Lit City Blues

  …loading …loading TERRAN UNION ARCHIVES//02102571//THE SUMMIT AT EL AUIUN …buffering ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE WILL BEGIN IN THREE, TWO, ONE- The Great Hall in El-Aaiun was starting to fill up as the delegates began to file in. From his place on the podium, the Commandant General of the Polisario Front, head of State of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic watched in satisfaction. They had been waiting a long time for this meeting. There were a ridiculous number of nations on Earth now and when the Terran Union had agreed to a rotating Presidency their fight for freedom from the Moroccan oppressors had not yet been won.  Two centuries later, they were free and the Presidency of the Terran Union had finally rotated to them and the Commandant could not be more pleased. Most nations had spent their Presidencies on mundane things like economic development or mining the asteroid fields or repairing relations with humanities now far-flung colonies across the local spiral arm of the Milky Way. Those

Since the inception of the current Marvel universe, I've always been sort of fascinated by the character of Hawkeye-- not just his on-screen portrayal (Jeremy Renner) but as the MCU took hold and began to expand, I spent some time acquiring comics and graphic novels and digging into the origin of a few of these characters here and there. I actually have the Matt Fraction/David Aja run on Hawkeye-- which is where the series draws many of its plotlines and overall milieu.  (I'm going to allow myself a minor parenthetical here: I did get on the pull list of our local comic store for a bit, but I was a bad customer and could never make it down there enough to pick up my stuff on the regular. But, I do have a decent long box worth of various comics and a half-decent collection of graphic novels to boot-- two of my favorites from this era? Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier is a beautiful origin story for multiple D.C. heroes and gorgeously drawn to boot and... Matt Fraction/David A

I have always loved The Illiad , ever since I was a kid. Admittedly, I was a kind of a weird kid and my parents had an amazing prose translation that I would dearly love to get my hands on again. I read that thing over and over and over again until it probably wore out and the cover fell off. I also seem to recall in elementary school, I found an illustrated version that I would also dearly love to get my hands on again as well. I couldn't tell you anything about it, but I have a vague flash of a memory of a picture of the burning ships and the Myrmidons rushing to defend them. All of this is to say that when I snagged Madeline Miller's Circe off Audible and saw that she had also written a novel called The Song of Achilles , of course, I was going to snag that too and listen to it first. Doing some digging on the book itself: Circe was actually Miller's second book and The Song of Achilles was actually the first novel she wrote. (Per the book's wiki-page it took he