Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 6, 2025

I was getting a movie from the library for my weekly "Movie Night" with my twenty-something kids, and thought "why not look at the ongoing list of books and see if I want to read any of them now?" And so I did, and so I requested these two, and so they were pulled for me.

If you have a local library, check to see if they do this - being able to request specific books online and have them held for you is a really neat feature. (Especially if you already have too many books in the house and are trying not to overly increase that number.)

Here's what I just got, which I'm actually reading this very weekend (one yesterday, one today):

The sixth book in the Asterix series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra. I read the first three in the current, too-small-for-my-aging-eyes omnibus, then jumped to the older album-sized English-language version for #4, Asterix the Gladiator. #5 is not available as a standalone in my library system, and plot/theme/character development does not seem to be a huge issue with these books, so I just moved on to the next one.

Um. And a misaimed search at that big e-commerce site gave me the surprising revelation that there was a recent French live-action series of Asterix movies? How did they find a lead actor short enough?

And the third (of a planned four) book in George O'Connor's current mythology-retold-for-younger-readers series, Asgardians, is Loki, just published this past fall. The first two books in Asgardians were Odin and Thor, as you'd expect; I haven't seen any hints as to who will be covered in #4. O'Connor previously did a long series about the Greek gods, as Olympians, and his work is detailed and smart, filled with insights from myth and fable and told in modern, compelling ways with complex characterization and a muscular, adventure-comics art style. (He also gets in a lot more quirky material than some people might expect from that "young readers" above - his books are suitable for smart middle-schoolers rather than aimed at them, is how I'd put it.)