Book #358 of 2021: Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket This new novel from author Lemony Snicket is very discursive, a word which here means wandering down endless alleyways of thought instead of sticking to the nominal plot of the narrator investigating his discovery of a note warning he’s eaten poison for breakfast. As he …
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Book #357 of 2021: Dark Rise by C. S. Pacat (Dark Rise #1) I’m quite torn on how to rate this historical fantasy novel, but ultimately I think three-out-of-five stars is a fair reflection of my overall reaction to it. Although I really love the ending and the broader shape of the story that’s revealed …
Book #356 of 2021: Hook, Line & Sinister: Mysteries to Reel You In edited by T. Jefferson Parker This 2010 collection is… fine. The subtitle is a bit misleading — the entries are generally more like crime thrillers than mysteries per se — but as a charity anthology of original fiction involving fishing, written by …
Book #355 of 2021: The Reunion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #30) I’m not a fan of the coincidence-heavy setup to this Animorphs volume — Marco has a nightmare involving his mom, the Controller to the Yeerk Visser One, which leads him to skip school and randomly go to the city’s business district, where she …
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Book #354 of 2021: Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson (Vespertine #1) I’ve described author Margaret Rogerson’s fantasy fiction as an Old Kingdom readalike in the past, and she proves it again in this latest novel, in which a trainee nun fights undead spirits with the help of one bound to her that only she can hear …
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Book #353 of 2021: Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution by H. W. Brands This is a solid history of the American Revolution, with plenty of specific details that I didn’t previously know. It’s burdened with a misleading title, however, as there’s no real attempt here to apply an analytic …
Book #352 of 2021: Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie An interesting little oddity, and author Agatha Christie’s apparent sole foray into historical fiction — easy as it is now to forget that all her quaint drawing-room mysteries were actually set contemporaneously upon release — not to mention one of only four Christie …
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Book #351 of 2021: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher I enjoy the protagonist’s magic here, which is limited to spells about baking and eventually gets put to creative use in defending the city from an invading army. I also approve of the dark and creepily realistic portrayal of a growing extremist …
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TV #86 of 2021: Doctor Who: Flux Doctor Who is a franchise that thrives on change, and so I have to credit soon-to-be-former showrunner Chris Chibnall for structuring this season as basically one single six-episode story, an experiment in serialization the likes of which the show hasn’t attempted since maybe Trial of a Time Lord …
TV #85 of 2021: ReBoot, season 3 An absolute delight, all the way through to that daft but earned Penzance recap number that closes everything out. This run starts right where the last one left off (although a year and a half had passed for viewers), and it continues the strong streak of serialized plot …
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