Eddie's Monthly

I did my best but I'm still late. Oh well. We are back with a lot of content this month, and I also spent some time in my home country at the end of it, so there will be a bit of stuff that I got in France. I have returned to my french roots and introduced a new medium here, the Bande Dessinée or BD. I talked a bit about those in my March 2025 Readings. To give you a quick rundown, the BD is a french comic. It's not american comics written/translated in/into french — there are vast cultural differences between them. We have very broad ranges of topics in France, and those can be quite different from one another, the BD caters to various types of reader of all ages. There isn't any stigma about reading comics, and like most adults have books in Canada, most french people's bookshelf will have a couple BDs as well. My grandpa has them, my mom, cousins, friends, friend's parents... most people that read have a couple. They hold an important spot in french culture. In any case, they rock, but had not graced the shelves of my bookshelf in Canada, and it is about time I remediate that. Before we get into them, let's look at the books and then manga from this month:

A Dance with Dragons – Georges RR Martin

Georges is still cooking with this one, but it is more obvious than ever that the previous book and this one were supposed to be one book. It was weird to see the one off chapters of Jaime and Cercei, and the Dorne plot in the middle of the book. It was cool to see the same events happening from a different POV though (Sam/Jon) and having access to both internal monologues; one in the previous book and the other in this one, it made it really feel like Dune. The Mereen plot kinda drags, and same with Tyrion, it goes pretty slowly. Considering this is the last book in the series so far (and probably ever) it kinda blows that we are nowhere along in the story. I really thought that more would have been written, but alas. Time to read Fire and Blood, another series that will never be finished :)

Cold as Hell – Kelly Armstrong

I told myself I would not read anymore of Haven's Rock novel, after how ass the previous one was, but I lied. I placed a hold on it a while ago on libby and it just became available; I had to see how much of a train wreck this would be. It was fine. There are some major flaws with it, but it was pretty inoffensive.

The beginning of the book is unbearable as always, with a crap ton of repetition, overexplaining and completely unnatural dialogs where people analyse themselves mid sentence and share their analysis out loud. Once it gets going though, it's alright, and we go back to the usual Rockton/Haven's Rock investigation shenanigan. We are introduced to more people here, and not knowing who they are adds a bit to the story. Casey finally does some good detective work without skipping over gigantic clues or extremely obvious deductions. But then, to setup the finale, everyone has to become dumb again. Spoilers ahead. Dalton, who was described many, many times as being overtly overprotective, decides to fly back to Haven's Rock with his 8-months-has-had-contractions-and-misscarriages-scares-and-is-predisposed-to-complications-pregnant wife from a city with a Hospital. And must I add that it was with a storm looming, in the middle of Yukon winter, right after they have discovered that a serial killer resides in Haven's Rock, a very remote town that doesn't have proper equipment and personnel to deal with a complicated birth? And of course, when they get to town and go on a manhunt to catch that serial-killer, in the middle of winter again, in the Yukon wilderness, guess who accompanies them, even if she has started getting other contractions... and then guess what, they split up. and then, guess what they decide to abandon the extremely pregnant lady without weapons with a rando also without weapon 5min away from the town, and then guess what, the serial killer shows up. And finally guess what, while in labour, the described “very small woman” overpowers the described “very strong” non-boypreggers man who has a gun, defeats him and gives birth in the wilderness. Absolutely insane amount of contrivance, and the worst is that, knowing the author, I already guessed some stuff like that was gonna happen right when we learnt that Casey was 8-months pregnant in the book. The rest of the book was pretty good, but my god, the ending was terrible. If the dialogues were worked on a bit more and if the story could refrain from going all out on the spectacle at the expanse of logic it could really elevate the books with very little efforts.

The Remains of the Days – Kazuo Ishiguro

That was a banger of a book. The prose was great and went hand in hand with the story, both really complemented each other. After you realise that a lot of the harmful opinions the main character has is due to his misplaced sense of loyalty and trust to bad men, you kinda feel pity for him. He really is a victim of the system, and it's his indoctrination by his masters and the general english high-society that leads him to shed every ounce of humanity, for the profit of those masters. It was really interesting reading about his almost change in point of view caused by his travel, and was devastating that, even if he came so close to waking up, he in the end just slips back to his comfortable and complacent servitude. I find it especially heart-breaking that he completely missed the meaning of the stranger at the end in a way, and instead of appreciating the work he's done, without dwelling on the past, and kicking back, he instead takes it as stop reflecting on his past mistakes and start looking forward to the work we'll accomplish in the future. Even if to the reader it is incredibly obvious from his writing that he has completely wasted his life by living sticking to his arbitrary principles, until the very end when he reflects about his meeting with Miss Kenton, he's almost completely oblivious to it. It is kinda crazy to think about people living their whole lives for other people, and it really sucked for Steven that he lived more than half of his life for a nazi sympathiser, who almost got England on bord with nazism. In miscellaneous notes, I found that the author really managed to create the most insufferable “english patriot” (derogatory), especially during his description of the english landscapeand objective beauty, and my french blood was boiling when he was speaking about the best races that make butlers, where he insults the celts, my people! I found it extremely funny his whole reflection about the butler profession and his little butler leaderboard, where he fangirls over some butlers. The butler gatekeeping (apart from the racist part) was also hilarious. I also loved how he, the stuck-up, broom-in-the-ass british man, was was completely incapable of bantering or having a shred of humour. The story about the tiger rocked though.

To answer Spenny's question, the GOAT was of course Miss Kenton. (Although Harry is a close second)

Grappler BAKI – Keisuke Itagaki

Childhood Saga – Chapters 143-180

The shenanigans continue and we get some more fighting. This does a great job at setting up the beef that Baki has with his father, and despite the extremely unserious nature of the manga, we get some very emotional moments that don't fall flat, unlike a certain pirate manga that overuses people crying for no reason. The panel in question was actually goated if you have the whole context:

Maximum Tournament – Chapters 181 – 277

Holy hell the time transitions are extremely rough. The fan translations are also pretty old and the scans are not of the greatest quality. It's a bit too much fighting right after another without much breathing. There are also way too many people introduced at the same time. And speaking of introductions, the way the Itagaki writes about the black zulu fighter is actually insane, and not in a good way, if you catch my meaning. Holy hell.

Néandertal (L'intégrale) – Emmanuel Roudier

Le Cristal de Chasse, Le Breuvage de vie, Le Meneur de Meute (Tome 1, 2, 3)

Laghou is a cripple, and despite being the best craftsman of his tribe, he is not well seen by a majority of the men folk who only value hunting. After his father dies, a chain of event unfolds leading him to leave his tribe, searching for one other in particular. Will this half-portion survive his journey and find this tribe?

This was really good, and a nice way to get back into BDs. The drawings are awesome and the story, although really, really fast paced was great. It might have lacked a bit of depth, but in total it's a 165-ish pages series so you can only get so much depth. It's nice to get a story set during this time (caveman time) which is something we don't see often, and one of my favourite setting. I think the creatures of that time and place are cool as hell, and they look fantastique here. Everything is gorgeous overall, but my favourite are the landscapes, which we have the pleasure to see often with the many panels where people travel, and the way the artist did the eyes, which I though were always very expressive. It was a bit disconcerting that everybody in the BD was speaking with a rather elevated language — not that I was expecting they all speak in grunt because they're neanderthals — but I was expecting more everyday french rather than literary french.

L'Aigle sans Orteils – Christian LAX

A one-shot retelling of the first few Tours de France, a cycling race where cyclist literally ride all around France, a cool 4700km at that time. It was first held in 1903, and apart from a couple of years during the World Wars, it has been held every year since. This retelling is through the lens of a fictional character, loosing his toes (hence the title), trying his darnest to win the Tour.

This was absolute cinema, the story was extremely engaging, the drawing gorgeous, and that's with me not ever giving a shit about le Tour de France. I loved the story of Amédée Fario, his tenaciousness despite his great handicap. I also like the friendship between him and Camille Peyroulet. The whole things was gorgeous, and I also really loved the colours, the palette used was very expressive but also restrained and consistent. The lines were kinda “brouillon” but it worked really well, breaking down people into simpler figures, while keeping a ton of detail. Going back to the story, the ending is very sobering. After failing to finish his last Tour in 1914, almost winning, the main character is eager for more, and eager to finally beat all his competitors, Petit Breton, le Géant... This will not come to be, as he dies, with all the athletes of le Tour de France, during WW1, where 25% of all french men aged 18-30 died, with much more coming back physically or mentally injured.

