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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TV #73 of 2021: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 8 Over the course of its history, the writers and cast on this police sitcom have appeared increasingly uneasy with its role as copaganda, leading to public statements and scripts that openly engage with institutional abuse and other social justice issues. For this last season, written in the …
Book #268 of 2021: The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison (The Goblin Emperor #2) I’ve enjoyed this spinoff sequel to 2014’s The Goblin Emperor, but I don’t love it nearly as much as the original novel. Leaving the imperial palace and its lonely ruler behind, we’re instead presented with a low-stakes, street-level plot …
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Book #267 of 2021: This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey (This Is Not the Jess Show #1) I love the premise here, which is like a YA mashup of The Truman Show with The Running Man, but I’m less sold on the execution. Partly that’s a matter of structure: our teenage protagonist …
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Book #266 of 2021: The Quiet American by Graham Greene This 1955 novel reads as a prescient (though obviously unheeded) critique of colonialism and American-style foreign intervention, following a journalist and an intelligence officer in the ‘Indochina’ region at the start of the Vietnam War. It draws on author Graham Greene’s own experience as a …
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