This book me far too long to read. I started (and finished) a lot of books while supposedly reading this one, and it’s just a massive book with a lot to get through. I’m also unclear on how much I’ll take from the book in particular. I got a lot from the overall arc of the story, but given the timeframe of my reading it and the sheer amount of material—not to mention Schlosser’s interweaving of a particular nuclear accident and other historical details—it was hard to keep track of who was who and what had happened.

As with the last collection of TUSG issues, I have read these stories before, but not recently and not often, so it was fun to revisit them. After finishing this collection, I had to go back to the regular TPBs rather than this double TPB format, and that’s made me better appreciate these large formats, which leave out things like the letters page, etc. I have enjoyed reading those before, but when trying to power through the entire series, it’s nice to remove extraneous information and focus on the stuff I’m really there to read.

I’m less familiar with this part of the Squirrel Girl series, so it was even more fun to revisit these issues as I try to make my way through the whole series. North is a great author for this kind of thing—I get a bit grumpy about his computer science lessons because of my complicated feelings toward computer science education (I’m for it but not necessarily in the way it’s being done) , but otherwise, I love his dialogue, characters, plots, and absurdity.

I recently finished the new Squirrel Girl podcast written by North, which made me miss the comics. I’ve also been meaning to finish the series, which ended in 2019 but I never caught up on. So, I checked on the hoopla app connected to my library account and discovered that the whole series is finally available there—hooray! I own all of these issues in trade paperback, but I read them on my phone to give me something productive to do on my phone.

This book has been as enjoyable as all of the previous ones in the series. It took me longer to get into—probably because I’ve read so many of them lately—but once I got started, it moved along nicely. The past few entries in the series have seemed more intentional than others in setting up clues for the future rather than being self-contained stories. This book was also shorter and ended on a dramatic cliffhanger, giving the impression that Herron is wrapping up the series in the next book and might even have split this final story into two.

I flew through this book and quite enjoyed it. As Herron gets further along in the series, the continued plots strain suspension strain suspension of disbelief more and more, just like Smiley’s repeated resignations and returns make some of Le Carré’s books a bit creaky. Like Le Carré, though, there’s enough that’s good about the series that you can overlook these gaps. Herron feels no need to spare his characters, and he uses that expertly in this book.

This continues to be a fascinating series. While there are real threats and real bad guys in each story, so much of the story is on internal squabbling, and none of the characters can be said to be a “good guy.” In some ways the immediate plot of the book seems to be an excuse for letting the terrible characters bump against each other and make a mess of things. This book in particular really strained my affection for the characters, but I was still hooked by Herron’s writing.

We took a family trip to Mammoth Cave this weekend, and I decided to read the fourth entry in this series over the course of the trip. I quite liked it and it was fun to read it so quickly. Despite being a bit more fantastical and less down to earth than some of the other entries, I thought the story was innovative and made good use of some of the recurring characters of the series so far.

Like its predecessors, this volume was interesting, and I appreciated what it had to say, but there was just too much that was weird about it for me to really love it. I don’t regret reading it, but I have no plans to buy the physical versions like I thought I might in the past. The story seemed to get more and more speculative over time, and while I appreciated the intent, it just felt like more and more of a stretch, which felt like it weakened the goals of the author.

Even though I ought to be finishing up some other books, I’ve enjoyed this series enough to check out the third book and read it over the last few days. Herron does a good job of making none of his characters likable but some of sympathetic and I enjoyed this book more than the last. Herron does his best, I think, when his nominal heroes and their bosses are the real villains of the piece.

I read this volume of the series much faster than the last one—perhaps because it was new to me and perhaps because the second round of the election motivated me to finish it—though I clearly won’t finish the series before today’s results were announced. Thematically, I thought the book was stranger. It put more emphasis on how laws and politics established under mainstream parties could become terrifying in the hands of far right extremists.

My spouse and I recently started watching the Apple TV+ series based on this book and its sequels. I’ve loved the show, so when she and kiddo were at a local library on Thursday, they grabbed the book for me. I’m a big fan of John Le Carré, and this feels like a worthy modern successor. It’s crafty and smart, but even more than Le Carré, Herron leans into the ugly parts of the profession and the people who embrace those parts rather than try to maintain honor and dignity.

