Book #327 of 2021: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee I like the spooky atmosphere of a Catskills boarding school where the students are dabbling in the occult with a potential side of murder, but the plot is a bit too derivative of other “dark academia” stories out there with an extracurricular club falling …
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Book #326 of 2021: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn Although relatively short, this new essay collection by Jewish author Dara Horn literally took my breath away. I gasped, and I sobbed, and I felt incredibly, reassuringly seen. She cuts straight to the heart of life in the modern …
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Book #325 of 2021: The Exposed by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #27) The second ghostwritten Animorphs novel offers a decent if anticlimactic adventure, most notable for the deep underwater scenes of Rachel and Tobias as sperm whales hunting and battling a giant squid to bring up to the surface for the whole team to acquire. …
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TV #83 of 2021: Shameless, season 11 This title has always been all over the map tonally, so perhaps it’s fitting that its closing run would be produced and set during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although in practice, the only real impact on events seems to be that everyone is wearing masks and …
Book #324 of 2021: Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby This is a heavy title, both for the graphic violence / gore and for the inherent bleakness of the premise: two grieving fathers, unaccepting of their sons’ sexuality in life, are drawn to one another in shared rage after the young husbands are brutally murdered …
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Book #323 of 2021: The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden by Peter L. Bergen A well-researched biography, although not one that actually answers its own question of explaining the unique radicalization path of its subject from millionaire son of a Middle East construction dynasty to Western-hating Jihadist and inadvertent architect of the modern …
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TV #82 of 2021: Fringe, season 2 This year drops the ball a few times in terms of maintaining the tension in its serialized plot — say hi to Meghan Markle, whose junior agent disappears after the second hour — but overall it continues the strong streak that developed late in the initial run. The …
Book #322 of 2021: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance #2) An improvement on A Deadly Education, which I already enjoyed quite a lot. This sequel returns us to the Scholomance, that magic boarding school / honeypot in a pocket dimension of Lovecraftian space where the students are prey to all manner of …
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Book #321 of 2021: The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #4) This 1980 sci-fi finale is honestly worse than the miserable third volume, although it picks up slightly for its closing stretch, in which the tower at the headwaters of the river is finally reached and breached. Not that that goal has ever …
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Book #320 of 2021: ReDawn by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Skyward Flight #2) I’m still not entirely sure why these Skyward novellas have been produced as co-written supplements to the main series that many readers will inevitably skip (accidentally or otherwise), but so far they’ve been worth seeking out, both as engaging independent tales …
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