This is another collection that I think I’ve read once but didn’t remember terribly well and was happy to return to it. I don’t know if I’ve read the next collection or not—it will be interesting to see when I begin to venture into the unknown.

I think this TPB has one of the most creative and sweetest stories in the whole run—one about the friendship between Doreen and her roommate Nancy. It also has some of the most explicit arguments for radical empathy in a series that makes that one of its main themes. All, of course, wrapped up in a lot of goofball humor and great art.

With this TPB, I continued to get into stories I’m not as familiar with but that make the best of this goofy series.

I think my favorite issue in this collection is the “zine,” which presents itself as an in-universe comic put together by the characters in the series. It is a great example of how North and the other have fun with this medium instead of just phoning the comics in.

This book me far too long to read. I started (and finished) a lot of books while supposedly reading this one, and it’s just a massive book with a lot to get through.

I’m also unclear on how much I’ll take from the book in particular. I got a lot from the overall arc of the story, but given the timeframe of my reading it and the sheer amount of material—not to mention Schlosser’s interweaving of a particular nuclear accident and other historical details—it was hard to keep track of who was who and what had happened.

As with the last collection of TUSG issues, I have read these stories before, but not recently and not often, so it was fun to revisit them.

After finishing this collection, I had to go back to the regular TPBs rather than this double TPB format, and that’s made me better appreciate these large formats, which leave out things like the letters page, etc. I have enjoyed reading those before, but when trying to power through the entire series, it’s nice to remove extraneous information and focus on the stuff I’m really there to read.

I’m less familiar with this part of the Squirrel Girl series, so it was even more fun to revisit these issues as I try to make my way through the whole series.

North is a great author for this kind of thing—I get a bit grumpy about his computer science lessons because of my complicated feelings toward computer science education (I’m for it but not necessarily in the way it’s being done) , but otherwise, I love his dialogue, characters, plots, and absurdity.

I recently finished the new Squirrel Girl podcast written by North, which made me miss the comics. I’ve also been meaning to finish the series, which ended in 2019 but I never caught up on.

So, I checked on the hoopla app connected to my library account and discovered that the whole series is finally available there—hooray!

I own all of these issues in trade paperback, but I read them on my phone to give me something productive to do on my phone. I’ve read these issues tons of times—or at least several—but it was still great to revisit the characters I love and North’s absurd humor accompanied with Henderson’s distinct art style.

This book has been as enjoyable as all of the previous ones in the series. It took me longer to get into—probably because I’ve read so many of them lately—but once I got started, it moved along nicely.

The past few entries in the series have seemed more intentional than others in setting up clues for the future rather than being self-contained stories. This book was also shorter and ended on a dramatic cliffhanger, giving the impression that Herron is wrapping up the series in the next book and might even have split this final story into two.

I flew through this book and quite enjoyed it. As Herron gets further along in the series, the continued plots strain suspension strain suspension of disbelief more and more, just like Smiley’s repeated resignations and returns make some of Le Carré’s books a bit creaky.

Like Le Carré, though, there’s enough that’s good about the series that you can overlook these gaps. Herron feels no need to spare his characters, and he uses that expertly in this book. Many of his books include teasing (even trolling) suggestions that something is about to happen to an established character, but this book begins with a flash forward to two characters’ deaths, and the rest of the book is quite tense as you wonder what Herron is going to do to lead to that conclusion.

This continues to be a fascinating series. While there are real threats and real bad guys in each story, so much of the story is on internal squabbling, and none of the characters can be said to be a “good guy.”

In some ways the immediate plot of the book seems to be an excuse for letting the terrible characters bump against each other and make a mess of things. This book in particular really strained my affection for the characters, but I was still hooked by Herron’s writing.

We took a family trip to Mammoth Cave this weekend, and I decided to read the fourth entry in this series over the course of the trip. I quite liked it and it was fun to read it so quickly.

Despite being a bit more fantastical and less down to earth than some of the other entries, I thought the story was innovative and made good use of some of the recurring characters of the series so far.

Even though I ought to be finishing up some other books, I’ve enjoyed this series enough to check out the third book and read it over the last few days.

Herron does a good job of making none of his characters likable but some of sympathetic and I enjoyed this book more than the last. Herron does his best, I think, when his nominal heroes and their bosses are the real villains of the piece.

My spouse and I recently started watching the Apple TV+ series based on this book and its sequels. I’ve loved the show, so when she and kiddo were at a local library on Thursday, they grabbed the book for me.

I’m a big fan of John Le Carré, and this feels like a worthy modern successor. It’s crafty and smart, but even more than Le Carré, Herron leans into the ugly parts of the profession and the people who embrace those parts rather than try to maintain honor and dignity.

I’ve wanted to read this book before—I believe I read the whole thing once in high school, and we read a portion of it in a French Civ class before discussing the Bayeux Tapestry. I recently saw it at the library and decided to give it another go.

Because I took a while to get started, the due date snuck up on me, and I had to rush through most of it rather than give it the critical read it deserves.

I jumped right into this sequel for Slow Horses right after finishing the first volume. The core of what attracted me to the first book was largely present, hence my giving it the same rating. However, at the end of the day, I didn’t like it quite as much.

I couldn’t say exactly why that is—the characters I enjoyed were just as enjoyable, the story was interesting, and there were great shout-outs to Le Carré and funny recurring jokes in the story.

I have been meaning to read this for quite some time, as it is the first volume in the most recent official history of Community of Christ. I’m also looking forward to the next two volumes, since they cover history that I am not familiar with, but it was especially interesting to read a Community of Christ perspective on the 1830-1844 era.

I appreciated the frankness and openness of the volume—it’s impossible to imagine an LDS version of this book taking the same approach. As open as the Saints books are compared to previous takes on LDS history, they don’t compare to this. My only complain about the book is the sometimes-stilted writing and the seeming tangents—ti was sometimes hard to tell why particular subjects got the focus they did.

I found this translation of Delisle’s latest graphic novel at the Jessamine County Public Library and decided to give it a try. I don’t remember how I discovered Delisle, but I love his book Pyongyang, I’ve read a couple of his other books, and I loved this one.

Delisle’s art is great—his style is consistent, simple, and appealing. I like the way that he did color in this book, which is mostly monochrome but with bursts of yellow here and there.

This was a bit of a slog sometimes—one of the reasons why it took me so long to read and why it didn’t get a full five hearts—but it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

This is supposedly one of the great classics of Mormon fiction, though I hadn’t heard of it before BCC Press released a free ebook of it a few weeks ago. It is a frank but respectful tale of Mormon pioneers “settling” St. George in the mid-to-late 19th century. It is unflinching in its discussion of the difficulties of polygamy and the abuse of ecclesiastical leadership, but it is also reverent in its treatment of the pioneers’ commitments and beliefs.

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.

I picked this graphic novel from JCPL just over a week ago. I think that Backderf’s art is weird, and I have mixed experiences with non-fiction comics, but I don’t know much about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, and I decided it was worth knowing more about.

The story was compelling, and Backderf’s art didn’t bother me as much as I worried it would, so I’m glad I tried it. The story of the Kent State shootings stuck out to me as a difficult tale of the importance of non-violent protest and of curbing state power.