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. I own the first ten TPBs, and I’m looking forward to reading all of those and then seeing what else I can find from the library.

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. En plus, c’est intéressant d’avoir une perspective qui date de 1997-1998, et je me demande combieb l’album aurait été différent s’il avait vécu cette expérience plus récemment.

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. En plus, le système politique américain présent dans cette série ressemble peu au système réel (sur certains points, au moins).

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.