I’ve wanted to read this book before—I believe I read the whole thing once in high school, and we read a portion of it in a French Civ class before discussing the Bayeux Tapestry. I recently saw it at the library and decided to give it another go. Because I took a while to get started, the due date snuck up on me, and I had to rush through most of it rather than give it the critical read it deserves.

I think this is the third time I’ve read this BD, but given the ongoing French presidential election and the possibility that Le Pen will pull off a win on the 24th, I wanted to revisit it—and read the other volumes in the trilogy, which I’ve never done. The BD isn’t the best—it’s overly didactic at times and the art aims for a photorealism that sometimes verges on the uncanny valley.

I jumped right into this sequel for Slow Horses right after finishing the first volume. The core of what attracted me to the first book was largely present, hence my giving it the same rating. However, at the end of the day, I didn’t like it quite as much. I couldn’t say exactly why that is—the characters I enjoyed were just as enjoyable, the story was interesting, and there were great shout-outs to Le Carré and funny recurring jokes in the story.

I have been meaning to read this for quite some time, as it is the first volume in the most recent official history of Community of Christ. I’m also looking forward to the next two volumes, since they cover history that I am not familiar with, but it was especially interesting to read a Community of Christ perspective on the 1830-1844 era. I appreciated the frankness and openness of the volume—it’s impossible to imagine an LDS version of this book taking the same approach.

I found this translation of Delisle’s latest graphic novel at the Jessamine County Public Library and decided to give it a try. I don’t remember how I discovered Delisle, but I love his book Pyongyang, I’ve read a couple of his other books, and I loved this one. Delisle’s art is great—his style is consistent, simple, and appealing. I like the way that he did color in this book, which is mostly monochrome but with bursts of yellow here and there.

I’ve owned this comic for a while and have been meaning to read it the whole time—especially since reading All of the Marvels and the first volume of Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther. Anyway, I finally got to it and I mostly liked it, but it wasn’t as mind-blowing as I hoped it would be. Coates does some really interesting things challenging the idea of Black Panther as an ideal monarch by questioning if such a thing even exists.

This volume went back to blah. On one hand, it’s interesting for the way it gives a backstory to a relatively minor character. On the other, it falls into the same trap of wanting to give series villains gruesome backstories as some sort of Freudian excuse. Truth be told, I preferred the minor character as just that. I don’t know that this backstory was consistent with his original portrayal, and it didn’t help me appreciate him any more.

I think this might be the best of the series so far, even if it’s not quite good enough to bump it up to four hearts. First, this is probably the most serious consideration of the far right conspiracy in the series as a violent, racist conspiracy and not just a plot point. Second, while it’s as chock-full of references to other characters and events in the series as previous volumes, I feel like this volume does a better job than any of the others of trying to weave them together into a coherent whole rather than simply stuff references into a volume.

This volume was better than the last two, probably because it had a more interesting plot than just a series of cameos and because it was less egregious than the others in terms of trying to do social justice but falling short. At the same time, this continues the series’s predilection for making sure that all of the characters are related to each other in some way, and that gets tiring after awhile.

Like the last volume, this one seems to exaggerate the things I like least about the XIII series while ditching the things I like most (the art and the French, though that’s a function of my reading a translation. Jones is an interesting character and the authors contextualize her childhood in interesting ways, but there’s something off-putting about (presumably) white French people trying to tell the story of the U.S. black civil rights movement and throwing racial slurs in there for good measure.

This series continues to be interesting, but kind of dumb. I feel like I’m a kid again, reading all the Star Wars books I could find at the library, filling in all the details between the main parts of the story, not always in a quality package. This volume in particular exaggerates the problems that already exist in the XIII series related to women. In a sort of half-hearted feminism, Irina is portrayed (like other women, including Jones) as capable, action-oriented and violent, but ultimately an objectified sex symbol.

I love the XIII BD even though it’s dumb, but reading the translations gets on my nerves for some reason. I think a lot of the appeal of the series for me is practicing my French, and a slightly stilted translation obviously doesn’t provide that appeal. I still enjoy the universe for all its dumbness, though, and I started reading this spinoff series on Hoopla several months ago before turning to something else.

