Finishing this up tonight, I appreciated reading through the sample script and other supplementary materials included at the end of the book. I have the horrible habit of consuming media without any technical appreciation for how it is made. I write for a living, so I have some appreciation for what writing fiction must be like, but I have zero understanding of film (or at least very little), and it occurred to me while reading this script that I read a lot of comics without really understanding the creative process there. That was a good thing to think about.

It’s probably unfair to get pickier about these comics over time, because this is the kind of story I would have liked to see when I first began reading through, but now it’s boring compared to some of the more interesting arcs. Alas.

This picks up near the end with some interesting ethical dilemmas (though it’s not clear how much of a dilemma they actually are), but it feels like the interesting premise of the first volume has kind of run out of steam. I’m still considering picking up the third volume (and I wonder if I’ve been too harsh on this one), but I can’t say it’s kept my attention as much as I’d hoped.

There is one really good story in here and one okay one, but I finally found the limits of my impatient with Star Trek and/or comics nonsense, and it was a Star Wars-like “let’s take a character who barely appears on screen and explain why they are the most important person in the world” story smack in the middle of the volume. Not going to stop reading the series, but it’s definitely slowing me down.

I’m beginning to wonder if I just don’t like Discworld, which would be a tragedy, since Pratchett is revered, and it seems like I should like his style of fiction.

I at least know that I didn’t really like this series, which also seems a shame, since I’ve always wanted to get into the Sam Vimes stories. I suspect some of it may be the adaptation: It seems just too hard to follow.

Alors, quelques mois plus tard, j’ai enfin fini de relire les albums XIII dans ma petite collection. J’avais l’intention depuis plusieurs années de grandir cette collection, mais après cette relecture, je ne suis plus sûr. J’aime bien l’art, les histoires sont parfois intéressantes, mais il y a bien trop de choses stupides qui se déroulent dans ces pages.

Cet album-ci montre bien une chose : Vance et Van Hamme sont attirés par les États-Unis (par le bien et le mal américains), et ils essaient d’incorporer tous les genres possibles de la fiction américaine dans leurs histoires : les espions, les militaires, les immigrés, les cowboys, les complotistes… tout ce qu’on pourrait imaginer dans un film hollywoodien doit aussi être intégré chez XIII. On n’arrive plus à croire, et si je ne m’amuse plus à lire, est-ce que cela vaut la peine ?

Bon, ce n’est pas que j’avais fort envie de reprendre cette série, mais il n’y avait que deux tomes qui restent dans ma collection, et j’ai d’autres choses à relire après avoir terminé cette relecture.

Il y a dans ce tome tout ce qui m’attire et tout ce qui m’agace de la série XIII. J’ai pas trop envie de tout répéter. Il suffit de dire que c’est intéressant comme histoire d’aventure tant qu’on arrive à oublier toutes les bêtises y présentes.

When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot. This really confused me, since it had never occurred to me that one could critique Common Core from the left.

C’est méchant de dire que cet album m’a été utile pour combattre l’insomnie hier soir ? Bon, c’est exaggérer un peu (n’importe quel livre aurait suffi), mais mes sentiments complexes envers cette série continuent.

C’est assez intéressant de revisiter l’Amérique latine, et il aurait servi comme occasion de critiquer le militarisme américain, mais pourquoi donc éléver un Irlando-Américain comme « sauveur blanc » pour ces rebelles ?

Je continue à lire, mais je continue à me demander si j’aurais du me mettre à collectionner une autre série de bd.

Je reprends donc cette série en lisant les albums que j’ai en format physique. C’est comme avant : J’aime l’art, et il y a des éléments de l’histoire qui m’intriguent, mais ce n’est rien de spécial.

Ce tome est encore plus difficile à classer. Comme « thriller », il est assez efficace, les nouveaux personnages sont intéressants, et les petits retours en arrière réussissent à donner du contexte et à accrocher le lecteur. Je continue à aimer l’art aussi.

Par contre, le traitement des femmes dans la série devient encore moins supportable. Connaissant quelques femmes qui ont éprouvé beaucoup de douleur à cause de la stérilité, je ne suis pas forcément contre l’idée d’une femme fictive qui éprouve cette même douleur pour des raisons dramatiques.

