J’avais déjà lu la traduction anglaise en 2025, mais depuis que j’ai reçu un exemplaire du livre original, j’éprouvais le désir de le relire. Vers la fin, je trouve que je ne comprend pas tout à fait ce qu’Ellul essaie de dire (c’est peut-être une question de compétence linguistique, mais je crois avoir éprouvé le même sentiment en lisant en traduction aussi), mais il y a des idées bien fortes dans ce livre aussi. En fait, il est fort intéressant de relire ce livre après avoir lu quelques-uns de ses autres livres pour voir combien de ses idées sont déjà présentes en 1948.

Bon, d’abord j’avoue que c’est difficile d’évaluer un film de 2002 sachant tout ce qui est maintenant connu sur Depardieu et Dieudonné (entre autres), mais je mets tout ça à côté pour ce post.

Je voulais regarder ce film parce que je savais qu’il est (était?) bien aimé des Français de ma génération. Je le trouve amusant et une bonne adaptation du sens d’humour des albums Astérix. Comme avec Les visiteurs, il y a beaucoup de blagues qui sont difficile à traduire, mais j’ai eu moins de mal avec ce film-ci.

Not a perfect movie but a really fun one. I appreciate a lot of the choices that went into this (techbro Lex Luthor, bowl cut Nathan Fillion, Hall of Justice in Cincinnati Union Station), and I look forward to seeing what else this iteration of Superman movies comes up with.

I felt the same way about this book that I often feel about Graeber’s work: I like where he’s going with things, but I’m not always convinced in the details.

So, the thesis of this book is great, and the last few chapters won me back when I was feeling a bit skeptical. Even with Graeber’s concessions about his data, though, his conclusions sometimes felt tenuous, and I’m not sure we needed the taxonomy of bullshit jobs to get to the conclusions he wanted to draw in the end.

Just as good as the first volume, and it’s disappointing to know that there’s nothing more to read.

I want to describe this series as equally over-the-too and restrained, which feels contradictory, but I stand by it. It doesn’t take the time to overexplain the misogynistic dystopia of its world, it just lets it happen and gives space for the reader to react. And yet, it’s also intentionally campy, too! It’s interesting!

Fun listen! It’s not any kind of deep book, but listening to how The Princess Bride was made is just about as much fun as watching the movie itself, and I enjoyed spening some time listening over the past week or so.

This series is getting even more interesting with time, which I honestly wasn’t expecting. I’m trying to remember if I’ve read the whole series before—I’d thought so, but I don’t remember these details. Looking forward to the conclusion!

Cory Doctorow has regularly referenced this book (most notably, the anecdote about people letting Mark Zuckerberg win at Catan) several times since reading it himself, so I decided it was time to take a look myself. It was an enjoyable (by which I mean horrifying) read, though I think I would have enjoyed it more if the same stories had been collected as part of a journalistic project rather than as a tell-all memoir.

I haven’t yet mentioned how good Chiang’s art is. It’s good! This series continues to be better than I remembered it being.

Vaughan seems to like to be edgy in ways that I don’t always appreciate, but this series has hooked me in the way that Saga eventually did, so kudos.

Starting to recognize the Vaughan stuff I like from Saga: Unapologetically weird but still holds together somehow. I’m enjoying rereading this series.

Funnily enough, there’s a paper TPB sitting on my bedside table from when I checked it out several months ago so that I could revisit this series.

That stalled out, but I am finding it easier to get through as a PDF on my phone. The series is better than I remember it being from whenever I reread it, but it’s still not so good that I feel like I get some of the hype.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan for long enough to recognize unnecessary expanded universe material when I hear it, but I’ve also been a Star Wars fan for long enough to know that some of it is actually pretty good.

I’ve known about this book for ages and always wanted to read it because the idea of the Kobayashi Maru is just fun. I was delighted to find an audiobook on the Internet Archive and enjoyed listening to it. James Doohan can only do so many voices (I had trouble telling his Chekov from his Scotty), but I appreciated what he brought to the role, the music and sound effects weren’t bad, and the premise paid off.

I like weird fiction, and this anarchist occult book delivers. I like the mundanity of the occult stuff and the persistent but relatively subtle anarchist themes. It could be better, but the vibes alone are enough for a positive review. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series.

