Movie #29 of 2026: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) It should be no surprise that a movie built around the stoner comic relief from Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse turns out to be so slapsticky and crude, and if you can manage to get on that level, there are genuine laughs to be found …
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Book #94 of 2026: As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel This title offers an exquisite toxic lesbian horror-fantasy romance that is easily my top new read of 2026 so far. It’s everything that I wanted and didn’t quite get from last year’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, whose angsty vampires never …
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Book #93 of 2026: Jupiter by Ben Bova I’m not convinced that this story about an established research station orbiting Jupiter really is the next chronologically in Ben Bova’s Grand Tour sequence after The Precipice, in which humanity was first starting to mine the asteroid belt for resources, but that’s what the late author’s website …
Book #92 of 2026: Doctor Who: Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box by Kalynn Bayron (Icons #3) Pretty good as a Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby story, neatly slipping into the dynamic they shared together over their one season on TV. I can’t help feeling like the title figure falls through the cracks a bit, though, …
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Book #91 of 2026: Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings (The Belgariad #2) More interesting and distinctive than the first volume in this series, but not to the degree I feel obligated to bump my rating up at all. I’m starting to understand why people say the authors’ later standalone novel The Redemption of Althalus …
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TV #28 of 2026: Classic Doctor Who, season 26 By certain metrics, what we now call the “Classic” iteration of Doctor Who had already gone on too long when it was eventually cancelled in 1989. Twenty-six seasons is far more than most TV shows get to have, and the program had passed through some dire …
Book #90 of 2026: Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins (The Underland Chronicles #4) This penultimate volume is easily the strongest of its series since the debut, largely for dispensing with the tired structure of yet another ancient prophecy sending our returning tween hero on yet another quest. (Granted, those elements both …
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Movie #28 of 2026: Dogma (1999) This was the first movie that I ever saw in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse series, and together with the novel Good Omens, it represented a fairly seminal text for an agnostic humanist kid from a Jewish-Unitarian household in my heavily Christian town — a way of grappling with the …
Book #89 of 2026: Vigil by George Saunders This one is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, which suggests that I should probably go ahead and read the author’s earlier novel Lincoln in the Bardo, as I’ve seen several reviews of this title comparing it disfavorably to that. But …
Book #88 of 2026: Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman I have any number of issues with this story, but let me start with the most basic and subjective, which is that I simply don’t like it. This is essentially splatterpunk — the transgressive celebration of gore for its own sake …
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