Book #179 of 2021: Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman I’m getting big Midge Maisel vibes from this novel about a 1960s Jewish housewife who leaves her husband and ends up pursuing a new career as a newspaper crime reporter. I love her brashness as a person finding her own path through a tough …
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Book #178 of 2021: Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by Kenneth Cain, Andrew Thomson, and Heidi Postlewait I have profoundly mixed feelings on this 2004 book, which documents its three authors’ experiences as United Nations peacekeepers in the 1990s. They initially meet while stationed together in Cambodia, but …
TV #53 of 2021: Star Wars Rebels, season 3 Another mixed bag of a season. The best element is clearly the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn, making his long-overdue introduction into proper Star Wars canon a full quarter-century after first appearing in the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire. I actually haven’t read any of the …
Book #177 of 2021: Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #18) Four solid but generally unremarkable short mystery stories, also published in the US under the title Dead Man’s Mirror. There are murders disguised as suicides and vice versa, stolen military documents (in one of author Agatha Christie’s rare moments of letting …
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TV #52 of 2021: Master of None, season 3 Returning to this series four years after its latest run gives the producers a chance to reinvent the narrative — and distance it from co-creator and original star Aziz Ansari, still under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations — and to their credit, they’ve seized that …
Book #176 of 2021: The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone #2) Another strong entry in this unfairly-obscure fantasy quartet. I don’t like it quite as much as the previous volume, in part since a couple of the new storylines — Anne’s to some extent, but especially Aspar’s — seem …
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Book #175 of 2021: The Capture by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #6) The big hook to this sixth Animorphs volume — the premise alluded to on the front cover and plainly stated on the back — doesn’t actually occur until about two-thirds of the way through the text. Spoiler alert: it’s that Jake himself is …
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Book #174 of 2021: Yearbook by Seth Rogen A heartfelt and hilarious memoir from actor Seth Rogen, reflecting on his childhood and Hollywood career thus far. I especially love how he centers his Jewish identity throughout, both in the particulars of a youth spent at bar mitzvah parties and religious summer camps and in his …
Book #173 of 2021: Going Postal by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #33) I generally enjoy the Discworld comic fantasy series, but this entry is perhaps a bit shaggy for my tastes. Although the basic premise of a con artist conscripted into running the failing Ankh-Morpork post office has potential, and that protagonist’s arc is a solid …
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Book #172 of 2021: Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain This is a remarkable and remarkably ambitious project, bringing together eighty prominent African American writers, from Angela Davis to Jamelle Bouie to Isabel Wilkerson, in order to pen a sweeping account of …
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