I was warned that this was situated strangely chronologically, so I actually had a much better time with this than if I’d not known it takes place before the 5th. Although, I wish I’d known that before so I could just actually read it before the novel.

Either way, Murderbot solving a murder in a fast-paced novella is a good time, inspiringly. It’s less philosophical, which is typically what I’m drawn to here, but I picked this up when I was in the mood for specifically what it was offering and that worked out well.

A compelling case that is well thought out, meticulously crafted, but oddly less accessible than you’d expect this sort of a dissemination of group reworking of terms in current use would be. It definitely seems written academically and could use an additional editorial polish, as it could easily be truncated at a sentence-by-sentence level.

But I did come out agreeing fairly wholeheartedly with the reworking and definition of the terms and what kind of ‘work’ it implies to, and why the update is necessary when we are constantly operating and relating to both terms differently. With a huge emphasis on aesthetics. The investigation section felt like it was merely reiterating a lot of already common use applications. But it makes sense to further codify the term as pertaining, especially, to counter-investigations.

Fundamentally, this book is interested in two things (imo): Agency, and how we construct our reality. It does this in several ways. On the surface, this is a story about Benny Oh and his mother, Annabel. We go from love story printed in memory, viewing Annabel and her husband’s courtship, right on to the death of the husband and Benny having mental health issues and a struggling Annabel doing absolutely everything she can to provide for him, make and hold a home, mourn her husband, and try to divine who she is amongst these challenges and her rejiggering of identity.

But it’s also a story about stories. Who gets to construct them and what the nature of a story actually is. In doing so, it begs the age old question: What is reality?

Benny hears objects and descends into spirals of mania depending on what they objects tell him, but also how people react to him. One voice warns him of danger, another seems to be his self loathing given voice, and another an internal, ostensibly, inner poet.

And then there is the book, which in a kind of post-modern step, is the “thing” narrating Benny’s life and story, and the thing we consume. It breaks the fourth wall at times, given separate chapters entirely, and will expound of the nature of what it is we are consuming—or else simply function as storycraft itself, dropping exposition or foreshadowing or quipping about the genre or trope happening.

This, initially, feels like a spinning wheel but does come together, I felt. Mostly because I like what it is examining, though it centres the trials and tribulations predominant Benny goes through. What I liked the most about this was the the vector of discussing mental health. We don’t really know, in the end, how much surrealism is in here because we are actively looking at what reality even is. The mental health professionals interacting with Benny assume everything he says is not valid because he does speak to objects sometimes. But not everything he converses with is. For instance, he falls in love (maybe) with an older girl whose artist name is The Aleph, but is both the embodiment and a simulacrum of the story by Borges of the same name. Yet because he calls her by that name, people assume she is not real.

And in some ways she isn’t, right? After all, we, ourselves are constructs of understanding through the vector of telling ourselves the story of… ourselves. So we need input from other people in other to see ourselves and adjust our story to be something approaching accurate to other people. But what happens when the people who have agency over aspects of your life—who have the authority to put you in a mental ward, kick you out of your house, or otherwise assert a kind of dominance over you when you’re vulnerable—give you information as they see it, benefiting them. The story of capitalism and the story of The American Dream, which you do not fit into?

Our society likes to think of stories as entertainment; a product of capitalistic anti-intellectualism and the inability to really ascertain “value” in art. And yet this book… within the book, narrating this, tells us that stories are the primary forces of constructing identity and our social reality. That a book, or narrative, story, etc. is maybe the primary animal on earth; the apex predator that colonizes our minds and propagates itself within us, disseminates itself using us as a vector.

Or, at least, that’s what I heard? What did you hear?

(A small edit here: if you consume the audiobook, while the narrator is quite good he also speaks in dialect and changes cadence for everyone—which is good, overall—but I hate it when narrator do dialect, especially for other ethnicities, such as Asian, which this person does. And also makes Annabel sound really sort of airy and dopey and lispy and overly feminine, so I almost gave this 4 stars, actually. Something to consider).

This implies it’s a study of more than just the philosophical genealogy of the actual term ‘crisis’, but that’s all it is. I’d much rather it have established that right away, then made real world applications interrogating existing decisions and governments. It’s interesting but not what I expected; somewhat let down.

Fantastic. Accessible and backed up with pertinent facts for each chapter, with a short introduction, and then a story with a different writer/illustrator combo. This highlights how indigenous peoples have had to combat constant forms of violence by colonial forces and the government. Most of this was not taught in school.

I think this is perfect for the form. All age groups, including myself can learn some history in an engaging way from indigenous voices and creatives. Hopefully it gets people to pick up even more information on the topic and get a much more comprehensive historical outlook about our country. It’s unfortunate that every person has to do this work themselves because government approved curriculum would rather teach from ahistorical point-of-view. It’s not hard to see why they do this. But I think it’s the responsibility of everyone to become more ethical than their government.

Informative but cookie-cutter, and delivered without emotion, heightening the mundanity.

I just could not get invested in any aspect of this. Not sure if it’s a problem with narration or the text. DNF 35%.

Amazing concept and execution. The artwork is incredible. The story itself is hard to follow at points, but it was basically revelatory that there is a final image constructed out of every single page, and the author encourages you to rip the pages right out of the book and arrange them into the final sequence at the back. I have a library book, so obviously I won’t do that. But I’d love to see images of the final thing, as that sounds incredible.

But, I think then there is a legitimate barrier to entry as well. If you can’t really consume it properly as it is constructed and sold, while cool and interesting, it’s not accessible either. I got the broad strokes of the story but not everything, apparently. So, I think I can’t rate it 5 stars, but it certainly exceeded my expectations.

Fantastic concept that is a bit of a weird experience reading via the backer PDF files. They’re not exported correctly; some are clearly higher resolution than others. I imagine the newer digital release on comiXology would have fixed that but the files I’ve had for years now, finally getting around to them, are like this.

The collection itself does what it sets out to do. It’s highly eclectic and doesn’t have a western centric lens, and the stories, overall, probably about 3/4 of them I quite liked. Similar to short story collections, there’s some great ones and some that I didn’t get out of and didn’t like the visual style of, either. But I have all 3 collections, so I’m hoping it gets more refined as we go, and that the export is better. I’m reading it via a PDF reader and made sure to specify sizing it as it’s supposed to be and via single pages at a time, so it’s disheartening that the compilation isn’t unified in terms of dpi and ratio.