#but jon and Dave choose the wrong path

[magnus-is-swagness]

Wish I was alive during the golden age (whenever episode 1 l, season 2 of the Mandalorian “The Marshal” premiered)

[ty-talks-comics]

Best of DC: Week of March 13th, 2019

The Grim Knight #1 - Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Eduardo Risso, Dave Stewart and Sal Cipriano

The Grim Knight makes my skin crawl and that is awesome.

The Batman Who Laughs is one of the worst case scenarios of what Batman can become if things go wrong in his life, but The Grim Knight is the worst. He's a Batman unrestrained, not held back by the moral view that killing criminals makes you no better than them. He's not above killing police or friends if it means staying true to the mission of keeping Gotham safe.

Throughout the book we're presented his origin as he kidnaps Jim Gordon and transports him to a possible secret lair in between issues three and four of The Batman Who Laughs miniseries.

His story starts the same as always. A boy and his family are walking through an alley when a gunman kills the boys parents as he watches. This time, however, the shooter drops the gun. The boy, in reasonable fury, picks up the gun and shoots the killer dead, setting him on a path of what he believes to be righteous bloodshed.

There have been stories where Batman has either gone bad or committed to killing before, but what sets this one apart, is how focused and brutal he is here. The mission is all that matters, so much so that Batman apparently hasn't even come across his more colorful villains, likely because he's killed them before they could become so. This much is alluded to when there's a caption mentioning a manning a red hood that he murdered at Ace Chemicals.

As always, Jim Gordon is a straight laced cop and wants to do things, by the book, including taking down Batman. He manages to trap Batman with a magnetic Batsignal and sends officers to raid Batman's stashes, but The Grim Knight has prepared for such things. Bruce Wayne had outfitted Gotham PD with state of the art armor which Batman takes advantage of and uses to kill the officers and disgrace Gordon who unknowingly led his men to explosive traps. Gordon disappears and is presumed dead.

The Grim Knight knows no mercy.

He is later arrested when Gordon returns with all of the evidence that Bruce Wayne is Batman, proving that the book still works and that all of the murder and death solves nothing.

I loved every bit of this and I love that we get his tragic backstory. I feel like more could have been explored, like who else he was trained by and how much more dangerous he could be, but what we got was pretty damn good. He's a tortured Batman. He's so blinded by making sure that the tragedy that happened to his parents happens to no one else, that he becomes paranoid, violent and insane. He doesn't care who he hurts as long as his cory and people are safe and he is the most terrifying of them all.

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Runner Up

It’s nice to see Jason carve out another piece of the pie for himself. Ever since breaking from Batman and learning of Arsenal’s death, as much as I’ve enjoyed the series, Red Hood has felt directionless. He’s been chasing the underworld criminals known as The Underlife, felt some kinship with Batwoman and found his absentee before subsequently burying him as he had become a madman.

Red Hood: Outlaw #32 - Scott Lobdell, Stephen Segovia, Rex Lokus and Troy Peteri

But now, he’s sitting at the top of his own part of the Gotham hill. Having taken over the Iceberg Lounge from a mysteriously missing Penguin, Jason Todd has a tight hold on the Gotham nightlife and a steady stream of possible information at his fingertips. Enlisting the help of the unknown Wingman, a more powerful Bunker, and the Sisters Su, he’s living the high life which grabs the attention of Batman.

Batman isn’t happy that Jason is back in town and confronts him, but since it was Red Hood who shot The Penguin and not Jason, Batman can’t arrest him without risking both of their identities and Jason points this out with all of the sassiness without literally telling Batman to “eat shit” and I loved every second of it. I really enjoyed this issue and can’t wait to see what becomes of this new angle that Jason is playing. High recommend!

