Lots of comic book nonsense mixed with Star Trek nonsense, but it’s still a fun read, and that’s what I care about right now.

Some interesting original stories in here, even if the pon farr one obviously riffs on TOS material (I even admit that it does an interesting job of considering the alternate continuity’s implications for that storyline). Some of the art was weird, but I’m used to that at this point.

Some more dodgy art in this one, but also some fun exploration of backstories. It’s not the best the comics medium has to offer, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

I have some complaints about this show, but I was so relieved to find myself smiling at the jokes that I’m giving it some grace. It’s a wonder I keep listening to these, but I spent a lot of time driving this weekend and needed something to listen to—besides, I’ve owned this collection for years without ever getting past Mort. I don’t know how much longer I’ll keep going, but I want to give it a try, at least.

One of the stories in this collection has the creepiest attempt at capturing the Kelvinverse actors yet, and that was pretty hard to get through. The stories in this volume were all pretty good, though, so I can try to look past it. Playing with the Mirror Universe within the Kelvinverse was a fun idea in particular.

There’s something inherently fanservice-y about spinoff comics, especially comics that are interested in reimagining beloved stories for a reboot. Not all fanservice is bad, though. I think the art is getting better, I appreciate those riffs, and if it’s not the best Star Trek, it’s fun to spend time with Star Trek.

This continues to be better than I expected. I’m just not likely to watch TOS anytime soon, so it’s interesting to see these takes on old stories, even if the off-model Chris Pine and company art bugs me. There’s also finally some branching into original stories, which is interesting.

I expected to rate this lower, because there’s a lot stacked against it. From what I can tell, the first stories are rehashes of TOS episodes within the Kelvinverse continuity, so you’ve got episodic 1960s plot points transported into a comic book spinoff for a reboot movie. The uncanny valley take on the 2009 Star Trek actors in the art isn’t doing it any favors either. It was a fun read nonetheless.

There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war. I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.

Having survived one Backderf book and knowing that this is his more famous work (it won an award at Angoulême in 2014), I decided to give it a try. The story is of Backderf’s childhood association with Jeffrey Dahmer, who grew up to be a serial killer. Dahmer’s crimes are horrifying—I had to put the book out of my mind before going to sleep—but he was caught when I was 3, so I wasn’t really aware of the story.

This bounced off of me at first, which surprised me, because I remembered liking it when listening to it years ago. I think it might have been a case of the Mondays, though, because by the last episode, I was totally on board. It’s funny, adapted well to radio, and worth the listen.

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take. That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of my comics collection in recent months, and after finally finishing XIII, I thought I’d revisit this series. In fact, I’ve been wanting to reread Queen & Country basically since I first read it. This first volume in particular has seen a lot of revisiting, especially the early pages. That made it hard to appreciate the volume this time around, and it was harder to get through.

The finale was a perfect summary of everything I love about this show, but I had some trouble getting into the earlier episodes.

J’aime bien les « Chroniques » de Guy Delisle, et j’étais content de pouvoir acheter cet album-ci. Pourtant, je l’ai trouvé moins intéressant que les autres que j’ai lus. C’est peut-être que le Myanmar a beaucoup changé depuis—même si je suis loin d’être expert sur le pays, ça fait bizarre d’entendre parler d’Aung San Suu Kyi avant sa libération, et avant le commencement de la tragédie des Rohingya. En tout cas, je continue à aimer le style de Delisle (en écriture et en dessin), et ça fait que je pardonne beaucoup même si je m’ennuyais plus que prévu.

It was really fun to introduce this to kiddo this weekend by watching it as a family. I don’t think this movie will ever be as good as it was when I was a teenager, before I could see the seams and tiny faults with it, but it will always be beloved in my family—and now including kiddo.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies. I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.

This book has been on my radar for a few months, and I’m glad to have found an audiobook I could check out (though I doubt I’d have regretted an impulse buy—this would be a good book to have on hand). Palestinian Christian ministers and theologians always call me to account in a way that I appreciate. I don’t think I should need someone from my own faith tradition (broadly speaking) to tell me how bad the situation in Palestine is (i.

Like everything I’ve read from Graeber, I appreciate the overall argument that he’s making and I find the evidence he marshalls compelling. At the same time, there’s a density to the latter that I admit having trouble following, so I don’t always see how it leads to the overall argument. Even with those caveats, I’m happy to endorse this read. I’m interested in how Graeber explores the relationship between moral thinking and economic modeling—as I posted earlier, I also find his thoughts on the moral dangers posed by abstracting interpersonal obligations into quantifiable debt with the help of money.