I’m generally a fan of Doctorow’s writing—his recent collection of novellas (“Radicalized”) is one of my favorites and I also own his entire “Little Brother” trilogy. This collection of stories just didn’t land for me, though, and there are other stories/books of his that felt the same. I wonder if his weirder, more optimistic stories don’t work for me in the same way his bleak ones do. This collection dates to 2007, and while Doctorow has long been a critic of certain uses of technology, there are some stories in here that seem like they have more faith in the future of tech than I think is warranted in a post-Snowden, post-Cambridge Analytica world.

This was a bit of a slog sometimes—one of the reasons why it took me so long to read and why it didn’t get a full five hearts—but it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently. This is supposedly one of the great classics of Mormon fiction, though I hadn’t heard of it before BCC Press released a free ebook of it a few weeks ago. It is a frank but respectful tale of Mormon pioneers “settling” St.

I grabbed this book at the library while dropping off some overdue items and read the whole thing that night before going to bed. Reread, rather—I’ve read this book at least once before. It made a big impression on me at the time, even though I’m sure I wasn’t particularly anti-racist then, and I loved it even more this time. The art is great and the story is even better. It’s an amazing comic with a powerful message, and I think I ought to buy a copy for kiddo to read when she’s older.

This took me a while to read: not because i didn’t like it, but because there were some parts that enraged me (in a productive way), so I couldn’t trust myself to read it before bed for fear of getting too wound up to sleep. I appreciated the book’s straightforward approach to laying out problems with American democracy and its optimism that we can do something about it. This year, I’ve been wanting to think—and engage—more in politics, and I think I’ll find the last chapter of this book particularly helpful for giving me the motivation to do so.

I don’t think I’ve ever read any Black Panther before, but I loved the movie from a few years ago, and Christopher Priest’s run was recommended in All of the Marvels, so I decided to give this a try. I see why this run was recommended, and there was a lot in there to like, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure it worked for me. I enjoy comics a lot, but it felt really continuity-heavy, and maybe I prefer graphic novels and self-contained short runs to issues that try to sit in the middle of everything Marvel’s ever published.

I’ve been interested in the idea of running for office since I was in high school, and as I’ve become more politically aware and engaged over the past five years, I’ve thought a lot in particular about eventually running for local office. I picked this book up with a stack of others a couple of months ago during a particular rush of civic inspiration and since I got a notice that I needed to return it, I blazed through it in a couple of days.

This was… a bizarre book. I’ve read plenty of David Weber’s writing before and the premise of the book seemed pretty close to Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, so I thought I might enjoy it. Te premise of the book is that Earth has been invaded by a species that is clearly superior in the grand scheme of things but comparable to human technology other than space travel, giving humanity somewhat of a fighting chance.

Wolk read 27,000+ Marvel comics to write this book, an attempt to trace the most important part of the Marvel universe over the past ~60 years. I love the book for a few reasons. First, it takes comics—and Marvel Comics in particular—seriously, examining their sense-making and stories. Second, there’s a deep love of comics that’s evident in the book. Not a stilted, defensive love, but a mature one that knows what’s wrong with them but champions what they get right.

Having survived one Backderf book and knowing that this is his more famous work (it won an award at Angoulême in 2014), I decided to give it a try. The story is of Backderf’s childhood association with Jeffrey Dahmer, who grew up to be a serial killer. Dahmer’s crimes are horrifying—I had to put the book out of my mind before going to sleep—but he was caught when I was 3, so I wasn’t really aware of the story.

I probably would not have read this book on my own but it was selected as the 2022 Kentucky Reads selection by Kentucky Humanities. I noticed that in a headline somewhere (probably the Herald-Leader) and decided it was worth giving it a shot. I ended up enjoying the book a lot! It plays with themes of nostalgia and wondering if the past could have or should have been different. I’ve been thinking about both of those things a lot recently, including in the context of my faith transition.

I picked this graphic novel from JCPL just over a week ago. I think that Backderf’s art is weird, and I have mixed experiences with non-fiction comics, but I don’t know much about the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, and I decided it was worth knowing more about. The story was compelling, and Backderf’s art didn’t bother me as much as I worried it would, so I’m glad I tried it.