Le Tour des Géants – Nicholas Debon

A historical retelling of the 1910 Tour de France.

Alrightly, more Tour de France. There wasn't an overarching emotional story here to keep one engaged, so I had a bit more trouble getting invested in this one. The storyline they chose for the race was pretty bare bone and repetitive as well. It was still interesting to learn about all the shortcomings of the bicycle of the time — wooden tire frames that would just break, the fragility of tires that would just explode incessantly, having to remove the back wheel to change gears, if you had access to gears to start with... The pastel drawings were really good though, and I really loved the colour pallet. The choice of pastel really gave it a welcomed artsy vibe which was reinforced with the decision to have mostly panels with narration at the bottom and no speech bubbles, and having the speech bubbles take either the whole top or bottom half of a panel. The 'framing' was also very dynamic, with a lot of different uhh.. camera angles and interesting shots (I don't know how to talk about drawings).

Astérix et Obélix – Jean-Yves Ferri, Fabcaro, Didier Conrad

Le Griffon & L'Iris Blanc (Tome 39 & 40)

Astérix and Obélix has been a staple of the franco-belge BD since the 1960's and is extremely popular in France, and even abroad with it being the second most sold “comics” series after One Piece. I remember it very fondly having, as any self-respecting french person, read them. The original duo is not at the helm anymore however, with the writer René Goscinny dying in 1977 and Albert Uderzo leaving in 2009 (and dying in 2020). The latest volumes since, starting in 2013 with Jean-Yves Ferri then Fabcaro starting in 2023 writing and Didier Conrad drawing, have not been the best according to most members of my family. My mom lend me those last two from 2021 and 2023, and I found them just a touch above alright. I have read most of the previous ones as my grandpa religiously collects them, and there were more “important” themes broached in those, in the midst of the usual fun ambiance. There was also some extremely french specific humour, with untranslatable puns and references to obscure french culture or little facts of (french) life — but it was funny. With those, there is not much besides the story, which is pretty straight forward and while not bad, it's a bit less content than we're used to. Especially since they are so short, at a bit less than 50 pages. The second one was better in this first regard, and was definitely almost on par with the average originals, but again way too short and devoided of heavier stuff. The drawing is however, as good as ever, and Didier Conrad has a great command of motion, while keeping things very simple and true to the original.

That's all for this month, and was quite a lot. I should read less because writing those reports is taking too much time. Expect more BDs next month.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

We are back in business ladies, gents and others. I have been gifted a lovely e-reader by my lovelier wife Tetyana, and have begun sailing the seas of ink in Jack Sparrow's fashion (I pirate books). I have also finally joined the Toronto Public Library, and am also acquiring books that way. Obviously, I check Libby for books before obtaining them officially and legally from eastern european sources, to support the TPL. In any case, it is easier than ever for me to read, and I do, as you can see below:

A Storm of Swords – Georges RR Martin

Not much to say here, it's good. It starts out very slow though, and the pace kinda grinded to a halt, but we pick back up a couple hundred pages later. Ngl, I'm reading all the books one after another without stopping, so the events blur in my memory and I can't remember what happens in what book, and therefore cannot really write a proper review of something I've finished at the beginning of the month.

Kill All Normies – Angela Nagles

I had an epub of this lying around (no doubt coming from Spencer), and also have heard it referenced a couple of times from the bookclub peeps, so I thought I would read it. It is also very short, so that helps. I have never been chronically online, and even less now as I have forgone all social media and news apps. I was a bit more online during the period this book about, which is set around the early and mid 2010's during the radicalisation of the online spaces, and the rise of the alt-right. The book was alright. It's surface level and very descriptive in its approach rather than analytical, which is what I was originally expecting. This felt more like the script of a very long video essay/summary than a well-thought-out book. I found that at some points she was giving a bit too much benefit of the doubt/credit to the deranged individuals composing 4-chan and the early new right. The description of what was going on the left side of the aisle is also pretty biased. I have no doubt that Angela Nagles sees herself as the enlightened centrist during those time, not being part of the alt-right; doxing, threatening, harassing, being racist, homophobic and other -ist and -phobic words, while also not being part of the “crazy” left, whose crimes are equal if not worse: “inventing” genders, “faking” oppression and cancelling people online for not being politically correct.

With this book, you at least get the broad strokes of what went down during this time, if through a coloured lens.

A Feast for Crows – Georges RR Martin

This book was goated. Probably my favourite so far. I really liked the Cersei chapters. It is so well written and doesn't hold you by the hand, or think for you. Cersei tells it how she thinks it is, and you are to figure out how much of an unreliable narrator she is. The whole Dornish subplot, if a bit slow to get going, was interesting. The world building is as usual top-tier. I also loved the later Jaime chapters, where he forsakes Cersei and starts his “healing journey”.

This book is missing a lot of perspectives however, and its ending is quite abrupt. Not that there is a cliffhanger, but it just ends at an awkward spot. Brienne's POV does end on a massive cliffhanger though, and considering that the next book, and last since 2011, is supposed to be part 2 of a Feast for Crows with the missing POVs, it might remain a cliffhanger until Georges releases Winds of Winter — which is never.

No Baki this month, I've been quite busy and reading books is easier than mangas. It will be back as soon as I finish ASOIAF, which is pretty soon.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

Only one book and a bit of manga, but your honour, you must understand, I was travelling and as soon as I came back, I had to move — I could not possibly have read any more. And this only book was pretty big, here see for yourself:

A Clash of Kings – Georges RR Martin

Everything is still good and the plot continues in a satisfying manner. One big strength of the series is that the characters are evolving very naturally, and there is no decision they make that seems out of line. This is basically a ratfic if you will. Another great thing to see is that while the first book was very regular fantasy, with a tone akin to the first book of the Stormlight Archives, where despite the setback you still had hopes (the nightwatch not being what Jon thought it would be —> him climbing the ranks and making friends, or Robb being inexperienced at war and fighting against a much bigger force —> still managing to be all victorious in the early stages of the war). Here things take a dark turn and hope is getting scarce. You can definitely feel that things can only get darker from here.

Grappler BAKI – Keisuke Itagaki

Childhood Saga – Chapters 78-143

The tomfoolery continues and I still love it. Where the manga could easily have been slop power fantasy, here our boy Baki gets fucked up, loses, trains and comes back stronger. And after that he still faces against opponents that are stronger than him and gets his ass handed to him. For such a demented manga, the author sure does know how to make the protagonist's progression still interesting.

That's all folks, I was and still am busy as hell.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

I am redeeming myself from the little I have read last month, and for the first time, we are starting with a compilation of poetry and prose:

If I Must Die – Refaat Alareer

For once, I'll talk about the author before moving on to the book. Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian professor who taught literature and creative in University in Gaza. He was critical of the israelian genocide of the Palestinian people (shocker), and wrote about it, leading to his murdered on December 6th 2023 by Israel, who targeted his residential building with an airstrike killing other civilians with him, including his sister, brother and nephews.

It is pretty clear-cut that Israel is committing genocide over there with the full support of the US and the complicity (even if sometimes by way of inaction) of many other western nations. There is nothing I can say that hasn't already been said a thousand times better, so this is as much as I'll comment. If you are looking to do your own research (which you should) please beware of the pervasive zionist propaganda in our western medias. The lies and gaslighting are prevalent, and so are attempts at manufacturing consent.

The book is a collection of writings about Pr. Alareer's life in Gaza and his thought on the israelian genocide, interspaced by poems. I will admit that I do not have the greatest sensibility for poetry, and it may have been lost on me, but the writings were really something. He was already saying how the situation is crazy and inhumane in 2014, and 2021, but his more recent writing say that what's been happening since 2023 is way worse than what they've experienced those years. He shows through his writing how untenable the situation is for him and his family. But the real situation for the average Gazan is much worse than what he puts on paper, as he says himself that he is in a very privileged position, with money, access to the internet and not being an anonymous Palestinian face.

He is very candid about his thoughts and what he thinks are his shortcomings about protecting his family and raising his children in this environment, it was very moving.