John Siracusa recommended the anime adaptation of this on the year-end episode of The Incomparable, and the premise sounded interesting enough to try getting into manga again. I love stories that explore the mundanity of fantastic worlds—there are lots of things I don’t like about the Star Wars prequels, but Jedi Knights resolving trade disputes is great—and this story delivers on that. It picks up after a D&D-style adventure party has completed their quest and asks what happens next.

I think I’m all caught up on TPBs now. It looks like a new one ought to be coming soon, but I might start reading issue to issue, because it’s just that good.

Strong return to the series after the major twists in Volume 9. It does a good job of continuing the themes of the series while still shaking things up—and continuing to deliver major changes.

I don’t think anything beats The Wrong Trousers in the Wallace and Gromit canon, but this could have been much worse as a follow-up to that classic. It’s silly (mostly in good ways), subtly but wonderfully British, and kept kiddo laughing. It’s the best Wallace and Gromit I’ve seen for a while, even if it isn’t as good as the classic stuff.

This was a fun show: trippy, clever, and metafictional. It departs from its source material in plot but not in spirit, which I think is a sign of a strong adaptation. It could have been tighter, and some episodes felt like they were stringing the show along, but overall, I think it was well done.

Still weird, still grosser than it needs to be sometimes, but still surprisingly good.

I suggested this in an earlier review, but there’s a lot in this series I don’t normally tolerate (gore, “will this marriage break up?” plots) but that still somehow works here. I also appreciate how the series pulls off cliffhangers that I actually care about rather than just feeling like they’re obvious.

This series moves quick and never lets up on the weird. I don’t know how it so successfully keeps me interested in bizarre characters in bonkers situations, but it does.

This series combines dumb and crazy with genuinely moving, and I’m really glad I’ve decided to reread it all.

I had been thinking about rereading this for a while, and there’s nothing like a transatlantic flight to get you to finally do it (even though there are two other books I “ought to” be reading. I continue to be amazed that I like this series—and how much I like it. There are so many things about it that shouldn’t work (at least for my tastes), but it somehow goes all the way around and back to captivating.

J’aime beaucoup les albums de Guy Delisle, et j’avais comme objectif de m’en offrir un lors de ma visite en France. J’aurais préféré acheter « Chroniques birmanes » car je ne l’ai pas encore lu, mais en trouvant celui-ci, je me suis dit que je ne l’avais jamais qu’en anglais, une fois, trop vite dans une bibliothèque. J’aime bien sa façon de parler de son travail, sa vie, et ses expériences dans un seul album.

Je me sens un peu déchiré là. C’était intéressant de voir la fin d’une certaine partie de la série, mais je suis toujours dérangé par les attitudes y présentes. Les personnages féminins dans l’histoire semblent n’exister que pour coucher avec XIII ou subir des menaces de viol. Même si tout cela est insupportable, il est intéressant de voir comment Vance et Van Hamme perçoivent les États-Unis. Quand XIII et Jones se vouvoient, je me demande ce que cela signifie, vu qu’on n’a pas les mêmes moyens de se parler en anglais.

Dès le deuxième tome, on voit déjà combien cette série va se montrer stupide. On ajoute complot sur complot et identité sur identité. On condamne la guerre au Vietnam mais on fête la violence des militaires. Le lieutenant Jones est un paradoxe en elle même. C’est intéressant d’avoir une femme noire comme personnage important et capable, mais elle reste toujours quelqu’un avec qui XIII peut coucher. Je ne devrais sans doute pas pardonner tout cela à la série, mais j’aime beaucoup l’art, j’aime apprendre le langage de ce genre de BD, et il y a des séries qu’on aime malgré leur stupidité, er pour moi, c’est celle-ci.

Ce n’est pas un chef d’œuvre, et il y a plein d’attitudes des années 80 qui me gênent dans la série, mais j’avoue que j’ai quand-même un grand amour pour ces albums. Ce premier, c’est bien intéressant, même si on a piqué les meilleures idées de « La mémoire dans la peau ». Bref, ça fait un moment que j’ai envie de relire ma petite collection, et c’est donc maintenant que je commence.

I bought this book well over a decade ago. Preparing for grad school, where I expected to study games and learning, I was fascinated by the idea of a work of philosophy that used games as its central metaphor. Well, it isn’t the easiest book to get through, so I made some progress and some notes (most of which missed the point) and then let it drop for a long time.

I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.

I am too young (and was for too long too disconnected from politics) to know much about Jimmy Carter except for a vague understanding of the common wisdom that he had been a poor president and of the progressive reclaiming of him in recent years. I’ve had my eye on this biography for a while: I nearly bought it at full price from my local bookstore, but when a used copy was on sale at the library for $3, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.