Fascinating read! I’m not as interested as the author in his largely geopolitical thesis, but the raw materials he uses to construct that thesis are depressingly fascinating. They could also make up the elements of an Ellulian thesis on the dangers of power, efficiency, and technical systems. It’s harder to use Apple products after reading the book—and it’s a stark reminder of how the world we live in is so different than the world I’d like us to.

This series continues to be compelling, even if I have some complaints about it. Casey’s dialogue for Black characters sometimes feels stereotypical, I don’t love his use (or depiction) of rape as a plot point, and (like some of the other Image series I’ve read) I feel like there’s a fine line between “comics can be a mature medium” and “let’s draw all the boobs and butts we can.”

And yet. This is a more interesting Batman story than so many actual Batman stories I’ve read. For all my baseline prudishness and legitimate concerns, I don’t (usually) think this is just mature content just to be titillating, and I really want to see how things play out.

Just over a year ago, I read and reviewed Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals, which felt weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge having read. I got why it received the acclaim that it did but didn’t really like it.

This Image comics Humble Bundle that I’ve been working my way through included the entire run of Sex Criminals, which I don’t intend to reread, but I am trying to read basically everything else in the bundle, including other series that it feels weird to read and even weirder to publicly acknowledge reading. I’ve been oblique in referencing that so far, but it’s hard to avoid with this review.

So, this still doesn’t sit totally right with me. The sleaze as art choice is still not my style, and I’m not sure which side of the “artistic vs. objectifying” it falls on, though the former is clearly the goal. I also think that plot and character “development” sometimes move too quickly to really land.

If I’m more generous toward this volume, though, it’s because it’s more clear what the creators are trying to do here. The characters are more compelling, with backstories and relationships that make them interesting. The plot twists add genuine drama. It feels like they are trying to prove that comics can be a serious, “adult” (in not just one sense of the term) medium, and I think they mostly succeed? It feels like a comics equivalent of all those blockbuster TV shows I don’t watch, and I can give it credit for that even if there are reasons I tend not to watch those shows.

This book starts off strong, with a very interesting exploration of Christology in the Book of Mormon. There are some other interesting observations, too (including a frank-to-the-point-of-productive-discomfort evaluation of race in the Book of Mormon). If I were only reading the conclusion, I’d likely give it full marks. A few things keep me from doing that for the book as I read it, though.

I admit that some of those things are entirely my fault. As with the last two books in the series, I’ve read this one too quickly to appreciate the arguments it’s making. Furthermore, I confess that I have personal biases against a couple of the authors cited even though I don’t know much about those authors—it’s the laziest kind of bias, and while I might still dislike those authors after a thorough evaluation of their work, it’s not solid ground for grumping about their appearance in this book.

Okay, once I got over the ways that generative AI have ruined the premise, it’s not a terrible story. It’s not deep or particularly original, but I enjoyed it enough to be more generous this time around.

This book is great: its emphasis on sight and invisibility, its meta-emphasis on self-evaluation and self-deception, and its leaning into the Book of Mormon’s condemnation of wealth and departure from contemporary Latter-day Saint understandings. So much good stuff in here. The only thing keeping me from giving full marks is that I’ve skimmed it too quickly to critically evaluate (or appreciate) the throughlines of the book.

I struggled my way through this book, but I also liked it? My wanting to quickly fly through this series hampered my ability to sit with it and evaluate its arguments in the way that it deserves, and it feels weird to review the book based on the skim that I ended up settling for. Yet, I also really liked the directions Wrathall explored, and I would be eager to reread what he has to say with more care and attention sometime in the future.

I’ve been meaning to reread this for a while, and I’m glad I finally got to it. It’s fifteen years old now and feels it sometimes (not necessarily in a bad way), but it’s a fun read.

I appreciate Doctorow’s use of MMOs as a metaphor for economics, and even if I’m not economically savvy enough to follow all the details or evaluate their accuracy, it’s a lot of fun to read about “Great Recession, but a heist carried out by unionized workers.”

We bought the English translation of this comic after falling in love with the series in the original French. The goal is to donate this copy to kiddo’s school library, but we couldn’t help but read it as a family first. It’s darling and wonderful, but it loses a bit of the fun in translation.