Book #25 of 2022: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #1) This YA fantasy novel reads as a blend of National Treasure with Six of Crows, which is not a combination that entirely works for me. (I’m not using that latter title as a shorthand for any heist story, either: this is …
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Book #24 of 2022: The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #27) The loose thread linking the twelve detective stories in this collection is that Hercule Poirot is planning to retire, but first wants to solve a sequence of grand cases mirroring the legendary feats of his namesake, the Greco-Roman demigod Hercules. Honestly, …
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Movie #6 of 2022: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) A solid yet ultimately unambitious Star Trek vehicle, with a title and premise that sound more exciting that what’s actually delivered. Theoretically speaking, this is a story about the Federation trying to force an indigenous(-ish) species off of their planet, so that its unique properties that keep …
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Book #23 of 2022: Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2) This sequel is rather cleanly bifurcated by a development midway through, and although both of the resulting sections have their strengths, I think the opening is more successful than the close. (Call it a five-star passage followed by …
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TV #8 of 2022: Star Trek: Voyager, season 3 Overall, this third year of Star Trek’s Lost in Space riff displays the same weaknesses as before. Few of its episodes are terribly awful — and I’d even grant that none are as bad as some of the clunkers from season 2 — but they still …
Book #22 of 2022: The Mutation by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #36) Another somewhat-middling Animorphs adventure, this time by one-off ghostwriter Erica Bobone. The initial premise is fine: the Yeerks are apparently still searching for the sunken Pemalite craft from #27 The Exposed, and have built an advanced heavy-duty submarine that the heroes decide they …
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Book #21 of 2022: Evershore by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Skyward Flight #3) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.] This final (?) Skyward novella feels like the most perfunctory of the lot, the entry whose events would be easiest to summarize in a sentence or two for any readers who skip …
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TV #7 of 2022: The Book of Boba Fett, season 1 This spinoff title coasts by on the lingering coolness of a live-action Star Wars show and the fun of revisiting the aftermath of Jabba the Hutt’s death from Return of the Jedi, but it’s a substantial step down in quality from its parent series …
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Book #20 of 2022: The Boy Who Lost His Birthday: A Memoir of Loss, Survival, and Triumph by Laszlo Berkowits with Robert W. Kenny [Disclaimer: Although I did not meet him until 2016 and never knew him especially well, I am a member of the temple where Laszlo Berkowits served as Rabbi Emeritus until his …
Book #19 of 2022: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu This is less a novel than a sequence of tangentially-related chapter-length stories, and although individual moments either tug at the heartstrings or pose some intriguing sci-fi concepts, I’m pretty lukewarm on the project as a whole. It’s a book about a …
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