Book #374 of 2021: Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott This pseudonymous (and therefore non-mystery) Agatha Christie novel from 1944 is my favorite thing I’ve read from her yet, under either byline. It’s a deceptively simple tale on its face: a middle-aged Englishwoman, delayed as the only passenger at a desert waystation whilst returning …
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Book #373 of 2021: The Illusion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #33) Remember that Scholastic Book Fair series from the 90s with all the wacky covers of kids turning into animals? Haha, anyway, this is the volume where one of those middle-schoolers gets captured and violently tortured in excruciating detail for a good portion of …
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Book #372 of 2021: The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang A soul-searching 2021 effort to explore the thorny issue of Asian-American identity: why it’s a problematic construct for attempting to incorporate so many diverse experiences and national origins into a theoretical monolith, and why it has generally been a poor fit within this nation’s …
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Book #371 of 2021: All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk This is a rollicking nonfiction attempt to grapple with the wide range of Marvel Comics titles, written by a lifelong fan after he went back to read literally all of them — the …
TV #90 of 2021: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 1 My expectations weren’t high going into this recent Clone Wars spinoff, as I generally found that parent show to be of variable quality and didn’t think these particular ‘defective clone’ figures made much of an impression beyond a gimmick during their brief appearance there. …
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Book #370 of 2021: Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE Like many self-help books, this 2019 title feels as though it probably could have been stripped of repetitive examples and published at magazine-article length, if not for the fact …
Book #369 of 2021: Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood The publisher is pitching this novel as an “Ethiopian-inspired… fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre,” which doesn’t quite seem to hit the mark, as the two books really only share a wealthy man named Mr. Rochester whose manor holds dark secrets (and a few isolated …
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Book #368 of 2021: The Reversal by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #3) I enjoy both Mickey Haller and his half-brother Harry Bosch as protagonists, and a team-up is always fun for combining their respective lawyer and detective perspectives. This particular exercise feels as though it needs some further twist to really elevate the material, however, …
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TV #89 of 2021: Hawkeye, season 1 The latest Marvel show on Disney+ is a flawed but fun action-comedy, taking full advantage of the Christmas setting for a festive buddy romp as Clint Barton reluctantly accepts an eager new junior partner. He’s trying to shut down a mob investigation into the Ronin, his blood-soaked alter …
Book #367 of 2021: The Separation by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #32) I realize suspension of disbelief is an odd criterion for a series about middle-schoolers changing into animals to fight aliens, but I find this book with the two Rachels particularly hard to swallow. I actually dig the initial premise: the protagonist is injured …
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