renewed faith in Discworld!

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. It also does what Lower Decks does best, which is to pay homage (and make fun of) what makes Star Trek fun. So glad I read this.

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. I think the movie does its job, though, and the naïveté of the characters landed more with me this time, as symbolic of our helplessness against nuclear weapons.