Babel – R.F. Kuang

I had previously read Yellowface, another book by R.F. Kuang and really didn't care for it. It was entertaining, but I found the characters to not be consistent or even make sense and the story not be and to make as well. I brushed it off as it being a side project of a different calibre, when the author's claim to fame is her fantasy book, like Babel. I was very charitable. But not anymore.

I was thoroughly disappointed with Babel. While I gave Yellowface the benefit of the doubt, this will not get a pass. There is so much wrong with this book, I don't understand all the praise it gets. The world building is atrocious, and I wouldn't dare even calling it worldbuilding — there's nothing. The setting is regular 19th century earth with magic runes in it, basically. Those runes can almost do anything, as long as you can find the right words for it. With this monumental change in the way the world works, you would think world events would have unfolded differently, but no. The world is the exact same, it's lazy and boring. At first, I thought in the book that the runes had been recently discovered, justifying the fact that everything just evolved the same way until the 19th century. But it is revealed later in the books that the Romans discovered the runes and how to use them; and the world didn't substantially change for all 2000+ years with this discovery!? Then, let's talk about the magic system. The silver rune thing is a seemingly interesting concept, but it is so underutilised and inconsistent. Even if its functioning and the functioning of specific runes is also explained ad nauseam. The writing as a whole is very repetitive and the 'themes' are really ham-fisted. The fact that they are also very, very surface level, while being discussed non-stop, was also annoying. It is also not saying anything very interesting about them. What really did me in is at the end when the leader of the union is like: “you realise it's about class, right” and our main protagonist is like “yes I do now” which makes no sense as this whole time they had only been focused on race and colonialism and after this little dialogue, the book picks back up with the main character solely focusing on race and colonialism. Speaking of our main character, he is such a serpillère, always being pushed toward something and having zero agency. He is so passive and the whole time he doesn't really move things forwards, he's just barely reacting to things just happening. The rest of the cast is somehow worse, and are just one-dimensional caricatures. Nothing is meaningful about them, they have zero personality, and we are told about how they are such interesting and diverse characters, but we are never shown anything. The “family” that was built at Oxford doesn't feel genuine and organic. And how can I forget about the footnotes — they are utterly useless. They do not make sense in the context of the story as this is not a text found and annotated by a historian or someone after the fact, or a journal, and they are literally just full of stuff that should have been cut out. I feel like during the editing process, whenever a section of the book was asked to be removed, it was instead turned into a footnote. They are not consistent in their tone and what they are saying; at one point it's to clarify a reference to a real world historical event, sometimes it's about a historical event in the fictional world and then sometimes it's about some truly meaningless piece of detail about one of the characters. The only redeeming quality of the book is that it is consumable; it's a very easy read. But not an interesting one and barely an entertaining one.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

An apocalyptic event happened, most life on earth is extinct, including plants. We follow a father and his kid trying to survive the aftermath.

I had seen this book recommended by a couple of people in the bookclub group chat, which ironically enough is rarely talking about books, and saw that it was available at the library. The prose was initially very distracting and off-putting, but once it clicked that it was part of the experience™ I was able to enjoy my reading. It's kinda like in L'Étranger (The Stranger) — I don't know how well it was translated in english — but in french the prose is very particular and peculiar on purpose. The Road is definitely not for everyone but I really liked it. I found refreshing that this was a truly a tragedy of everyday life — there might be smalls ups but it doesn't distract (and even further reinforces) the hardships and struggles of day to day living. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no hope, life is just objectively unbearable. Good little book.

Brave New World Revisited – Aldous Huxley

Guess who's back... After my presentation at theory night, I had acquired the last bit of motivation needed to finally finish the article about this book. However, I got some pertinent questions from the gang and I had to revamp the article a bit to address those. The article will have come out before this (it's here!), so I can now promise it is the last time I count this as a reading. (I do not wish to read this book a seventh time, believe me)

A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin

You all know what this is, so there is no need for a synopsis. I had seen the show when it came out with my parents (horrible parenting, I know, I was only 12 years old). We all know how it turned out, but I had heard the books were goated. The world building is good, the dialogues are good as well, and the characters are great. They have their own personality and motivation and act accordingly. Every POV of the book is interesting, and it is also great to see the conflict from different angles and how each influence the other POVs. The only little issue I have is with the writing sometimes — when a character is witty, it feels a bit too forced how other characters are gobsmacked or lose their tongue. Another thing is the antiquated “man writes woman” that appear mostly in the Daenerys chapters. The books have been written in the late 90's, so I'm sure the sensibilities were different, and I'm just thankful it wasn't much, much worse, which it could easily have been.

Grappler BAKI – Keisuke Itagaki

Underground Arena Saga – Chapters 1-77

What the- If any of you are familiar with BAKI, I don't need to explain to you how insane it is. For the blessed others, BAKI is a fighting manga where people just duke it out using ancestral or extremely rare techniques that are always “backed up” by scientific reasoning (which never makes a lick of sense). For instance, one character's defence is impenetrable because he learned to move his eye independently like a chameleon. Or some techniques are just stupid as hell, and they are never consistent in universe. Like one character is doing the “unstoppable force” advance that cannot be stopped by anything in the world, but then the opponent one is using the “immovable object” stance which cannot be moved under any circumstance. It is absolutely beyond idiotic, and I love it. The only issue I would have is the beginning of this manga, the flow of movement is kinda hard to read, and it is not helped that fighters are doing things that almost defy physics.

There is also no official translation for this, so you have to rely on fan one, and the most readily available one is from the wildfang project (actually just one guy) who not only doesn't speak japanese and only “translated” by using context clues in the drawings, but after a while he starts to change the plot just because he doesn't like this or that thing. Dodging this translation was a nightmare, but I thankfully could try to find a version in either french or italian (turns out it was a mexican flag and not an italian one) for the chapters that we only available through that horrendous wildfang translation.

I'm thinking we're back. Some good reads overall, and some not so good, but I have read. I'd like to get back to some reading in a language other than english very soon, as — it might sound weird to say — I'm growing bored of it. I'll try to sneak in a bit of french or maybe a cheeky ukrainian book in there. There will probably be a couple less books next month as I am away to Japan, and also have to prepare my feminist theory presentation.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

One single book this month, but I made up for it by reading a ton of manga and — for the first time since I have been documenting my readings on the printhouse — comic! Let's start with our only book this month:

Blood – Dr. Jen Gunter

Many of you will be familiar with this book as Elisa presented it during the bookclub in Newmarket, and also wrote about it in her Reading Roundup: Grad School Flashbacks (it ended up being a 5/5). This book is a deep dive into menstruation, and everything surrounding it, like contraception and menstrual products. Needless to say this is not one of my usual readings. Not gonna lie, at first I grabbed this book from the library because ha ha reading a book solely about menstruation, feminist literature meme and so on, but in the end this was a really interesting read, I unironically think everyone should read it and I ended up buying a copy.

Menstruation, contraception, the female body and studies about it are well researched, funded and a crucial part of our school education in another universe. In ours, that's not true. Even in my school in France, which wasn't subject to the weird north-american puritan culture, we had only a very brief unit in biology learning about menstruation and contraception, but the gist of it was focused on conception. I would imagine that in regular canadian public schools the subject — if broached at all — is largely glossed over. This leads to people being woefully under-informed about the bodies of 50% of the world population. There is absolutely nobody that doesn't know anyone affected by menstruations. Even as a män, it is important to be informed about menstruation, contraception and all that gööd stuff. For instance, when I'm a father and my daughter start menstruating and has some concerns or questions about it, it would be insane for me to act disgusted by it and shoo her away to her mom because I'm uninformed. Again from a (cis) man pov, even if you're not looking to have kids, it's obviously important to know about contraception, but also menstruation and the specific hardships that can come with it. It's simply to be better able to support the menstruating people around you. And lastly, obviously, if you menstruate, it is important to knowledgeable about it to be able to make informed decisions about your own body.

One great way to learn about the menstrual process, and everything surrounding it, is with this book. It covers a wide breadth of subject, from the biology of menstruation, to hormones, causes of bleeding, abnormal symptoms with menstruation, common anomalies affecting menstruation, to menopause, to contraception, to abortion... There is truly a lot here, it is a treasure trove of info. It's also why it took me so long to read it, almost a whole month, because it is very dense with info. I really liked that at the end of the chapters there was always a tldr. I obviously learned a lot, but the most shocking would be all the misinformation surrounding menstruations and contraception, but not the common braindead ones from conservative (like how the pill or plan B is actually abortion or other things to control women's body) but the more insidious ones that are aimed at making people feel insecure about contraception or seeking healthcare related to menstruation by basically using pseudo-science or twisting existing research. I had even come across of some of those lies (which I didn't know were untrue) while casually scrolling tiktok, so I can't imagine people who the algorithms actively targets with menstrual “hacks”. Most are fearmongering disguising as feminist empowerment, and it is disgusting. The author does a great job dismantling those by pointing out either their logical error or biological impossibility. Be careful out there ladies, germs and others.