Not a criticism, but it is odd how Scott Lobdell is always referencing his past work and bringing Bunker back and in a flashback he does it again. Apparently, (mostly) everything in New 52 Teen Titans did or possibly did happen as Skitter, Solstice, Cassie Sandsmark, “Bart Allen” and Kon-El all appear, but Bunker remarks that he feels like everything in his mind has been “reset and reborn and rebooted again and again.” What could this possibly mean for the greater DCU if anyone else chooses to acknowledge this? Solstice appears in Heroes in Crisis and is likely dead. Lobdell killed H.A.R.V.E.S.T. in an earlier issue of Red Hood and the Outlaws, so does that mean that Kon-El is still out there somewhere? Will he meet and fight Conner Kent or Jon Kent? What happened to New 52 Bart Allen? I’m genuinely interested and hope that some of these things will come to light or at least be explored in the future.

[readbykena-blog]

13 years - 305 books

I am an avid reader and friends frequently ask me what I am reading. Here I will try and post a brief review of each book I read. To begin with here is a list of books I have read over the last 13 years. Feel free to ask me any questions.

2017: (22)

-Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

-Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

-Corporate Communication, Theory & Practice by Joep Cornelissen

-Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

-Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

-A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park

-Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

-Theorizing Crisis Communication by Timothy Sallow and Matthew Seeger

-Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns

-The Global Public Relations Handbook by Krishnamurthy Sriramesh and Dejan Vercic

-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

-When My Name was Keoko by Linda Sue Park

-The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

- Introducing Communication Research by Donald Treadwell

- We are never meeting in real life by Samantha Irby

- Ethics in Public Relations by Kathy Fitzpatrick and Carolyn Bronstein

- The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

- Origin by Dan Brown

- What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

- Social Media Communication by Jeremy Harris Lipshultz

- A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

2016: (20)

-A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell

-Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

-The Underground Abductor by Nathan Hale

-Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

-The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

-The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

-The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim

- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

-The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin

-The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

-But What If We're Wrong by Chuck Klosterman

-Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

-Brewster by Mark Slouka

-Rosemary The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

-The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

-The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

-Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

-The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

-The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

-A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman 

2015: (29)

-All The Truth Is Out by Matt Bai

-Double Down by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

-The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

-Dad is Fat by Jim Gaffigan

-Yes Please by Amy Poehler

-A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

-All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

-The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

-To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

-In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

-A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka

-The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway

-Persuading Scientists by Hamid Ghanadan

-The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey

-Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

-A Heartbreaking Word of Staggering Genius by David Eggers

-Polio, An American Story by David Oshinsky 

-The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

-Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

-One Summer America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

-Brain on Fire by Susannah Catalan

-The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

-The Making of Modern Medicine by Michael Bliss

-People I Want to Punch in the Throat by Jen Mann

-Internal Medicine by Terrence Holt

-The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

-The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

-The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

2014: (10)

-David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

-Why Grizzly Bears Should Wear Underpants by The Oatmeal

-Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

-Wild by Sheryl Strayed

-Stiff by Mary Roach

-An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

-Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

-Dataclysm by Christian Rudder

-Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracey Kidder

-Columbine by Dave Cullen

2013: (13)

-The Next Best Thing by Jennifer Weiner

-The Path Between The Seas by David McCullough

-Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

-I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

-Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

-A Hologram For The King by Dave Eggers

-Inferno by Dan Brown

-The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

-Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky

-Monkey Mind by Daniel Smith

-The Brief Wondrous Live of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

-Truth in Advertising by John Kenny

-The Cell Game by Alex Prud'Homme

2012: (16)

-Walden by Henry David Thoreau

-Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

-The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

-Overtreated By Shannon Brownlee

-Listen To Your Heart by Fern Michaels (TERRIBLE BOOK!)

-The Ten, Make That Nine Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten, by Steve Martin

-The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

-Baby Proof by Emily Giffen

-Natural Experiments of History by Jared Diamond

-The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

-The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

-Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

-Secrets of The Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg

-A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

-The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

-Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

2011: (20)

-Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

-I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

-Tinkers by Paul Harding

-How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

-What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

-The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

-The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

-An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

-Tea Time For the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith

-Bossypants by Tina Fey

-The Pearl by John Steinbeck

-Summer Sisters by Judy Blume

-Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillian and Al Switzler

-Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

-The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

-Of Thee I Zing by Laura Ingraham

-A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron

-Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

-The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

-Trust Me I'm Dr. Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne

2010: (26)

