“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.

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. Wil Wheaton does great narration on the audiobook, and it’s just an enjoyable listen all around.

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.