This took a while to get through for a book I enjoyed so much. It has Andor-level grittiness and complex characters and narratives that make it better than a lot of Star Wars stuff. The audiobook’s use of Star Wars music and sound effects is also a big plus. I’ve already checked out the final book in the trilogy so that it’s not another two years before I wrap it up!

This book isn’t the best of the anarchist fiction I’ve read—it feels a bit stilted or maybe even too didactic at points—but it grew on me, and I enjoyed the story a lot. (It’s also not the worst anarchist fiction I’ve read—looking at you, V for Vendetta). Cory Doctorow mentioned Killjoy’s most recent book on his blog, so I’m giving some of her older stuff a try, and so far, I think it’s pretty good.

Dumb but fun is how I would describe this. It’s got good art and an interesting premise, but the longer it went on, the more tired I got of twists and the harder time I had following the story. It wasn’t bad—but nothing special either.

This one almost won me over. It has good art, and the kind of worldbuilding that goes with an interesting idea rather than explain things. It had a bit more violence than I like and some objectifying art that wasn’t really necessary, but what really lost me was an unnecessary fridging late in the second arc. It could have been something interesting—and frankly still was—but that scene cancelled out a lot of that potential.

I didn’t want to like this. The IDW comics bundle I’ve been working through has been kind of a mixed bag, and this was weird from the get-go. A fast-food employee robs an entire strip mall, which gets him entangled in an effort to summon the devil on earth. It doesn’t sound like my thing at all. It’s so unashamed of its weirdness, though, that it comes all the way around to amazing.

I feel kind of weird rating this above any of the Earthdivers volumes, but hey. The art feels a bit off sometimes, and there were some bits that I didn’t quite follow. The character designs and worldbuilding were great—weird sometimes but stronger for it. The plot was interesting, with some good twists that kept me hooked.

En fait, j’ai lu Stay, la traduction anglaise que j’ai trouvée à la bibliothèque chez moi. Je n’aime pas lire les BD en traduction—traduire « kebab » comme « gyro », ça se comprend, mais c’est quand-même insupportable—mais je ne voulais pas rater la possibilité de lire une vraie BD non plus, L’art est magnifique, et si l’histoire est un peu bizarre, elle est touchante aussi. C’est impressionnant combien cette équipe a pu raconter une histoire tellement émouvante avec si peu de paroles.

This is a very Ryan Northy comic, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s a great adaptation of the Lower Decks vibe (and Fenoglio’s art is a fantastic recreation), but it also has a lot of North’s signature moves. I love his physical comic adaptation of webcomics’ alt text jokes, his voice in those jokes, and his fun with science and public domain characters. I don’t know how much more there is in this series, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for additional volumes.

This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

Had to watch this after finishing Andor, and I spent the first half of it being disappointed??? I thought I remembered this being one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but after the depth and maturity of its tv prequel, it feels kind of superficial. The last few sequences won me back, though. Andor is the superior story, but this is a fine action movie and a marvelous piece of fanservice.

Maybe I’m dumb—or not reading closely enough—but I just cannot follow the twists and turns of this series. I love the back of the envelope idea of Indigenous time travelers trying to set things right, but I am very confused by the execution.

This was Star Wars at its best, and there is (unfortunately) no better time than now for it to come out. I’ve wrestled a lot recently with the tension between my love for Star Wars and my aspiration toward non-violence. I don’t know that I agree with this series’s implicit argument that sometimes ugly things are necessary to make a better world, but I appreciate that it deals with that ugliness rather than just letting Luke blow up the Death Star without counting how many people that act of self-defense killed.

This feels a lot like the first volume: great premise, great art, but very hard to follow. Maybe it’s me not paying close enough attention, but it just feels twisty and turny without enough signposts to keep the reader on track.

There’s a lot going for this book: A compelling premise (Indigenous survivors of a climate apocalypse send someone back in time to kill Columbus, hoping that no America will avert said apocalypse), a willingness to interrogate the premise (violence begets violence, can the past be changed, etc.), and great art. I felt like it didn’t live up to that potential, though. I had trouble following the timey wimey twists, there were a lot of shortcuts, and the dialogue and characters sometimes felt flat.

This webcomic is just so good! I really enjoy reading it in collection format, even if it hasn’t been all that long since I read it strip-by-strip. This holds true even if this collection doesn’t have my favorite storylines in it. Looking forward to next year’s collection!

I’m being a little hard on this book because it wasn’t quite was I was expecting. There’s a lot of good stuff in here despite not having some of what I was hoping to find. I do wonder if it would have been better as the original lecture it’s based on: You could hear some of the audio, and I think some of the fat could be trimmed from the manuscript.

I picked this up (along with Arca, some titles I’ll be reading and reviewing in the future, and a few that I’m going to skip because they are Not My Thing) in a Humble Bundle for recent IDW titles. I’ve read Wilson’s run on Ms. Marvel (or at least most of it), but I’ve bounced off some of her other stuff, so I wasn’t sure what I’d think of this.

I forgot for a while there that I was waiting for this to come out on hoopla! I finally remembered yesterday, looked it up, and checked it out. I think I’ll appreciate this volume more when I can binge read it alongside some of the others. I forgot some of the context for the major plot developments, which got in the way some. It continues to be a weird-but-amazing series, though, and I can’t believe how easily it hooks me, despite forgetting the context and despite the levels of blood and violence being higher than I usually tolerate.

