Issues 85-90 are covered and it just keeps getting better. This is one of the few comic series where I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen most of the time and even when I guess it usually turns out better than my ideas. Kirkman brings a little more of his Walking Dead level of gore to this TPB, but the story remains strong. Should be finished up with the series in May.
The Eternaut 1969-Written By Hector Oesterheld. Illustrated by Alberto Brecchia. An Argentine graphic novel with ties to science fiction. I was pleased as punch to find this on Amazon. For those who don't know, Oesterheld and his 4 daughters were forcibly disappeared by the last Argentine dictatorship. BTW, Cloud Cuckoo Land was a good read.
I've been reading City of God a few pages a day since... October? Maybe even September. About 5 pages to go so I'll knock off St. Augustine's monumental doorstopper of a classic by this time tomorrow, barring unforeseen circumstances. Not always compelling, but at nearly 1,100 pages, a few skimmable passages are to be expected.
A buddy of mine did his dissertation at Georgetown on a comparison of the understandings and applications of Augustine's writing in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions.
Sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum from City of God, it's John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. First: I have no idea why this was on my list of requests from the local library. Perhaps one of you recommended it, but I can't find it in a forum search. And I didn't just grab it in one of my impulse borrow sessions, I had it on reserve for when it came available. So I bumped into it somewhere. This is an interesting series of brief essays (most only 4-5 pages) about the human centered planet, each ending with a rating of 1-5 stars. It's a good narrative device. There's virtually no connection from one review subject to the next except Green's interest in them, but I enjoyed almost all of them. A couple are soccer-focused as he's a big Liverpool fan. Many of the essays started life on a podcast or in an NPR show of some sort.
Orwell's Roses, a brilliant meditation on the life and writing of George Orwell, using Orwell's writings about nature as a way into his famous anti-totalitarian outlook. Interesting way to shed light on a much-studied author by Rebecca Solnit, who herself is pretty terrific.
The Quest For the Radical Middle by the late Bill Jackson. I started attending a Vineyard Church last July, so I figured I'd read a history of Vineyard. I'm pleased that LGBTQ Lonnie Frisbee hasn't been airbrushed from the work. Should be a good work.
I am reading through Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin. The best part of it is the finding that while this process helped colonizers sometimes, it also worked in the reverse and helped the colonized sometimes too.
I read Robert Harris' "Fatherland" when it first came out in the early 1990's. I loved that book. So when I found this book on a "book swap", I took it home. I thought the book cover was JFK and Jackie Kennedy at the Dallas airport in 1963, but the couple was a former British Prime Minister who was modelled after Tony Blair. I also did not know the book had turned into a movie directed by Polanski.
A surprisingly balanced look at how smartphones can and probably should be used from an evangelical perspective. Published in 2017, it was written right as Snapchat was the new hot social network, but it still hits quite a few valid points for today. The structure is weird in that it's the only book I've ever read that has a forward, an introduction, a preface, a conclusion, and an epilogue. A few really interesting ideas popped up. He did a survey of readers that showed smartphone usage had actually increased book reading in older users, especially men, while also decreasing book reading in younger users, especially women. On the difference between in person and distanced interaction, he suggests, "All writing that is remote...is more like ghost-to-ghost communication than person-to-person interaction." On our heightened state of distraction he quotes Matthew Crawford, "Distractability might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity."
I created a "what if Brazil 1982 team" in my blog. My blog was uploaded in 2014, but i updated it regularly with new information. I found this book about the 1982 team today and hoped to get a perspective for my blog. I finished it in 2 or 3 hours, but I skipped a large section of the book. It spent half of the books summarising Brazil at the World Cup Finals of 1970, 1974 and 1978. They were informations I can get from wikipedia. Then, he spent a single chapter on each of the matches played by Brazil in 1982. I could easily watch Youtube highlights. My blog. It was completely different from his book. https://soccerfootballwhatever.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-brazil-1982.html
‘Perusing’ my phone this morning at 4am Being older I usually look at Facebook, to see what’s happening to my extended family around the globe. Then still of Facebook I check on my regiment, old boys like me who still have ties. but get fewer every year. Your book is right though, I’ve been reading a lot more, getting ideas from in here and on line. Mrs Scouse gifted me a Kindle last year, the last thing I read at almost every night. Mostly history, (old farts read history) or light historical faction. I came across a quote this morning on my phone that stirred the wheels of long ago memories. “What did I want? I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur--I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be--instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road
On Being a Christian, a much-maligned work of post-Vatican II theology that is widely misrepresented by its detractors among conservative and hyper-orthodox Catholics. To be sure, Hans Kung's book hasn't aged extremely well, but it only occasionally sounds as if it's written by a hippy priest giving a piece sign while wearing a rosary for a necklace over his tie-died dashiki.
