Below are posts associated with the “media” type.
📚 bookblog: Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book One (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Billy Stockton (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Steve Rowland (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Colonel Amos (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Little Jones (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Irina (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: The Mongoose (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: The Giant Joshua (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: American Born Chinese (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
📚 bookblog: unrig: how to fix our broken democracy (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
📚 bookblog: Black Panther: The Complete Collection, Volume 1 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Running for Local Office for Dummies (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Out of the Dark (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: All of the Marvels (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
📚 bookblog: My Friend Dahmer (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.
📚 bookblog: Dear Ann (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
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.
📚 bookblog: Kent State (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
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.