Anyways, this book is a great resource that anyone should have on hand or take a look at if they ever wondered about menstruation, contraception and much more.

As a little bonus, I decided to check out the 1 star reviews on Goodreads, because it could only be good. What a treat! Reading people whining about Dr. Gunter's “leftist agenda”, how her views about abortions are wrong, how she's bashing the patriarchy too much (and she doesn't even give a definition for it) was so amusing. The best was probably all the people dunking on Dr. Jen for talking about evidence-based medicine and disparaging non-evidence based medicine. It was so funny to read from the people who believe in alternative medicine myths and cry that the author debunking those is “dangerous” and that she's in the pocket of big pharma, and recommending real books from 'real' experts (for some reason they all turn out to be naturopaths, weird).

Also the “Acknowledgements” section at the end start with “First, I want to acknowledge me.” — absolute queen behaviours.

HxH – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chimera Ant Arc/Chapters 259-318

I should never have doubted Togashi, I see his vision now — peak. Fights were goated, drawings were cool. The nuclear bomb ending is kinda underwhelming as a resolution to the fight (plot-wise), but it was still cool as fuck. Gon's transformation was also something I was not expecting at all. Overall very satisfying tie-up to the arc.

13th Hunter Chairman Election Arc/Chapters 319-339

Interesting little arc, a nice change of pace from the gigantic ones we've had recently. It's some good lore, and it was nice to follow Killua for a bit. The fight between Chrollo and the clown was a bit hard to follow at points, but I'm interested to see where it goes. Good and straight forward, I'm sure the next arc is going to be as simple and easy to enjoy

Succession Arc/Chapters 340 – 410

What the fuck is my man cooking?

This arc is quite the departure from what we are used to in HxH. There are a TON of characters, I am not joking when I say that there are at least 45-50 characters to keep track of, and the new ones are also introduced in batches of 5 or 10 at a time. Both Gon and Killua are absent from the cast. All the characters are extremely talkative, there's often panels that are only text. The plot lines are (to my small brain) very convoluted, and their unfolding complex. Whenever I thought I had a grasp on what was talked about, Togashi decided to shift POV and start another entire plot line. Not gonna lie, most of the time I had no idea what was going on. As far as content go, it was is so funny to see that Nen (which I previously equated to Hamon from JoJo's) has now , with Nen beast, been more closely related to stands (also from JoJo's). Although being from two different mangas, the supernatural powers have followed a similar evolution. This must be the carcinization of manga powers. My main issue with this arc is that Togashi feels the need to explain everything right away. There's constant verbose explanation, and all of it is tell not show. For instance, wouldn't it have been more interesting to have the power of the Heil-ly boss secret until the card game with the soldier? When the troupe and the mafia are investigating them and trying to figure out why the Heil-Ly members are just killing random civilians, there would be more incentive to follow their investigation closely. This also ties in with my second complaint; it's that people just figure stuff out based on almost no evidence or wild shots in the dark or hunches that always turn out to be right. I think this would be more egregious and apparent if we didn't always know the answer to mysteries before our protagonist do. The setup of the arc (which spans a good chunk of what has been released yet, since there was so much to introduce) was a bit hard to get through. We finally get some good shit halfway through, despite my criticism, and the last few chapters really regained my interest. In the end, whether this entire arc was madness or pure genius entirely hinges on what Togashi is cooking.

Regardless, I am excited to get to the dark continent.

Invincible – Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley

Issues 0 – 144 (all of it)

Like a lot people, I was introduced to Invincible with the TV show. I really enjoyed that the story is kinda of always going at 100km/h — there is no time to rest, something new is always pushing the story along. This is why after finishing season 3, I couldn't wait and read the three compendiums of Invincible, which include the entirety of the complete story. This was my very first time reading american comics, which are extremely unpopular in France. This is in part due to the Nazi occupation of France, which prohibited american material from reaching our coast, and the subsequent post-war protectionist laws. The franco-belgian comics (or Bande Dessinées) industry had become too prevalent after those laws were repealed for the american comics to really pierce the french market significantly. Couple that with the language and cultural differences between amerikkka and France (a major one being the target audience — there's really never been a stigma in France about reading BDs as an adult, and there are therefore many targeted towards them) and you get the general lack of interest for american comics in France.

Uh... what were we talking about? Ah yes we were talking about

I will keep it spoiler free because this is absolutely something you should read if you're even 10% interested.

This is just pure cinema. The story is great and truly original, and so many themes are brought about in interesting ways. A big one is definitely masculinity and just growing up as a man. Those are talked about in very compelling ways, even if I think so far the show edges out the comic in terms of maybe subtlety in handling those topics. As a whole the story is very refreshing, and gets sort of crazier and crazier as time goes on. I really liked that the author never goes back to a status quo, whatever happens, characters, their relationships and the world as a whole is always forever changed. The characters are mostly compelling here, and the writing is more than satisfactory. I think overall it is well-thought-out and planned. The conclusion to the story is also very satisfying and I will give big props to the creators for ending it instead of just continuing it for financial gains.

The drawing are really great, even for the first five-ish or so issues which people online seem to find particularly rough, but I really found them distinctive and thought they had a lot of SOVL. After those issues, it is undeniable that the rest of the drawings are gorgeous and even if I'm not that much of a visual guy, there are many scenes and characters that are etched into my brain. The character designs were GOATED and although there is a lot to like, for instance Dinosaurus, Thragg with his animal cape takes the cake and was hard as fuck. I also really loved the lettering of the 'sound effects', how they play with having other elements cut in front of it was really visually interesting. The dialogues bubbles were also very clear and the ratio of text to drawing was always balanced. The only time I got confused is when I got a bit stupid and read it the wrong way (I was still reading HxH at the same time so I mixed things up).

One other things, this comic really made me feel good. I would come out of my little reading session just serene. The story's good, the drawings great and the action is straight forward. It was also probably impactful to see the resilience of some characters, the redemption of others and the love forgiveness characters had for each other.

Although I think the TV show is very good, especially in its writing — which I think easily rivals the comic so far — it doesn't really hold up in the art department so even if you have only watched the show I think it would be worthwhile to read the comics. The order of certain events and such is also altered so it would still feel fresh.

That's all for this month. Before someone asks (again), yes, the next manga I'm reading is BAKI (only the three first parts). I'll probably try to get some more books under my belt next month, but no promise.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author

Despite a shorter and busier month I managed to read quite a bit. I'm currently very impulsive with my reads, and will just grab whatever catches my eye. It started with:

A che ora si mangia? – Alessandro Barbero

Did you know that in the 18th and 19th century, people of the fancy western world started to delay lunch to the evening? That it was deemed high-class to only have lunch at 6 or 7pm? And that at some point they only ate two meals a day, breakfast and late lunch? Well this book goes over this bizarre trend that took over western Europe, with examples from England, France, Italy, Germany and Russia during that time.

My sister gifted me this book a little while ago, and it's been on my book backlog (a booklog?) ever since. The book is in italian, but despite my rustiness with the language, reading it was actually not bad at all. The author is a proper joker though; there are many excerpts and citations from diaries or books from the time and the english and french ones are not translated at all. This italian book, printed in Italy and made for italians has whole paragraphs in english and french that are integral for understanding it. I believe my sister is the only person I know that can also read this book. Absolutely based author actively trying to reduce his reader base.

