Book #15 of 2021: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis (Tales from the Chocolate Heart #1) A cute little book about a young dragon who gets cursed into the body of a human and discovers her true passion for hot cocoa. Unfortunately, it has a few issues typical of the middle-grade fantasy …
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Book #14 of 2021: Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman (The Rabbi Small Mysteries #1) This series has been on my radar for a while, and although I’m not sure I’m going to read all dozen volumes, the first one is pretty neat. It’s one of those stories in which a police investigation …
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Book #13 of 2021: The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie A charmingly creepy departure for author Agatha Christie, who trades in her usual detective fiction for a dozen tales of the supernatural (or supernatural-adjacent). Normally when she’s written of things like possessions and premonitions, their reality is ultimately undermined Scooby-Doo-style by some more mundane …
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TV #4 of 2021: Justified, season 1 I’m not thrilled with the first hour of this show about a trigger-happy US Marshal, which has a whole lot of white supremacist violence and rhetoric used as an apparent shorthand for villainy, I assume so that audiences can know which group of white gentiles are the good …
Book #12 of 2021: The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty An interesting but digressive text, blending personal memoir and genealogical research with an effort to trace the roots of southern cuisine through enslaved and free black traditions. Author Michael W. Twitty’s passion for …
Book #11 of 2021: Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford [CW: sexual assault. I’m not sharing the cover of this book, out of concern that it may be triggering.] Author Lacy Crawford’s first nonfiction title offers powerful testimony on the way she was treated as an underage girl at a prestigious boarding school in …
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Book #10 of 2021: Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans An interesting survey read, albeit with less of a narrative throughline than I would have expected. Author Claire L. Evans presents a history of the internet’s development that focuses on its female pioneers and participants, …
Book #9 of 2021: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow Although author Cory Doctorow’s debut novel doesn’t indulge in the patronizing moralism of some of his later works, its edgy nihilism is nevertheless nearly as tiresome. There’s a neat concept here about an “adhocracy” stepping in to keep a beloved theme …
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TV #3 of 2021: Kim’s Convenience, season 2 A slight improvement over the first year of this Canadian sitcom, both by making Appa a bit less caustically opinionated and by finally introducing some plot developments at the end of the season that speak to exciting shake-ups ahead. For now, though, it’s a lot of status …
Book #8 of 2021: The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #3) This is one of my favorite Narnia installments, in part because it’s an odd misfit even for such a haphazard and eclectic series. The fifth volume to be written, it’s also the first time author C. S. …
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