Book #277 of 2021: The Discovery by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #20) Well, I’ve been wanting the Animorphs series to grow more serialized, and it’s hard to beat the introduction of a new member, for the first time since Ax’s arrival in #4 The Message. (That would ordinarily be a bit of a spoiler, as …
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Book #276 of 2021: The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Gap Cycle #5) I still don’t altogether love this 90s space opera, which has a lot of scenes of people just standing around talking, even in this climactic finale. Don’t get me wrong: the dialogue here is …
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Book #275 of 2021: Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin “Delightful” may not be the best word for this story of a depressed hypochondriac suffering from panic attacks, but it’s nevertheless a wicked sharp character study that swiftly draws a reader in. There’s so much wrong with the protagonist that …
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Book #274 of 2021: A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski This 2011 title should really have been called “A Gay and Lesbian History of the United States,” due to how little it addresses the remainder of the LGBT+ acronym. The treatment of transgender people is particularly egregious, presenting just a few …
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Book #273 of 2021: Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #5) Author Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel was later followed by a number of loose prequels, detailing how the world arrived at the future civilization depicted here, with humanity divided into three warring tribes: ‘Clayark’ mutants infected with an alien pathogen, regular people, and psychics …
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TV #74 of 2021: Scandal, season 2 This second year of the presidential-fixer-and-mistress show is an undeniable improvement over the first, both steadier in its storytelling and with better definition to its characters. (I still don’t really understand what Harrison and Abby’s exact skillsets are within the firm, but at least they have clearer personalities …
Book #272 of 2021: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia The best part of this historical noir adventure is its setting of 1970s Mexico City, as rendered in rich #ownvoices detail from author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I don’t love the overall story as much as her previous titles Certain Dark Things and Mexican Gothic — …
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Book #271 of 2021: The Departure by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #19) Cassie is in crisis. The latest Animorphs battle wasn’t even that bad by the scale of what they’ve faced before, but as sometimes happens, it was enough to push her to a breaking point. A pacifist teen forced yet again to kill, she …
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Book #270 of 2021: D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber Not bad, but a pretty typical novel of the child-goes-to-another-world-to-have-a-series-of-strange-encounters variety, a la The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and so forth. The most distinctive part of this book is also its most frustrating, as there’s no consistent and coherent explanation …
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Book #269 of 2021: Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #22) A curious story. The first half of this Agatha Christie mystery reads almost like one of her pseudonymous Mary Westmacott romance / character studies up until the murder happens, and then when Poirot finally makes his entrance, he doesn’t spend much time investigating …
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