In any case, the content was really interesting, and I learned a lot. I was confused with the dates initially, until I remembered that italian don't really use century the same way as us, and will use “ottocento” (eight hundreds/century) to signify 1800-1899 instead of saying the nineteenth century. After that, I was in the clear to delve into the folly that took over the brits, french, italians, and to a lesser degree germans and russians. The practice of delaying lunch was mostly constrained to the bourgeoisie and people trying to emulate their lifestyle. Or should I say delaying dinner; you will not believe it, but dinner was the name of the meal that was eaten midday. It's only after the 19th century was the dinner associated with the evening meal. Lunch was created to fill the gap between breakfast and dinner in England. In France, breakfast was delayed until later in the day, and another meal for before breakfast had to be invented and only came into effect around the 1930s! It was funny to see how gradually over the course of a couple of decades, this evolution took place. This prompted for the disappearance of souper (the meal after dinner) which is a word that is nowadays very seldom used in either english or french. In the end, everything came back to normal, with three meals a day but different names. Truly another win for the “nothing ever happens” crowd. The book could only have been made better if the excerpts from the german and russian books/journals had also not been translated.

This was actually as super interesting read, so big shoutout to my sister for finding this book.

Crying in H mart – Michelle Zauner

Holy hell, there were 33 copies at the library, I've never seen any book with more than 5 copies total. This memoir was warmly recommended by a book reviewer colleague here on the printhouse, Kaitlyn z.c.. And believe it or not, this book also started out as a Reylo fanfiction!

This is a memoir detailing the author's relationship with her mother, more specifically her [SPOILER] death. This review will mostly be filled with spoilers, beware.

I think the book was good and it was very raw in its presentation. A lot of emotionally charged events were very descriptive and matter of fact. It was kinda disconcerting at some point, for instance when the author's mom asked her dad to hit the author, as her mom wasn't strong enough to do any damage anymore. This culminated in her mom telling the author that she aborted a potential little sister/brother because she was such a horrible child. This was incredibly fucked up and not even just bordering on abuse. The author does not dwell a lot on those events, like the fact that she very early on discovered that her dad was cheating on her mom, which was just mentioned in passing. The memoir is also disconcertingly honest, one example that struck me is that she admitted that in the later days of her mother's illness, she was just waiting for her passing and that it happening would be a relief. Obviously she would have preferred if her mom didn't die at all, but the way she retells the last few days of her mom's battle with cancer paint a pretty pitiful picture. The overall battle between her mom and cancer hit particularly hard because it was heart-breaking and the writing was so raw. It also hit me in the feels as when I was reading this, Sirius (my cat), was ill, refusing to eat and losing a ton of weight, and we were still waiting on the vet's results. He's getting better now though — turns out this idiot managed to become allergic to cat food. To come back the the memoir, the story is very touching if a bit messy with time jump that don't feel super fleshed out, but it is overall well written and engaging.

Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters – August Ragone

Do you guys know about Godzilla and Ultraman? Eiji Tsuburaya is the man behind the visual effects for these productions and the co-creator of these icons. In general, he was on the forefront of visual effects in Japan, which very well rivalled and even surpassed the then effects in western production. This man is easily the goat of early visual effects. His work is not only limited to monster movies, and he started his carrier doing period pieces and propaganda films for the japanese military (yikes). This book goes over his life and the films he worked on.

Love the subject, love the aesthetics, love godzilla, but god damn, was that book's reading experience terrible. The paper is nice and thick, but incredibly glossy, which makes the ink invisible if there is even a single photon in the room. The images cut the sentences in their middle and not at appropriate points either. Each chapter is preceded by a gorgeous monochrome double-page image, but there's also the beginning of the chapter there in the corner that also gets cut weirdly. Then the descriptions for the images are sideways, and are very annoying to read as turning this massive book is a whole operation. The books is absolutely gorgeous and stylish, but anything involving actual words is really frustrating to read. The pacing was really strange and the content just ok. There's just not a really coherent and compelling story being told here, it's just a collection of facts about his life and movies he worked on. I am not a fan of biographies at all, but this wasn't the issue here — this was just not a great one. It's mostly very lean in interesting details or funny anecdotes, with the octopus one being the exception. The images also don't really match the text, and sometime they are about something that we read 2 pages ago. I must emphasise that it's a visual treat, and while its big size is a minus on comfort, it's a big plus on design. I was just disappointed with the content. It's my bad though, why would I read a book when it contains images — I should just have looked at them.

_{love the cover that they chose though}

Grendel – John Gardner

All is well in the land of the Danes and they have many parties. They are very loud thought, and Grendel is not happy about that. He sets out to terrorise the Halls of Hrothgar for twelve years before our hero, Beowulf, arrives and slays him. Spoiler I know, but it was released about 1250 years ago, if you still haven't read it, it's your fault. This is the plot of Beowulf. In Grendel, the author spends time with Grendel, detailing his motivations and drives, which were only barely mentioned in passing in the original poem, and extrapolates from them.

This was a very good read. Derivative in the best of way and yet still original and very contemporary. Whereas the original poem is a bit thin in substance and more of a classic straight-forward epic tale, this has many layers and brings some very interesting themes. It is very well written, if a bit too “english academic” in my hateful french eyes; every action or description needs a comparison, every noun needs to be qualified by no less than two adjectives and every verb by at least one adverb (ideally two). I do not know moncrief very well — who recommended this book — but I can feel in my bones that chapter 5 (the talk with the dragon) is without a shadow of a doubt his favourite. There is not much else to say apart from: based comrade peasant.

Children of Ruin – Adrian Tchaikovsky

I cannot spoil this for anyone, so no synopsis. Sorry not sorry.

This is book 2 of the Children of X series. It would have been so easy to fuck it up but no, it's so good. I like it even more than the first one. I wholeheartedly disagree with people that say it's just a refresh of the first one — it's completely different. The story, themes and even the writing style is different. There is a horror section in this one! I think this was better paced and I was surprised when I reached page 500 because there had not been any dip in intensity and “things happening”. Even from a structure standpoint, the chapters were super well divided and it made the legibility much better. I could easily crank out one or two chapters on the GO train, without having to rush. The meshing of past and present timelines is also done well. It might still be a bit too fresh in my memory — and the honeymoon period hasn't faded — but I cannot find a single issue with this book. Maybe the ending was a bit rushed and a tad confusing, but it's very minor. Will definitely read the third (and for now final) volume in the coming months.

The Dragon and the Foreign Devil – Harry G. Gelber

This book was part of the white elephant book exchange. As per the contract that each and everyone of us have signed (and are bound to by blood) I will make a presentation about it. Wouldn't spoil the fun by telling you about it here.

HxH – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chimera Ant Arc/Chapters 186 – 259

I'm not gonna lie, I never really understood it when montcrief said that this manga was peak. I still stand by my opinion that the beginning is very rocky, and while it gets good after that, I still didn't really think it was worthy of being the top dog manga. With this new arc, I might be seeing the light. It really opens with a bang. The premise is goated, the designs are goated, the fights are goated, the characters are goated — it's just all around good original stuff. I'm far from done the arc but the story seems to kinda drop in intensity halfway through, when the king is waiting to execute his plan. I was very underwhelmed by the king's design as he looks like a generic DBZ villain. Also please don't tell me he's falling in love with a child. I am still excited to see where it's going — I shall report back next month.

Good continuation of the year, 6 books and 70-ish manga chapters, we're doing pretty good. At my current pace, I should finish HxH by the end of April. What manga will replace it: who knows?

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

New year same me; we're gonna be looking at a couple of books and some manga as well.

1984 – George Orwell

On our ride back from New York City, the boys and I listened to the 1984 audiobook. It is not good. I had read 1984 previously and really liked it. There is no issue with the book, and since everybody probably knows about it, I will here complain about the audiobook. This was an Audible exclusive, and a “big budget” audiobook, as much as you can make one. This means it was over-produced to the point of being distracting from the story. Almost all descriptions, whether it is of actions or of dialogues, are removed in favour of sound effects or acting. This makes it quite confusing, as you kinda have to guess what actually happens in the book from sound clues. The whole audiobook sounds like it wants to be a movie, but without visual (no, I do not picture anything while reading either) it is just a noisy mess. The addition of music to build suspense doesn't ameliorate the situation. Going back to the acting, the main character is played by Andrew Garfield. I am a certified Andrew Garfield hater. Nothing against the guy (lie), but he cannot voice-act to save his life. Please, I'm begging you, I need one sentence that is pronounced clearly. He physically cannot do that. He cannot utter a sentence that is not whispered, part of an exaggerated exhalation, without performative stammering or god forbid, all at the same time. The fact that the whole cast is acted by different people, and the descriptions bring removed, make it a bit hard to figure out who's speaking when it's tertiary characters. The voice acted sex scenes were also excruciatingly uncomfortable; some people of the printhouse would be able to enjoy them I'm sure, but not us four boys in a car, not even 1 feet apart — let alone 5.

