Book #204 of 2020: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #2) This is a strange sequel to Gideon the Ninth, retaining the excellent focus on lesbian space necromancers but shifting perspectives from the snarky cavalier of the first book to her bitter former enemy. Harrowhawk has also gone mad and literally forgotten …
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Book #203 of 2020: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever #2) This fantasy sequel is structured somewhat like The Empire Strikes Back, a downbeat middle chapter that recontextualizes an earlier victory as a minor skirmish and not the decisive blow it may have seemed. In Lord Foul’s …
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TV #34 of 2020: Shameless, season 10 And with that I’m all caught up on Shameless, after my wife and I watched all 122 episodes in roughly as many days. The show has passed through several different versions of itself in that time, from an interestingly flawed family drama to (briefly) a pretty compelling one, …
Book #202 of 2020: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones The difficulty with millennial memoirs is that for the most part, our generation has not yet reached a stage where we can honestly put the arc of our lives into a complete coherent narrative for ourselves or others. Such is the case …
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Book #201 of 2020: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #24) Author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is reliably hilarious, and I appreciate how his City Watch subseries blends that humor with wry philosophizing and a detective story structure. The question for me as a reader is always whether the writer can stay out of his …
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Book #200 of 2020: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao I wasn’t sure what to expect of a standalone spinoff sequel to the Rise of the Empress duology, whose cruel first volume of an antiheroine’s ascension engaged me far more than its softer follow-up tracking her defeat. For this new book, author …
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Book #199 of 2020: Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer A fascinating and even-handed account of how America and Russia / the Soviet Union have each played a role in other countries’ elections — sometimes openly and sometimes not — from the end of World War I …
Book #198 of 2020: Mirage by Somaiya Daud (Mirage #1) I love the rich cultural history that author Somaiya Daud pours into this YA sci-fi debut, much of it drawn from her own Moroccan heritage. She has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the politics of occupation and resistance, and although the plot …
Book #197 of 2020: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix This story of a haunted IKEA-type store plays out about as expected, but I think it’s my least favorite of the four Grady Hendrix novels I’ve read so far. Too much in the early chapters seems like a cartoonish satire on corporate retail culture, so when the …
Book #196 of 2020: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison This 1992 book is a short but super interesting piece of literary criticism, adapted from a series of lectures given by author Toni Morrison several years before. She argues for viewing classic works by white American writers through a …
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