Bon, j’ai commencé cette relecture en espérant pouvoir défendre mon amour pour cette série malgré ses problèmes. Il est vrai qu’elle continue à être intéressant, mais le sexisme s’accroît, et ça devient se plus en plus difficile de justifier mon intérêt.

Bon, il y a quand-même des limites à mon amour pour cette série, et je n’ai jamais trop aimé cet album. Même si les éléments des complots se révèlent (et se révèlent assez intéressants), la cruauté de l’asile pénitentiaire où se trouve notre héros pendant l’album me dérange. Même si cette cruauté reflète la réalité de telles institutions, ce qui se déroule dans ces pages est pour amuser, et je ne le trouve pas très amusant. (En plus, je suis forcé par cet album de me souvenir de l’album XIII Mystery sur la vie de Billy Stockton, un album qui est absolument nul).

I picked this up because it had Zdarsky’s name on it, and Jorge Jiménez’s art looked gorgeous. It was a fun read, but there are all the problems with it that I have with most modern Batman: It’s violent, absurd, and bogged down in continuity. I’m glad I tried it, but I don’t miss Batman all that much.

I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today?

Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.

I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much.

I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).

I am by nature pretty prudish, and even though I’ve been successfully dialing that down recently, I still feel weird about having read this and even weirder about acknowledging that on a public website. That said, I’ve always felt like I should give this a try since it’s well regarded in comics, and after a few failed attempts in earlier, more prudish years, I powered my way through this complete edition over the past few days.

I’ve been feeling like reading some Turtledove recently, but I’m a lot more mixed on him than I’ve been in the past. I read nearly this entire series back in high school and thought it might be worth revisiting.

The premise of this book (World War I in a timeline where the Confederacy successfully seceded) is super interesting. Woodrow Wilson as Confederate POTUS feels plausible, as do a lot of the other details, and it’s interesting to see how the story plays out.

I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.

This is a goofy but fun book about demon hunters from a 1990s evangelical church. It came highly recommended by Cory Doctorow, which is why I checked it out from my local library even though I wasn’t sure it would be my thing.

I enjoyed reading it, but I don’t think it was my thing after all. I followed enough of the 1990s gags and enjoyed enough of the story to have a good time. I also appreciate the more nuanced take it had on religion and demon hunting (the final battle is very ecumenical, including a Wiccan coven). This isn’t a genre that I love, though, and for all the good bits of the story, nothing stood out as amazing.

I don’t remember when I learned that Leo Tolstoy had written his own, Thomas Jefferson-style miracle-free New Testament mashup, but I do know I immediately wanted to read it. Then, I spotted a copy at my local indie bookstore while looking for things to spend a gift card on, and that’s how I picked up a copy.

Like The Kingdom of God is Within You, I like some of Tolstoy’s ideas, but getting through them can be a drag. Since a lot of this one is just remixing the four gospels, it felt even harder to get through. It took a few starts and stops to make progress, and I think it’s going to be more of a reference book for me than anything I reread.

There’s lots to like about this movie: a good message, some good jokes, and some animation gags that I really liked. It’s hard to live up to the original film, though, and this just didn’t feel as tight. Parts of the plot felt rushed, the internal logic of the first film wasn’t as present, and it felt repetitive with some of the plot beats. I’m glad I saw it, but I think the first captures most of the magic that’s here—and more besides.

This season isn’t as strong as the first; I’m glad I watched it (for the first time!), but I feel like it got too tangled in storied and then trying to wrap things up for the end.

I’m glad that so many French comics are now available in American libraries, and it’s a pleasure to read something that came from the influential Métal Hurlant. This is one of those reads, though, where I understand why the work is important, but it just didn’t land with me.

The book seems to be beloved in Community of Christ: I’ve heard a member of the First Presidency recommend it on a podcast, I’ve seen an emeritus senior president of seventy recommend it in the Herald, and this copy was given to me by an apostle. I can see why! It’s interesting, full of important observations, and I think Community of Christ will need to adopt some of these ideas to survive in the decades to come (at least in the Global North).