TV #45 of 2021: Saturday Night Live, season 46 I may be grading on a curve here, but the erstwhile sketch comedy series bounced back pretty strong from (or rather, during) COVID-19. Following the few “SNL at Home” episodes that closed out the past season, it was sort of a relief to see the gang …
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Book #139 of 2021: Passing by Nella Larsen An interesting 1929 novella about a black woman’s friend crossing the color line to present as white instead. The racial insights (and potential queer subtext) from almost a century ago are worth checking out, but the ending plays into the regrettable trope of the ‘tragic mulatto’ — …
Book #138 of 2021: The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis (The Initial Insult #1) This first volume of a planned YA duology is a fun but kind of goofy modern spin on The Cask of Amontillado, playing out against a broad pastiche of several other Poe stories as well. So you’ve got the teenage girl …
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Book #137 of 2021: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo (King of Scars #2) This is a much busier volume than its predecessor in the King of Scars duology, but author Leigh Bardugo impressively manages to bring it all together in the end (which is a welcome change from how disconnected Nina’s storyline felt before). …
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TV #44 of 2021: Dawson’s Creek, season 3 Pacey Witter is the beating heart of this show, and the third season gets better as it goes along by leaning into the prickly attraction between him and Joey. That’s still not perfect storytelling — it’s a major disconnect from their dynamic the year before, and the …
Book #136 of 2021: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright Among the more unexpected surprises of 2021 has been this publication of a new novel by Richard Wright, eighty years after it was rejected by publishers and made available only as a heavily-truncated short story. In this full version, it’s a text as …
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TV #43 of 2021: Star Wars Rebels, season 2 A definite step down from its first season, this sophomore run of the Disney Star Wars cartoon is a frustratingly meandering piece of storytelling. There are some slight attempts at character arcs, but mostly we’re given a lot of episodic filler that doesn’t really capitalize on …
Book #135 of 2021: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman This novella is a sorrowful look at an elderly man gradually losing his memories to dementia, but it’s a bit too short and disjointed to be entirely effective. The whole idea is that he’s slipping between past and …
Book #134 of 2021: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers #4) Another lovely and warmhearted picture of alien diversity, reportedly the last in the loose Wayfarers series from author Becky Chambers. (These stories are discrete enough that there’s no internal continuity reason for this to be a conclusion, but that’s what …
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Book #133 of 2021: Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher (William Shakespeare’s Star Wars #4) This book is built around a cute idea, but once you get past that basic gimmick of retelling the first Star Wars movie in iambic pentameter — “In time so long ago begins our play / In …
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