Book #106 of 2022: The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Chronicles #4) This final Animorphs companion novel is a risky departure even by the standards of the Chronicles sub-series, which has previously left the teenage morphers behind solely to flesh out backstory periods of galactic history whose species and major events are already …
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Book #105 of 2022: The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin This nonfiction title explores an interesting and new-to-me topic, which is the obvious yet rarely-considered point that the seven-day cycle we know as a week is entirely cultural, having no relation to observable …
TV #32 of 2022: The Shield, season 2 The same bitterly funny anti-cop police drama, back for a follow-up round of continued corruption, complicity, and arrogant ignorance. I’d rate this season as a slight step down from the debut, but mainly only because as great as all that remains, the series has already staked out …
TV #31 of 2022: Stranger Things, season 4 Late-stage Stranger Things has a character problem, in that there are simply too many of them at this point for the narrative to function remotely efficiently. Even with the cast (somewhat clumsily) split into four or five geographically separate storylines, this season often finds six or more …
TV #30 of 2022: Abbott Elementary, season 1 A really strong and funny sitcom debut! I have a couple critiques that are holding me back from an utterly glowing five-star review, but this mockumentary series about teachers at an underfunded, majority-Black, inner-city Philadelphia school is generally sweet and hilarious alike. It also feels fresh in …
Book #104 of 2022: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica This Argentinian novel is a stomach-churning dark satire, presenting a dystopian future where all animals have caught a virus making them poisonous for human consumption and people have resorted to widespread cannibalism in order to satisfy their protein needs. Some individuals give up their …
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Book #103 of 2022: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami First published in 1999 (or 2003, for the English translation), this controversial thriller posits a dystopian Japan where school classes of fifteen-year-olds, selected by random lottery, are forced to fight one another to the death each year. The children are kidnapped, locked into metal collars lined …
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TV #29 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 5 Another strong year of Bob’s Burgers, albeit maybe a slight step down from the one before, if only because I don’t know that I’d include any of these individual episodes on an all-time favorites list. But they generally remain funny and confident explorations of characters, with the …
Book #102 of 2022: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke Author Katherine Locke nails the tense and paranoid atmosphere in this fictionalized account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (a student-led uprising against Soviet control that ultimately failed, although the novel doesn’t track the conflict all the way to its bitter end). And as ever …
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Book #101 of 2022: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #19) It was interesting to read this novel soon after watching the first season of Bosch: Legacy, which adapted both of its main plotlines: the quest to find a possible heir to dying billionaire Whitney Vance and the hunt for a …
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