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. It also expresses the kind of commitment I wish I had but know I am still too cowardly to adopt.

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.g., the serpent = Satan) without acknowledging that there’s not a lot of basis to them. I also find anarchist writing to make a lot of assertions without walking me through them; while I’m sympathetic to the conclusions, I feel like I can’t get on board without some more help.

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. There are still bad people acting in bad faith, there is poverty and famine, and one of the themes of the book is about the risk of getting entrenched in old ways of thinking, even if those “old ways” are the ones portrayed as being better than “other ways.” (As an aside, the protagonist of the book is also imperfect, most notably in an act of sexual assault that he’s more or less absolved of by the narration, which is the part of the book that least sits right with me).

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. Somehow, though, remembering all of these facts and events as I read them all in one place felt overwhelming. Had Musk really created that much chaos in such a relatively short period of time?

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. While Graeber fully and repeatedly acknowledges that, it’s still hard to see this as more than a predetermined thesis supported by particular interpretations of scanty evidence.

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. I followed the general thesis of the book, and I’m rating it highly because of my appreciation for that thesis, but I think I’d need to return to individual chapters before I could teach about any particular issue or endorse a corresponding strategy.

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.

This is also a darker novella, and reading a post-apocalyptic story that touches on death and disease stresses me out. More than the last time I read it, though, I get what Doctorow is going for with this story. It’s a critique of survivalist go-it-on-your-own mentalities with optimism that even in the worst of times, humans can come together and help each other out—if they’re willing to try. I don’t like reading the story, but I appreciate the message.

This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me.

It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.