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Also started listening to this book on the 9h-ish ride from New York City to Toronto, and unlike 1984, the audiobook was quite good. We didn't have a chance to go past Act 3, so I bought the book when I got home, as there were 29 holds on it at the library. This is how it goes:

The year is like 7000 and humans have conquered space. We have colonies on multiple planets and satellites of the solar system, we have also started terraforming. One of those terraforming project light years away is done and the next phase of the experiment is starting; trying to replicate evolution. Dr. Kern is sending down to this fresh planet some apes contaminated with a nanovirus supposed to accelerate their evolution — to a certain point. After this certain point is reached, humans will start colonising the planet, which will have been prepped for them by their new ape servants. Everything of course goes according to plan and nothing goes awry.

This was such a treat to read. The story is divided into three parts, and while some are more interesting than others initially, they soon converge and you get invested in all of them. I really liked how even if the story takes place over thousands of years and many generations you never get confused as the author has a great trick up his sleeve to keep things clear: he just reuses names and archetypes for generations. For instance, whether it's 200 years after the initial time of the book or 2000, across generations, the character named “Portia” is an adventurous soldier. This is some good-ass sci-fi, and really accessible too. No “he put the skalhad into the kjbfljba — held tightly against the gahdu with the use of some gahsywko from lkkoasl — so that the aljhbjhbsa condenser would allow him to go at JKH75N-pc/h, a speed never consocarded by any ahsdgaj of the himijahal — even those that had ahhsjdyw their hakd wieojf. The inhabitants of himijahal had ljbated the ljhbsjda after all, so there wasn't any chance the asdhuwj of the hadajkk would allow that”. Just some real sentences, with real words. Apart from the accessible writing, the premise is original and the story never gets predictable. The build-up is great and the pay-off is also well done; can't wait to read the second one (the two people before me on the library waiting list better hurry up before I track them down). The themes introduced and questions that the book raises are also compelling. It is neither a fantasy nor a war epic. There is a spaceship and science.

The Boy Who Cried Bear – Kelly Armstrong

For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Finding my Book Twin

I'm not sure if I'm getting extremely tired of the series, or if there is something wrong with the book, but I really disliked this one. It is my second least favourite one in the series. The “mystery” is really half-assed and hinges on too many people being oblivious or things just happening — my suspension of disbelief was completely broken many times. It was not engaging at all. To me, it seems that the author has lost all of her steam and is just going through the motions, as a lot of paragraphs felt like fillers and everything is extremely repetitive. The paragraphs where Casey is doing some deducting — which sum up to “the guy said that, but maybe he lied. But also maybe he didn't lie. But also he could have lied. But then he could have not lied. But there are also reason for him to lie...” over and over, were really frustrating to read. There was a ton of overexplaining for things that really did not need to be explained, us readers aren't *that* dense (I am but others aren't) The initial confusion of the wild man for a grizzly bear also makes no sense: people saw in broad daylight a figure wearing a bear fur rush past them on two feet and thought it was for sure a bear. But the figure was close enough for a kid to see the man's eyes and even see their colour. Then Dalton (who's an expert forest tracker), finds prints 'that matched a bear', but when it turns out the 'bear' was a human they're like: “actually those prints make sense if it was a big man”. Casey, Dalton and Anders not figuring out that Joe is the attacker, Joe, who says he was just attacked by the bear-skin man, who has a stab wound on the leg, who was the only one in the forest with them and next to Max — even after Max said that a guy without a bear skin, who was stabbed in the leg just attacked him 2min ago — is wild. I have no words. The dialog still felt really unnatural and the Anders and Yolanda board game interaction was also incredibly cringe.

Brave New World Revisited – Aldous Huxley

I swear, this is the last time I count this book in my readings, but I did read it again ok. The article for it has been resurrected, amended, edited, corrected, [insert word]ed, it's gonna be ready this month. Maybe I'll turn it into a presentation.

Selling Hitler – Robert Harris

In April 1983, a distinguished British historian, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Rover – First Baron Dacre of Glanton, gets an incredible call: Hitler's journals were found and the rights to them were to be sold at an auction. Although there were three reports — each from a different handwriting expert — as well as multiple historian assessments certifying that those were genuine, The Times would like him to investigate the diaries. He goes to Switzerland to see the journals in person, as well as the german journal selling them. All 58 volumes are there, with their provenance authenticated as well; the story investigated and verified. Trevor-Rover is not any old academic; in 1945, the British Security Services had asked him to find out what had happened to Hitler in his final hours; the myth that he was still alive — was living as a free man or had been captured, and anything in between — kept circulating. He successfully investigated Hitler's death, wrote The Last Days of Hitler, and afterwards became one of the foremost experts on Hitler and his entourage's writings — many times calling out fake ones. Well, after reading through a couple of volumes Hugh Redwald Trevor-Rover – First Baron Dacre of Glanton and former Regius Professor of History at Oxford is convinced that those are real. The news travels the world, and everyone wants a piece of the cake. Journals backstab each other, historians start feuding, it is chaos. An auction is quickly called in April of that year for the world rights to the books to be bought for 3.75 million dollars ($11.8M or CAD16.9M today). A truly incredible find, all this first-hand information, almost 40 years after the fact; a lot of events from the Second World War would have to be revised and recontextualised.

A couple of weeks after, the diaries were proven to be a grotesque forgery as the content made no sense, and the paper, glue and thread were all produced post-war. This book is about how this blatant swindle managed to go this far.

Readers might know that I usually dislike historical novels; I do not care for dates and places, and have a terrible memory of names and titles. I also don't know a ton about history, so events' significance often fly right over me. But this was so fun to read. While not as eccentric, I would say the book has strong William of Rubruck vibes. Someone is getting dunked on at all times, and you can feel the mischief in the air. The book spends about 300 pages building the stack of cards before it starts to fall down. And my god, is it entertaining. Just when you think that it's the end, something happens or someone says something and we're back. I loved how the forger never really did anything proactive, or actually never really did anything, and yet somehow everything just ended up working in the best possible way for him, even after he got caught. Apart from the fun part of the book, it was interesting to read about the reality of west germany after the war; journalists could just hit up some former big-shot SS general for an interview, and it was relatively easy to go to a party only to realise everyone there is a 'former' nazi. I had thought all those generals had been put behind bars, and that the 'former' nazis had at least the decency to deny they abhorrent beliefs in public.

HunterxHunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Greed Island: Chapters 143 – 186

B-b-biscuit, is that you?

The Greed Island Arc is over, and I didn't mind it at all. I don't think the highs are as high as the highs of the Yorknew arc, but it is overall more consistent and good. I also like how for once you see Gon and Killua actually training, and not the joke we saw in the tower of doom arc where they just had to try for 5 min and they got it. I also particularly liked the end of the arc and the dodgeball “fight”. The fight with the Bomber was also interesting. It does feel like the manga is taking a completely different route from the premise, and hunters or doing typical hunter things don't matter at all anymore. I don't dislike it at all, but it is a big disconcerting, especially with my criticism of the earlier chapters — I don't feel like my complaints have been addressed but rather retconned. I am really looking forward to the next arc as if I remember correctly it is H's favourite one and Tetyana told me it was very weird, and weird is good.

Nen does do everything though I'm afraid.

Good start to the year, a good historical book, some great Sci-fi — probably already a contender for my favourite book of the year —, finished reading all the available books of the Rockton/Haven's Rock saga, re-re-reread a book, and I got back into HxH. Selling Hitler was also actually a book from my backlog: my dad had lent it to me all the way back in 2021. I will now finally be able to give it back, only 4 years late. That is of course, unless someone from the café wants to borrow it (it is very funny).

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

Another late reading report, I'm starting to make it an habit. In my defence, I had no access to the internet for my laptop, so I couldn't have possibly released it sooner. The backlog is done, and I've released all the articles I wanted for the year. While I'm catching up on other things that had taken the backseat due to the backlog, it's also the holiday season, so I have more reading time overall. Unfortunately, I had to spend it reading the monstrosity below:

Manic Pixie e-girl – Nate Lemcke

I have so much to say about that book, but as it is part of the bookclub white elephant, I will refrain to speak until we get the presentation.

