Pleasant Evenings Book Club

It's been a long time coming, but I bring you Pleasant Evening's first episode on Mobile Fighter G Gundam. In this first part, we chat about our first impressions on Yasuhiro Imagawa's work, which also happens to be the first Gundam alternative universe (AU). This discussion includes conversations about the hyperreal and the random cinema that informs our perspectives.  This is my first time editi...

The ending to Sabres of Paradise offers a sober counterpart to the high passions of the previous two parts. The story of a rebellion that even in defeat refuses to be forgotten shifts into the story of a man who, in captivity, refuses to sacrifice his dignity and faces his new life and coming death with grace few can imitate. We count down all the pieces that fall into place as history marches on...

It won't be the last we see of it, but this is as far as the Universal Century goes. In some ways compromised but never boring or lacking ambition, Victory Gundam is a true Tomino original and one of our favorite things that we've covered so far. For this discussion we discuss the motivations of colonization's middle-managers, inter-generational conflicts vs. cooperation, and more on Lupe Cineau's...

Part two of Lesley Blanch's Sabres of Paradise is takes us beyond beyond introductions and scene setting and places the reader in the middle of the push and pull of rebellion. (Though many scenes are still set and characters introduced in Lesley Blanch's signature prose). The Russians acclimate to fighting in the Caucasus and the people of the Caucasus hold fast under the relentless onslaught of R...

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam found yet another way to escalate many of the themes and motifs that defined Gundam. The young pilot is only 13! The main crew is such a scrappy resistance that their base of operations is a big truck! The battles depict more desperation and destruction from the perspective of people that simply want to live normal lives. This was Yoshiyuki Tomino's first Gundam TV Show...

Leslie Blanch's epic biography of Imam Shamyl and the Russo-Caucasian struggle that defined his life for almost 30 years is now mostly remembered for having been a major influence on Frank Herbert's Dune, but it's place as a classic of literary history-writing deserves to be celebrated. Blanch's ambition to cover such a complicated period of time seems incidental to the passion evident in every ex...

The second of the Gundam OVAs cements what War in the Pocket had confirmed: that the world of Gundam is rich and exciting enough to sustain and inspire many stories outside of Tomino's original vision. In this case, it is to tell a relatively straightforward wartime melodrama. We discuss the highs and lows of this series. And using the negative provided here, we uncover what exactly the "Tomino To...

Really proud of how this one came out. Ice is an incredibly slippery novel to try to pin down. The book teeters back and forth between dark anti-romance, bleak rumination on a dying world, and on one occasion, a James Bond parody(?) The story itself is unsteady about its facts and chronology, employing some perspective altering rug-pulls. We had an interesting conversation exploring the emotional...

Our initial reaction of F91 was as a beautiful but flawed movie. A stylish and emotional evolution of the themes and aesthetics of Gundam that never truly got to bloom. In way that lost potential somehow makes F91 an even more alluring and curious artifact that has only grown in our estimation since our initial reaction. This recording is closer to that initial reaction but even then the budding l...

It's hard to find new things to say about The Stranger. Occupying a space of historical importance in literature, philosophy, and youth culture across three continents and ultimately around the world, The Stranger is enduringly popular (especially so among people who lack the self awareness to consider whether their opinions are worth sharing). It's no wonder that this episode came out to a little...

I'm starting to think that War is actually bad! This side story in the Gundam universe is the first series not overseen by Yoshiyuki Tomino; and it reflects a difference in style, tone, and scope. Instead of an operatic 50 episode epic, we zoom in on ordinary civilians and disposable grunts for only 6 episodes. The result is one of the most impactful works, not only in Gundam, but in the medium.  ...

What happens after you die? What about after that? Or after that? And what if you just skipped the dying part entirely? How far can you take things? Isaac Asimov helps wrap our heads around these questions with the power of AI. From a time when that had little to do with crypto-adjacent scams, Asimov's story used AI to plant a seed in our imagination. I had never felt closer to the entropic ends o...