Arca isn’t perfect—the plot moves at the speed of convenience, the characters aren’t terribly deep, and the twists are either predictable or “huh?” Even with those critiques, though, I nearly gave it full marks, because it’s really good. I love the art and panel design, and the dystopia as metaphor for modern social problems lands really well. I really enjoyed the read!

I wasn’t sure if I was going to read this—not that I wasn’t interested, but so many books, so little time, etc. However, a friend introduced me to NetGalley, where she was reading it prior to publication, and that pushed me into following her example. I did wait until the end of my time limit with the book to really make progress, and between that rush and my familiarity with Smith’s life, I still wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of it.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting (I think the “biography” subtitle is misleading), but it’s good! It’s organized around specific understandings or depictions of Jesus in Mormonism, and while it isn’t afraid of exploring the weird and controversial (I may be citing this at some point for a paper that touches on arguments about a polygamist Jesus), it’s also good about contextualizing Mormon beliefs within broader trends, thereby making (some) things (slightly) less weird.

In many ways, this is a great book! It’s well written (and well read), and it made me care about baseball in ways I usually don’t. It’s also an interesting story—a great example of the power of statistics and data science to do cool things. That last part, though, is why I read it. I expected to be critical of the book’s take, and I wasn’t wrong. It cheerleads attitudes about (data) science that I’m skeptical of, like its supposed superiority in terms of objectivity and rationality.

Man, I really wanted to like this movie. I’m glad kiddo enjoyed it, I did appreciate some of the Jared Hess vibes, and some of the visual design was pretty good, but this was just an excuse to make a bunch of Minecraft references in a movie, and I have never been more aware of green screens in my life.

I’m glad I found this book through the UK library. I had read that it’s foundational for the ideas Ellul would explore through the rest of his career, and that pans out. I don’t agree with everything, and I think he overreaches sometimes, but I did find this book compelling, and a good addition to my Ellul studies.

This was a hard book to read, but I’m glad I did. Munther is a Palestinian Christian pastor, and his holy anger and hurt in this book really spoke to me. However, I have a lot of internalized resistance to what he has to say, and things feel so big, and I spent a lot of the book tensing up and feeling overwhelmed. I feel called to repentance by this book, and I’m glad I read it before next week’s Community of Christ World Conference, where a resolution standing against Christian Zionism will be debated.

This is more the kind of thing I’d expect from OOTS “purchase only” content. The additional stories were fun, the author commentary was interesting, and there’s at least one panel I might be able to work into a conference presentation, so that’s nice.

Webcomics break my reviewing assumptions in interesting ways. I recently spent a lot of time binging the OOTS archives, with over 1,000 pages of material, without writing any reviews, because that wasn’t a “book.” This 75ish-page comic, though, gets a review. Anyway, that binge reminded me of how much I love this webcomic, which is why I’m kind of surprised not to like this prequel. Maybe it’s because it’s anchored to the beginning, gag-a-strip format, before the story gets really interesting.

Cory Doctorow reviewed this book on his Pluralistic blog recently, and since I typically enjoy the books he recommends (well, the ones I try, anyway), I gave it a try. The writing style is not my favorite, and I don’t know that it needed to be one of those books that is written by an in-universe character, but both of those fit really well into the themes of the book, so I shouldn’t complain.

This is the third (or fourth, if you count a quote-pulling skim) time I’ve read this book in the past 2ish years, and I do think that I need to give myself more of a break before trying to come back to it again. I really like the audiobook, though, and I’m glad I now own it in mp3 and epub. I also needed the read, since it’s a hopeful one, and I started it when I was in desperate need of something hopeful.

This apparently took us two months to watch, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if that hadn’t been the case. I actually didn’t really enjoy the season arc so much—individual episodes were great, though, and the show continues to be fun. Hard to believe there’s only one season left to get through!

This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!). If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!

This is a funny show to rate! I believe I learned about it from David Loehr on The Incomparable, who spoke highly of it. I did enjoy watching it, which is why I’m pretty positive about it. Thinking about it critically, the overarching plot is kind of hard to follow, the individual mysteries don’t have any way of solving them but “trust that brilliant main character is brilliant,” and the show almost knows how contrived its confessions at the end of each episode are.

Il faut peut-être que j’arrête d’essayer de lire des œuvres philosophiqies ou théologiques en français (même si je n’ai payé que 10€ chez Cultura), car j’avoue avoir du mal à tout comprendre dans de tels livres. Pourtant, ce que j’ai compris dans ce livre j’ai beaucoup aimé. Lagandré distingue entre le théisme et la religion d’une manière fort intéressant, et il arrive à exprimer plusieurs pensées qui m’arrivent d’une manière bien moins mûre depuis des années.

Tinker Tailor is a comfort listen for me at this point. This weekend, I also watched the two first episodes of the Alec Guinness miniseries, and I might like the radio adaptation more? It’s really good.

Okay, yes, I just listened to this a couple of months ago, but I was doing a relisten of the BBC Radio 4 Smiley adaptations, and I wanted to see how this held up reading it where it fits chronologically. It holds up well! I like this novel a lot. It’s fun to see Smiley being competent in the field, and I appreciate how it complicates Ann without making Smiley the bad guy in the relationship.

This was fine. I’m glad I read it, so I can continue my Doctorow completionism, but I’m not sure I would have missed much if I didn’t. You can see the beginnings of Walkaway in here, but it just makes me want to reread that yet again.