Hadn't read her in decades; this week I've been reading one or two stories with my coffee first thing in the morning. Had almost forgot how much I loved her writing. My copy is a 1981 reprint which I acquired in college from a friend's used bookstore (which is still around) for a then-princely sum of $7.00. It's moved around with me several times, nice to finally crack the covers and read it again after all these years.
Fools Crow by the late James Welch. The author was of Blackfeet Amerindian descent. He details the 19th Century life of the Blackfeet on the plains, in this work of fiction. The infamous Marias Massacre is involved. Looks like a pretty good read.
When the book first came out, I did not bother with it. I thought it was just another book about a "Dragon Lady" from the "East". Being an Asian, I always found the topic both offensive and comical at the same time. i was not interested in the book until i watched the movie. As you might know, it was not about the Far East. I can't remember it was the Hollywood remake or the original Swedish movie. Anyway, I completely forgot about the story. I tried to rewatch the Hollywood version literally after I finished the book. I could not finish the movie.
The "new" Invicible gets into some stuff he can't handle, Rex and Monster Girl find out she fathered a child with the Flaxans, Mark nearly dies because that's what he does from time to time, and the balance of power seems to be shifting away from where it's been for a few volumes now. Pastor Mase, a black man who is basically my age and from the same area, is now a pastor in Philly. He wrote this in 2018 to challenge the mostly white portions of conservative Christianity to realize that being woke, leading the charge for BLM, and a host of other things are a closer fit to the historic faith than much of what churches do in the US. A very well balanced and interesting read that only took a few days to get through.
Bad timing on my part. I knew I should have tried to get The Unicorns Are Shitting Rainbows: Peace Breaks Out, but instead I picked up this on the "recently returned" stack at the public library Sarajevo: A War Journal a series of dispatches focusing on ordinary people trying to get on with their ordinary lives in the midst of chaos and violence, starting (chronologically) with the confirmed execution of a colleague at the newspaper wherein he published these reports in 1992, and ending with the "Liberation" in August of 1993. The author, Zlatko Dizdarevic has a memorable eye for detail and a restrained prose style that amplifies the fear and horror that were the daily fare of Sarajevans for those months.
Mark dies, but not really. Lots of people are mad about a lot of things, leading to the death of one villain, the return of another, and a new ruler for Viltrumites. Oh, and Eve is pregnant. Ridiculously good series where the twists and turns all make sense. Only 7 more to go, should be done in May.
Preventable by Andy Slavitt. About the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US during the Trump Administration. Looks to be a good read.
Today I learned there are a whopping 125 Osher Institutes dedicated to lifelong learning/continuing education at colleges and universities across the land. I was peaking at Boise State University's Osher when I found that out - thought it was just a BSU thing. Anyway, as I mentioned a while back, I've been preparing to speak about William Edgar Borah, and for that purpose, have been reading this: LeRoy Ashby was one of my professors, and he's who I would have speak about Borah instead of me (in fact, I did five years ago, having him come out of retirement to speak at the 2017 Borah Symposium). But I had not read the book The Spearless Leader and thought it was a play on word for his work in the outlawry of war movement. In fact, it was a derisive nickname given by other progressives for his knack of leading out on an issue and then getting distracted by another issue before seeing the first one through.
Light reading: A Very Punchable Face, by Colin Jost I actually got this book for a buddy of mine who recently found himself spending many hours in a doctor's office. He loved it and gave it back to me when he was done, telling me to read it (I'd read an excerpt having to do with an incident on a golf course in the bookstore and thought he'd like it, which is why I bought it). I don't watch SNL much and so didn't know what to expect from this series of essays/vignettes but it's tremendously enjoyable. He manages to be really funny without being mean (well, he's merciless with himself, but generous to everyone else except Russell Crowe). While he never avoids a good one-liner if it presents itself, most of the humor comes from a story well told.
Make Russia Great Again by Christopher Buckley. A satirical work about the Trump Administration. The protagonist, Herb Nutterman, becomes Trump's Chief of Staff. Hilarity ensues.