- History's Worst Decisions and the people who made them by Stephen Weir

- Junky by William S. Burroughs

- One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell

- Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman

- Food Rules by Michael Pollan

- Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

- Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

- Drive by Daniel Pink

-The Help by Kathryn Stockett

-The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

-US Americans Talk About Love Edited by John Bowe

-For You Mom, Finally by Ruth Reichl

-The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

-Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston

-The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

-Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

-You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett

-Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

-The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

-The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

-I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

-The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent

-Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris and Ian Falconer

-Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

-A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

2009: (22)

• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

• Remember Me? By Sophie Kinsella

• A Long Way Gone, memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah

• Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

• Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

• Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

• Crawfish Mountain by Ken Wells

• My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler

• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

• Mistakes Were Made, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

• Gertrude by Herman Hesse

• The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

- Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

- The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

- When You are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

- Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

- Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich

-The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

-Super Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner

2008: (21)

• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

• Inside the Minds, The Art of Public Relations by CEOs

• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

• Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol

• The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell

• The Known World by Edward P. Jones

• Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susan

• Wired by Bob Woodward

• One Pill Makes You Smaller by Lisa Dierbeck

• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

• Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg

• Pound for Pound by F.X. Toole

• All the Way Home by David Giffels

• Bonk by Mary Roach

• In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

• Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

• The Sea by John Banville

• Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

• Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy

2007: (28)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

• 1984 by George Orwell

• What Ifs? Of American History edited by Robert Cowley

• The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

• Rabbit, run by John Updike

• Life of Pi by Yann Martel

• The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer

• Pigtopia by Kitty Fitzgerald

• FiSH by Stephen Lundin, Harry Paul and John Christensen

• The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

• 1776 by David McCullough

• Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

• Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

• Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

• Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

• The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards

• Men at Arms by Evelyn Waugh

• A Dog Year by Jon Katz

• 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann

• IV by Chuck Klosterman

• Devil in the Details by Jennifer Traig

• The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

• Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

2006: (27)

• Collapse, How societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond

• The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

• Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner

• Harry and Ike by Steve Neal

• State of Denial by Bob Woodward

• Crossroads in American History by James McPherson & Alan Brinkley

• The Lexus & The Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman

• The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant

• Strategery by Bill Sammon

• Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

• Japanese Canadian Redress, The Toronto Story

• The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War by Howard Blum

• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

• Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

• Red Weather by Pauls Toutonghi

• Wifey by Judy Blume

• Frantic Transmissions to and from LA by Kate Braverman

• Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

• The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-time by Mark Hadden

• A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

• Marley & Me by John Grogan

• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

• Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell

• Boni y Tigre by Kathrin Sander

2005: (51)

• Guns, Germs, And Steel by Jared Diamond

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

• Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

• The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf

• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

• Mary Magdalene by Lynn Picknett

• Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

• The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

• Bob Dylan Chronicles Volumn 1 by Bob Dylan

• Smashed by Koren Zailckas

• Culture Shock Costa Rica by Claire Wallerstein

• The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs

• Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim by David Sedaris

• Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart

• All the President's Men by Bernstein & Woodward

• The Final Days by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein

• The Secret Man by Bob Woodward

• Shadow (5 Pres. & the Legacy of Watergate by Bob Woodward

• All Politics is Local, by Tip O'Neill

• What's the Matter With Kansas? (How Conservatives Won the Heart of America) by Thomas Frank

• Don't think of an Elephant by George Lakoff

• Confessions of a Political Junkie by Hunter S. Thompson

• America The Book by Jon Stuart

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

• The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London

• Animal Farm by Goerge Orwell

• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnecut

• The Stranger by Albert Camus

• Empire Falls by Richard Russo

• The Great Fire by Shirly Hazzard

• A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler

• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

• Skirt and the Fiddle by Tristian Egolf

• Drive Like Hell by Dallas Hudgens

• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

• Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

• Deception Point by Dan Brown

• Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

• The Ship of Brides by Jojo Moyers

• Angry Housewives by Lorna Landvik

• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

• Loving Che by Ana Menendez

• Wolves in Chic Clothing by Carrie Karasyov & Jill Kargman

• Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus

• And Sister by Sophie Kinsella

• Trading Up by Candace Bushnell