Drawing the Female Figure: A Guide for Manga, Hentai and Comic Book Artists – Hikaru Hayashi

Not that much to say about that book, as it's mostly pictures, and it's also part of the bookclub white elephant. So again, I will refrain to comment on it until we get the presentation. I can't wait to see Oncle's drawings.

La juste part (The fair share) – Patrick Turmel

Neat little book. The main thesis of the book is rebuking that the disparity of capital ownership is moral. It often uses a philosophical angle, and debunks some common arguments meant to oppose redistribution. It also shows that the redistribution is not only morally just, but also beneficial to a society as a whole.

I found the book interesting in its arguments, but thought it was a bit shy in its criticism of capitalism. It also chose to debunk/support arguments that were a bit too obvious and easy. Yeah, obviously redistribution would be beneficial to a society, rather than having a select few hoarding everything. Yeah, obviously having people who own everything is harmful to democracy. Don't get me wrong, the book is decent, but maybe my expectations were for it to go further than: it's bad to have a society where the overwhelming majority of people own nothing, and a couple of people own everything.

Wind and Truth – Brandon Sanderson

The GOAT is back with a new entry in the Stormlight Archives, and this is the last book of the first arc. I will not provide a synopsis here, because the other four books before this are all 1100+ pages, and it would actually make no sense to anyone that hasn't read those.

This is the longest book I have ever read, clocking at 1344 pages, and honestly it was almost great the whole way through. It slowed down a bit between pages 900-1000, but then we're back. I really liked the direction that my boy Brandon took a lot of the characters in story-wise, and I was hooked to most story lines. One issue that I had is that a lot of characters have had plot lines resolved in the previous books, so they only have one remaining internal conflict left here, and it really makes most of them a bit too one-dimensional and one-note. The themes are also very ham-fisted, which I didn't really like at all. The one things that really took me out of the book for a little bit was the whole mental illness language used in the book by the characters; the societies in the books have no concept of mental illness, and suddenly now everyone talks with IRL mental illness sensitivities, using therapy appropriate language. It's a bit jarring for some characters.

As usual, the book is divided in parts, and between those are sandwiched some interludes. For once, those were a pleasure to read (I had some trouble with them in the previous volumes). The story is great and the world build as usual first class. We finally get some answers on the big mystery of the universe, but at the same time still get more questions. It's just good, but my man Brandon really need more editors, this book could have been much better written, and easily 200, maybe 300, pages shorter. It's good, but could easily have been great with more effort from the author.

Murder at Haven's Rock – Kelley Armstrong

Back to the Rockton Series, after having last read it in September. For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Finding my Book Twin

We're back with Casey and Eric, in a new setting. Gotta be honest, I was kinda of a hater on this one. The formula is starting to show, and I don't like it. Casey and Dalton split up all the time, for Dalton to run into the forest cause his keen eye has caught something. He never catches anything (just like in the previous books), and by now they should have learned that something bad always happens when they split up. Another classic is Cassey (a god-damn great detective — or so I'm told by everyone in the book) never figures out who the bad guy/girl is until they are literally shooting at her or other people of the town at the end of the book. People behaving like robots, and unnatural dialogues are other classics that we can find here. Apart from that, the writing is still engaging, and fast-paced, not wasting our time. I do miss the town and its inhabitant, as they at least brought some interesting interludes between the investigations bouts. It's not bad by any means, it's entertaining as usual, but it's a bit too formulaic despite the change of setting. I hope for some more originality in the next book.

No manga this month, took a little break. But I still read a lot. A year of reading and I've got about 39 books and 667 manga chapters under my belt. Not too shabby. Apart from a couple of dishonourable mentions, especially the first book of this review, it has mostly been a blast. I feel like I am at a good reading equilibrium, between staying in my comfort zone, and being more adventurous with my readings. My backlog of books is as long as my arm, but I think I'll make a decent dent into it next year. I am in no rush. Happy New Year.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

I must apologise for the late (a whole week!) release of last month's reading. While they normally come out on the 5th of each month, I dropped quite the lengthy article earlier this month and needed a bit more time to finish this one. Without further ado, let's get into it:

Howling Dark – Christopher Ruocchio

You know what, I lied: I didn't actually finish this book in October, the last 80 pages plagued me all the way until mid-November. It was such a slog to read through. It's not bad, but it just really, really didn't click for me; I'd rather be reading the other Dune books (liem you know what to do, I'll even accept you moving to bluesky)

Mutual Aid – Dean Spades

That was a great little book. It introduces (in the sense “describes”) the concept of mutual aid and goes on to describe how a mutual aid group could work, and what the common issues with those groups are. It was a really interesting read, especially since it was so politically committed. While it doesn't go super far, some things that the book took as granted were just not the admitted reality of even many left leaning people. It was nice to just kinda be like: ok, that's the situation, where do we go from there.

Mutual aid is something that I found particularly interesting in “The Assassination of Fred Hampton[...]” which we read with the bookclub last month. Two great examples of mutual aid groups in this are the Black Panther breakfast program, which is also mentioned in “Mutual Aid”, and Jeff's law office (at some point in the office). People organically just coming together to make their neighbourhood or city a better place is something I found super cool. This is not to be confused with charities, or billionaire funded organisations. It's by the people, for the people, no strings attached.

Some aspects (and usual pitfalls) of mutual aid can also be applied in other situations, and in one chapter I was often drawing parallels between the organisation of the mutual aid group and that of my IT department.

Mutual aid is a cool concept, and its functioning is interesting to read here; don't hesitate to borrow my copy of the book.

Le droit de mentir (The right to lie) – Emmanuel Kant & Benjamin Constant

In 1785, Kant published Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals), in which — amongst other things — he touches on the illegitimacy of lying. In 1796 a quirked-up french swiss (then french) boy decides to critique Kant's position in his book Des réactions politiques (On political reactions). The next year, Kant replies in a text title Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (On a supposed right to tell lie). The biggest feud in philosophy ensues, which lasts until they duel each other, and also indirectly leads to the Franco-Prussian War (this is a complete lie).

This book only solidified my belief that the great writer of old are known for the idea within their work despite their shit writing. I am willing to give a pass to Kant, as german is pretty hard to translate so that's not on him — and my german is not good enough to actually read the original. But I'm sorry Benjamin, your writing is shit. A coma digression within a coma digression, within a coma digression...

Apart from that, the arguments are interesting and while I do not have a fully formed opinion on whether it is moral to lie or not, they did bring up some good points. One that I thousght made particularly good sense is that some people — by their actions or words — have broken the social contract and therefore do not have the right to the truth and are not entitled to the truth. Saying the truth to them is therefore no more a duty. This gets destroyed by Kant in his next essay, but the reasoning is still provocative.

Even if there is not apparent feud, it's still funny to see Kant trash talk Benjamin; Benjamin had not named Kant in his original reply, and only gave him the “a german philosopher” nickname — Kant goes hard on him for that.

Good little read.

Invisible Women – Caroline Criado-Perez

*trips, drops book which slide over to your feet, cover facing up* -Oops, I dropped my feminist literature, I'm so sorry about that _{(I'm 6'3” btw)} *bites lips*

For the synopsis, please refer to Elisa's Reading Roundup: Enjoying unemployment by binge-reading

This book is collection of anecdotes showcasing the lack of data we have about women specific issue, but also about the impact of universal issue on women. It is thankfully not a very dense, indigestible and rigorous text, and is overall well written. There are very clear divisions of topics in the chapters and parts, which make the book very easy to follow.

There are some very good points in there, and for the most parts, the anecdotes are well chosen to illustrate and issue, without getting too into the weeds. We have a nice selection of topics from the workplace, home life, healthcare... One really good point that was made, and that I hadn't really thought about, is that by taking the average human and making decisions based on that, the result will usually leave women at a disadvantage. For instance, safe exposure to certain chemicals mostly depends on weight and metabolism, and taking the genderless average of both will make the maximum threshold safe for men, but still unsafe for women. Of the things that I would never have thought about, it's how the economy and it's design are favouring men and reinforcing the gender gap issue, especially when it comes to tax credits and monetary benefits. There are many anecdotes that are about things that I would not have though could afffect women in particular, because they seem completely unrelated.

With the book being written, or at least published in 2019, COVID is obviously absent from the topics here, and I would really have been curious about what a chapter of this book dedicated to it would have been like. There was not only a big healthcare issue with the covid crisis, but also a restructuring of society especially in the workplace, with the recrudescence of gig-work and work from home which I think would have been interesting topics.

