Book #72 of 2022: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of …
Continue reading “Book Review: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry”
Book #71 of 2022: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #4) As far as mystery hooks go, it’s hard to beat an ad being placed in a sleepy village newspaper, politely informing its readers of the place and time of an upcoming murder — where sure enough, someone winds up killed and …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie”
Book #70 of 2022: The Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #42) In another riff on a classic sci-fi premise, this Animorphs novel by ghostwriter Emily Costello — fresh off her dubious success with Alternamorphs #2 — finds the team shrinking down to microscopic size, in order to chase a squad of Helmacrons who have …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Journey by K. A. Applegate”
TV #18 of 2022: Moon Knight, season 1 I’ve enjoyed the first half of this six-episode miniseries as a character study of a meek man coming to realize his blackouts and sleepwalking are the result of undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder — and that his opposite persona is a confident ex-mercenary who’s also the superpowered avatar …
Book #69 of 2022: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz This book is primarily a biography of Smedley Darlington Butler, a now-obscure figure from the late nineteenth / early twentieth century who was once a household name as a military leader-turned-reformist. In …
Book #68 of 2022: The Outside by Ada Hoffmann (The Outside #1) A brilliant extension of Lovecraftian cosmic horror into hard sci-fi, in which certain equations and lines of scientific inquiry can rupture the laws of physics and open a window into the unknowable, madness-inducing chaos writhing outside reality. My strong suspicion is that we’re …
Book #67 of 2022: O Beautiful by Jung Yun This novel is a real powerhouse, as scathing as it is insightful about white and male entitlement in small-town America. (The protagonist is sexually assaulted by her airplane seatmate in the opening chapter, and things don’t get any better from there.) She’s a fledgling reporter on …
TV #17 of 2022: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 6 Overall I would call this the strongest run yet of DS9 — and the Star Trek saga at large, for that matter — although that designation does come with a few glaring exceptions. First is the episode “Profit and Lace,” a thankfully standalone / …
Continue reading “TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 6”
Book #66 of 2022: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner This historical account of Germany following World War II is detailed and well-researched, tracing how the country’s population began transitioning from perpetrators, victims, and complicit bystanders of the Holocaust into participants in modern western democracy once more. But …
Book #65 of 2022: The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #5) A solid legal thriller like most in its series, but one with some unfortunate pacing issues and a letdown of an ending, in my opinion. Nevertheless, this volume is interesting for showing a bit more serialization than the Harry Bosch-adjacent novels …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more