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.

This was fun! Interesting characters and stories, and that gets it a lot of credit. Not a lot of it holds up to close scrutiny, though—character motivations don’t always make sense, and plot explanations can feel unsatisfying. Glad to have tried it, though.

Look, I’m still tired of Batman stories, and I don’t think this series really pushes back against the grittiness and violence that finally pushed me over the edge, but this is as close as you get to “wholesome Batman,” and it’s kind of fun.

I still enjoyed this season, but I don’t think it’s as good as the first one. The characters and situations remain interesting, but the plot feels more slapdash and less carefully constructed than it did in the first season.

I’ve listened to Glenn on The Incomparable for years, and a rule I try to follow is to pay for creative works from creators whose content I’ve often consumed for free. This sounded interesting, I do like comics, and so I bought it on a whim. I don’t think buying a print copy was ever in the cards for me, but I wish I’d at least read it on a bigger screen than my phone: It’s beautifully designed, and there are lots of visual goodies in there.

I’ve seen a newer edition of this book on the shelves of my local indie bookstore and been curious about it for a while. So, I decided to look it up when searching for a new hoopla audiobook. It’s a breathtakingly radical book in its aspirations, and I loved that. It captures the kind of nonviolent radicalism that I want to explore more in this period of personal faith and world politics.

I have Ward’s Anarchism in Action waiting for me on my nightstand while I work through a Jimmy Carter biography, so I thought I’d listen to this on hoopla in the meantime (since I regularly do an ebook, an audiobook, and a print book in parallel). It’s an interesting and helpful overview of a political philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Lots more to be read, but this gives some context.

I enjoyed listening to this book: Stokes writes well and reads his own writing well, too. It’s funny and (mostly) accessible, and it has a lot of ideas I can get behind. I also have a list of nitpicks, though. Stokes wants to have it both ways with critical Biblical scholarship, accepting (for example) that the Garden of Eden story is allegorical rather than literal but then also running with traditional interpretations (e.

I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.

I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.

Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book! What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.

This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook. It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up.

I’ve passed this up a couple of times at the library, but an article at BoingBoing got me to give it a try. It’s a fun, meta take on the comics industry through comics themselves, even if it feels melodramatic at times.

Bors has some great political cartoons in this collection, but I also don’t like political cartoons in large doses, even if that doesn’t necessarily reflect on him!

I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up. Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.

It’s really hard to know how to rate this book! It is meandering to the point of tangential—Graeber confesses that it evolved out of an essay that didn’t stop growing, and I wonder if it would have been better if forced to be more concise. It also has some of the same issues that I saw in The Dawn of Everything (indeed, this could have been a section of that book), in that it’s working with data and history that are impossible to nail down for sure.

First things first: I am not familiar with the source material or with the Michael Caine adaptation, so I can’t make any comparisons there. I enjoyed the beginning of the series more than the end: The fast pace usually worked for me but felt rushed in the last episode, and I preferred the more grounded elements to the semi-fantastical stuff that was eventually introduced. That said, I thought it was well shot, well acted, and interesting spy fiction!

This is another one of those books that’s hard to review—in part because it wasn’t always easy to get through. I’ve owned it for a while and tried to get through the ebook a couple of times, but it wasn’t until checking out the audiobook before some long drives this weekend that I finally made it through. The book is wonky, and while that’s a good thing, I confess that I didn’t follow all the details in either the laying out of the problem or the articulation of the solutions.

Over a year ago, I listened to Little Brother, with the intent of revisiting this whole series. Homeland is my least favorite of the three, though, and so I stalled out pretty quickly and put it off until now. The book is better than I remembered it being, with some good themes and interesting plot developments. It does a good job of exploring WikiLeaks-style activism as something complex and not easily resolved, but it still comes down on the side of protest, activism, and pushback in a way that I find inspiring.