TV #13 of 2020: Saturday Night Live, season 45 Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang are fun new additions to this long-running sketch show, and I have to credit the whole team both on and off-screen for bouncing back so strongly after the COVID-19 coronavirus curtailed the original plans for the season. (The three pre-recorded “SNL …
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Book #101 of 2020: Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #8) Although this book contains one of those Agatha Christie solutions that I deduced well before her stalwart investigator, I don’t consider that a weakness of the text or a detriment to my enjoyment of its puzzle. (Indeed, my top complaint about …
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Book #100 of 2020: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #2) An unfortunate continuation of the thin plot and character motivation issues that are keeping me at a distance from this fantasy series. The biggest event in this second volume is a magical tournament that isn’t even mentioned until a …
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Book #99 of 2020: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey This novella sort of feels like it’s over before it’s even begun, but within those sparse pages is a fun snapshot of a post-apocalyptic world and a young lesbian running away to find her place in it. The story reads like a typical western, and …
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Book #98 of 2020: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney I’ve been reading a lot lately about disease outbreaks as a way of understanding the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and this book from 2017 is a solid overview of the influenza pandemic that ravaged the global …
Movie #5 of 2020: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) This is the first Star Wars release in my lifetime that I didn’t see in theaters, partly due to new parent challenges and partly because of the mixed-to-negative reviews it seemed to be getting everywhere. Now that it’s out on Disney+ and I can …
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Book #97 of 2020: Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa (Profesorowa Szczupaczyńska #1) The idea of a nineteenth-century Polish Miss Marple has potential, but I haven’t found the characters or plot in this series debut to be especially interesting. The amateur detective in particular seems motivated to look into the case largely out of …
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TV #12 of 2020: Shameless, season 1 I like most of this large Chicago family, and I especially enjoy the hardscrabble depiction of their poor financial straits, which is pretty rare for TV. The Gallaghers’ lives are precarious in any number of ways, and seeing them cleverly hustle both in and outside of the law …
Book #96 of 2020: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix This 80s horror pastiche doesn’t win me over as early or as completely as author Grady Hendrix’s later effort The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires — set in the same town but otherwise unrelated — but it’s effective at balancing its various …
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Book #95 of 2020: Severance by Ling Ma This 2018 novel offers an intriguing fresh take on plague fiction, in which victims are reduced to mindlessly repeating their most familiar mechanical actions until they eventually waste away. It’s almost like a zombie scenario, except that the shambling mobs are just a sad curiosity rather than …
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