Another one of my unmet expectations, and were the book could fall a bit short, is in the analysis of the anecdotes, which is usually very surface level, if there is one.

One thing I found odd were the citations. With a book this filled to the brim with info, there are many citations. While I liked that the citations were separated in chapters, the format of most of them really leaves to be desired; it's just urls. This made reading up on the topics I wanted to go deeper in extremely annoying — who enjoys typing a long url in the search bar? It also strange that those almost all directed to news articles, rather than the source that those news articles use.

As I've discussed, most of the anecdotes are relevant, but some feel a bit out of place in the book. Two in particular jump at me. One of the early one was about who Todd Howard, after showcasing the character creation menu in Fallout 4 during E3 2016 and pointing out that you could play as either a man or woman, decided to play as a man. I'm not too sure what the point being made is here but I found hilarious that it was included. Then some anecdote just might not have enough substance to warrant being included: I was particularly interested in the part where it states that VR headsets are not well suited for women, because men and women use/prefer different mechanisms to process depth — parallax for men and shape-from-shading for women — and VR priorities parallax. However, there were no citations in this book. When doing research, I could only find 3 papers related to the subject, all from long before modern VR was developed. None of those papers gave a definitive answer on whether men and women did use or even prefer different depth perception mechanism, as any results were not significant enough (high p value, extremely low sample size, issues with experiment design...). At least in this last case, that ties in with, and supports, the thesis of the book; there is clear a lack of data on how specific issues affect women. Not only that but there is a distinct lack of will to even attempt to gather data about women.

Hunter X Hunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chapters 95-140

We continue the story and I'm glad we depart from the collecting money avenue to just do shenanigans or go on adventure. I liked the Yorknew arc, but I'm not too sure about the isekai one yet.

Going back to my issues with the manga; the argument that people who are actually strong don't bother with the small fries make sense (see Harrison's post on the café), but the characterisation of the tower of doom and the hunter exam still aren't super consistent in my eyes. Tetyana started to watch the anime and I caught a couple of episodes with her — and while it isn't fair to judge the manga based on the anime — just as I remembered in the manga they made the hunters out to be a big deal. Naturally, one could trust the magaka when he says that the hunter exam is the hardest exam in the world, and that is actually matters in the power structure of the universe. But it really doesn't and some characters could eat that exam for breakfast, which feels like the rug has been pulled from under me.

The story is still interesting, my fear is growing that nen is basically like stands/hamon now and it can do pretty much everything. I will report back on what extent later. Nothing has yet topped the fight between Uvo and the Shadows, maybe because I was still under the impression that HxH was bad. The symphony to Chrollo (where the troupe goes on a rampage) was sick. I was midly underwhelmed with the fight between Chrollo and Killua's father+grandfather. They had made Killua's family to be so goated that I was expecting more. Although I cannot complain about them being the strongest people in town anymore; they are getting bodied by the weakest creature of Greed Island. While they are strong, they have no idea how to use their strength. I stopped right when the Bomber reveals his identity, I think it's about to get hype.

no way they got a _gargaydar as their first card!

Not too bad this month, and I also finished my backlog! While you might think this means more time for reading, the holiday season is upon us, which means less time overall. I will do my best, but also, I won't try too hard. Also a little change this month, I switched from Typora to Obsidian to write this. Having the rest of my monthly articles available with a click is really handy. But I like the focus that Typora provides, being so bare bones, so I will keep using it for standalone articles.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie

I WAS SO BUSY THIS MONTH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The Assassination of Fred Hampton – Jeffrey Haas

I was not expecting the angle to be: following the lawyer trying to bring justice to the murderers. I was kinda puzzled when Fred Hampton was killed, and we were only 10% though the book. Despite my surprise, this was a very effective way to show how the system was stacked against black people, and people trying to even nudge the racial status quo in the US.

Man, it was so depressing to see what the FBI and police got away with. Every time I thought it couldn't get worse, it just got worse. In the end, even if Jeff and associates won the case, it barely made a difference after almost a decade and a half.

The book was well written, but there were some times when the author was just name-dropping for 4 pages, and then acronym dropping... Not the most riveting, but you gotta put the context somewhere. I am incredibly ignorant about the justice system in the US, but it looks like an absolute joke. How in the hell do judges have so much power?!

It's also wild to see how different people/society was back then, and it only amplifies the common modern adage: “Nothing ever fucking happens [anymore]“.

Howling Dark – Christopher Ruocchio

My man Hadrian has had a lot of stuff happening to him. He and his pals are looking for something, but everyone in the empire knows this thing as a myth. Will he manage to find his holy-grail or will finding it even help him at all?

I still can't get into it. I have started this book and then let it sit on my nightstand for two weeks, without ever wanting to pick it back up. I know that means I should probably give up, but the story is good, it just doesn't click. We still have the Dune easter eggs, which are everything but subtle, like the adage from his mentor: Fear is the mind killer a poison. All of my praise from book 1 stand here.

Hunter X Hunter – Yoshihiro Togashi

Chapter 51 – 95

All of my objections and criticism should be void/resolved with those chapters according to the Hunter fans. Let's review a tldr from my criticism of chapters 1-50:

• Killua and Gon are unnecessarily strong, and we don't know who or why. It makes it boring.
• Secondary/tertiary characters are here only to marvel at their strength.
• Some situations make no sense and are only there to showcase how strong Gon and Killua are.
• World building is completely destroyed just to show how strong and special those two kids are (the hardest exam know to man: it feels easy to two 11 years old, they even find it boring. The tower of doom and death, where only the strongest of the strongest come to duke it out: Killua climbed it when he was 6 years old.)

Does what happens in chapters 51-95 confirm the points above?

Point 1 and 4: Gon heals life-threatening injuries in one month, when the doc said it would take 4. Gon and Killua learn Gyo (a technique that takes years to master and yadi yadi yada) in less than a day. Killua can withstand one million volts. Killua has survived life-threatening situations since he was 3. I think my arguments still stand.

Point 2: We are introduced to more people, that actually matter in the story, and while there are still people on there to marvel at the kids' strength, we have other interesting characters (both protagonists and antagonists). This argument is invalidated

Point 3: There is nothing that I can remember that is even 10% as stupid as the weight incremented doors this time, so I'll say the argument is invalidated.

Half of my critiques of chapters 1-50 are thankfully not valid here, but my main complaints, point 1 and 4 still are. We will talk about it more later.

Some random notes: wtf, aura and nen is recorded by camera and computer code?! I hope it doesn't become like Hamon and stands in JoJo part 3 where, they could do everything. York New... really? Kurapika is a dude?! Wait, unlike One Piece, it actually gets good?!

You've heard correctly ladies and gentlemen, it gets good. When the POV shifted to Kurapika, I thought I was in for a snoozefest. She He barely had any development, and his red eyes just looked so gimmicky, like it was only there to get all the kids to think he's cool. I was thoroughly mistaken. Even the artstyle kinda changes and we get some great looking panels. The character building of the troupe and the fucking fight against the mafia's “super-strong” goons were awesome. We finally get characters that are stronger than the two 11-year-olds we've been following. And when it's time for Kurapika to fight the super strong guy, he prevails, but not because he's naturally gifted, or because he went to the locker room for 5min to practice and master a technique that takes 6 decades to even grasp. No, he's strong to begin with, but he would have gotten steam rolled, if not for the super particular technique with a specific sets of condition that would literally kill him if he misused it. Now that is an interesting protagonist, he's OP but only under a certain set of circumstances, namely against the troupe. Kurapika made it even clearer how flawed the kids' writing is.

I don't understand why the kids are made out to be so strong, even when it doesn't matter. And then why they have to be so nonchalant about the literal godly feat they perform. And why the hardest/strongest [insert event/person] known to man is beaten easily by a 6-year-old or 11 years old that are just naturally gifted, with minimal training — it just completely ruins the immersion and worldbuilding. What's the point? Why do the kids need to be so god-damn strong for no reason, they could have had a flaw or just be toned down, and the story would have been the same (but better imo). Technically, there are still about 25 chapters I need to read through that will completely alleviate my criticism (I hope).

PS: Announcing you got a kid in your manga; based.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Thanks for reading my logorrhea, Eddie