Book #246 of 2020: Daughter of Regals and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson Stephen R. Donaldson is one of my very favorite authors, and although I don’t remember liking this 1984 collection of fiction as much as his novels or the later Reave the Just and Other Tales, my current reread through his oeuvre …
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Book #245 of 2020: The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir by Sara Seager This title is a firsthand account of author Sara Seager’s experiences with death — primarily that of her young husband to cancer, but also those of her father, a dog, and two cats — as well as a look at …
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Book #244 of 2020: Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold A dark and gory feminist tale, perfect for the chilly weather and dimmer evenings we’re getting now at the tail end of the year. It’s a loose retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, where the girl in the woods is a teenager going home to …
Book #243 of 2020: Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko (Raybearer #1) A lovely piece of #ownvoices YA fantasy, with an all-black cast and imaginative worldbuilding loosely inspired by West African mythology. Debut author Jordan Ifueko is clearly breaking from the eurocentric genre norm here, but she also seems to have ventured further afield from the Orisha …
Book #242 of 2020: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #29) This wasn’t my first Discworld title, but for a long time, it was the only one I had read in the subseries about the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. It’s the volume I’ve reread the most as well, so I can attest that it works just …
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TV #42 of 2020: The Office, season 4 This is a deceptively light season of the classic workplace sitcom, with few of the plot shake-ups that have marked previous years. But there is still the structure of Ryan’s time at corporate bookending this particular run, and some new romantic developments offer intriguing forward momentum that …
Book #241 of 2020: Our Time Is Now by Stacey Abrams Author Stacey Abrams witnessed unprecedented levels of voter suppression in her 2018 campaign for Georgia governor (in which her opponent was the state official doing most of the suppressing), and even the slight fraction that she presents here should be infuriating to anyone who …
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TV #41 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 7 The penultimate run of this legal drama petered out by the end, but this final year is somehow another big step down. On a scene-by-scene basis The Good Wife continues to bear a surface resemblance to the show it used to be, but the characterizations and …
Book #240 of 2020: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #2) This alternative history sequel furthers the accelerated timeline for space travel after the natural disaster of the original novel, with most of its new plot concerning a 1960s first voyage to Mars. That’s fun to see play out via Apollo-level technology, …
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Book #239 of 2020: The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #4) I know it was only a matter of time before Detective Harry Bosch would get around to the cold case of his mother’s murder, but most of the investigation here plays out too straightforwardly to keep my full interest. The lack of …
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