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.

There’s a lot I like in this book: the call for urgency; its focus on bottom-up movements; echoes of Ellul, Graeber, and other authors I’ve appreciated. It feels like an example of the prophetic voice, and I hope to keep it in mind in the years to come. I’m not an economist or an environmental expert, so I feel inadequate in my ability to thoroughly review it. I wish it were easier to translate those lofty ideals into daily action, though maybe part of the point is that there are no easy answers to this.

I was more generous to the first series this time around because I was impressed by how tightly it works as a single story, despite being episodic. While there are lots of gems in this series, it doesn’t feel as tightly constructed, and there are also some weird things that don’t really work for me (like a conspiratorial diatribe against the FBI?). I don’t regret rewatching it, but it just isn’t as good as the first series.

This season wasn’t awful so much as “just okay,” but I’ve come to expect more from the show. It took my least favorite book and changed it in weird ways that didn’t feel like they fixed much. A few changes were good, but others felt like they added too much complexity to the plot or that they were trying to lend a gravitas to characters that don’t need it.

I have tried to rewatch this a few times since discovering it in 2023, and I’ve always stalled out by the final episode of Series 1, which is so cruel and cynical that it’s difficult to watch. Yet, it fits nicely with the themes of the show (and especially the first series), so I’m glad I made it through this time. I’m still critical of the misogyny and brownface that led me to dock points from my last review, but seeing how carefully the show sets up that final episode of the series (especially during an era where season arcs weren’t nearly as important as they later became) has won my respect.

I have been meaning to read this book for months and was happy to have an uninterrupted couple of hours on a flight so that I could finally get to it. It covers familiar ground but without feeling repetitive. I expect to cite it frequently in the future—in fact, I ought to work it into some slides I’m presenting tomorrow!

I wasn’t sure about this book at first, and I’m not totally sure about it at the end, but there was enough in the middle to mostly win me over. Herron continues to be a cruel narrator with one of the major developments of this book, and the other major development really raises questions about where the series will go from here.

This comic is dumb, but mostly the funny kind of dumb, but still not quite enough to get more than a middling review.

Honestly, I was getting bored of this series, but this story got me back on track! It helps that it features a Project 2025/DOGE-type villain, anticipating our current nonsense. The characters are also as (or more) compelling as usual, and things felt less outlandish than in some of the preceding books.