Char's Counterattack is as iconic to the history of animation as it is inaccessible to those not caught up to the decade of Gundam that came before it. Amid all the proper nouns and sci-fi jargon is the touching conclusion to the saga of Amuro and Char. And throughout the runtime of the film is also some of the greatest achievements in animation, art design, choreography and sound to close out the...

For how popular The Fall of the House of Usher is, it is quite a strange story. Poe guides us through a fever-dream where rather than ghosts or things of that nature haunting an old house, the house itself exudes menace that entrances our characters. Without deviating too far from the story, we discuss abstract art, the fall of the aristocracy, fungi, and the Castlevania video games.

This is where ZZ Gundam momentarily stops being the goofy show we came to love in it's first half, and the horrors of war rear up again and again. We found this second batch of episodes to be really impactful, cementing ZZ Gundam as potentially the funniest and most tragic Gundam series that we've covered so far.    In this conversation we talk about how ZZ interacts with the themes that we've dis...

Who knew that reading about the world ending over and over again could be so fun? Exterminator! isn't as talked about as William Burroughs earlier work even though it contains some of Burroughs' most popular short stories, including "Twilight's Last Gleamings", "The Discipline of DE", and "Wind Die, You Die, We Die". In the context they're included here, we found the stories sang out twice. This i...

We went into this iteration of Gundam hedging out bets, but it easily ended up being our favorite series in the franchise so far.   Bright Noa recruits a new generation of Mobile Suit pilots from the unlikely corner of Shangri-La, an impoverished space colony where we meet our new protagonists junking for salvage from the previous wars.   Despite dealing with some heavy topics and doing a lot to e...

So this book might literally be your grandfather's Gundam 0079 because it was released really close to the original run of Mobile Suit Gundam and written by Yoshiyuki Tomino himself, robbing me of claim to that cliche. Nevertheless, reading this novel is a very different experience from the animated '79 Gundam experience. You can find out how in this episode. It was really fun to record this episo...

Finishing up Kamile's tragic story, Pleasant Evenings return to discuss the second half of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. We take turns discussing what it means to be a perfect soldier, brood parasitism among birds, and what happened to Reccoa's character in the back half of this show.

A few months ago we announced we'd be diving into the world of Mobile Suit Gundam, and with our new episode talking about Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, it's officially a sub-series! Mobile Suit Book Club.   Yoshiyuki Tomino parlayed the success of the original MS Gundam theatrical run into a well-heeled sequel that doubled down on everything that made the original series so interesting, exciting, heart...

After a longish absence, Corbin and Roberto come back to announce our most ambitious project yet: podcasting the entirety* of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. We're starting things off with the trilogy of movies adapted from the original series which we found to be a very exciting introduction to Universal Century and the poor people who have to live in it. If you're Gundam-curious like us or alr...

This was a pleasantly entertaining read and a great showcase of the romantic nostalgia that Tokien's Middle Earth is such a great stage for.    The episode itself is definitely one of our loosest and most deranged. We had a great time recording it and I hope that translates to a fun listening experience.   You can email us at eveningspleasant@gmail.com for any comments, questions or book suggestio...

My favorite description for the curious effect of Robert Aickman stories was given by Neil Gaiman: "Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully."   His story Into the Wood is one of the more curious entries in his catalogue in that he has somehow inverted the ghost story to such a degree that...

10th episode! We didn't plan anything extra for the occasion, but it is coincidentally our very first episode about a comic. So let's say that's how we are celebrating the milestone.    It brings me great joy to introduce the medium to Pleasant Evenings with none other than Junji Ito. His works practically need no introduction as it feels like Ito's name is already mentioned alongside the likes of...

What do you get when a bunch of depressed failures spend a lot of time disappointing each other in a rural Russian estate? It turns out, one of the enduring classics of western literature. Anton Chekov is not messing around. This was easily the most emotionally challenging read so far for us on Pleasant Evenings Book Club, but we were able to have a nice conversation regardless. We touch on the pa...