Book #85 of 2020: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix The tone of this novel in which a group of 90s housewives take on an undead interloper in their suburb community could so easily trip over into camp, but author Grady Hendrix avoids that by rooting the narrative in a …
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Book #84 of 2020: Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah This popular science title from 2016 offers an engaging and informative explanation of disease outbreaks, focused primarily on the biology of the pathogens that carry them. Author Sonia Shah has literally given TED Talks on the subject, and it …
Book #83 of 2020: Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb (The Fitz and the Fool #3) The closing chapters of this 2017 fantasy novel form a meaningful sendoff to the hero and world first introduced in 1995’s Assassin’s Apprentice. Overall, however, the book is far too slow and exposition-heavy — and because the larger Realm of …
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Book #82 of 2020: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden A light but sweet look back at the production of the 1980s cult classic The Princess Bride through the eyes of its leading man. This is definitely one of those books that’s helped …
Book #81 of 2020: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin (Great Cities #1) I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but author N. K. Jemisin’s foray into urban fantasy reads rather like a 1990s throwback, with its tale of five New Yorkers who become powerful avatars of their respective boroughs harkening …
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Book #80 of 2020: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez This sci-fi story changes shape rather dramatically at several points, and the ending veers a bit too far into the abstract and surreal for my tastes. But gosh — there’s just so much I adore in the novel that makes up for all that. This …
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TV #10 of 2020: Russian Doll, season 1 This story about a woman repeatedly dying in a decaying time loop — Happy Death Day meets The Langoliers, roughly — takes a little while to grow on me, and I’m still not convinced its internal logic quite checks out. But the characters are endearing, and I’ve …
Book #79 of 2020: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel As in her earlier Station Eleven, author Emily St. John Mandel has a real talent for crafting lifelike protagonists whose personal struggles are deeply compelling to watch unfold. Here, however, I feel as though those threads are too often truncated individually, and too …
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Book #78 of 2020: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi (War Girls #1) This #ownvoices sci-fi novel is an amazingly brutal piece of Afrofuturism, sort of like Black Panther by way of Mad Max: Fury Road. Inspired by the Nigerian Civil War (as experienced by author Tochi Onyebuchi’s mother), it tracks two teenage sisters who end …
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TV #9 of 2020: Better Call Saul, season 4 My original review from 2018: “I’ve mentioned this before, but one reason that I prefer Better Call Saul to its parent show is that Walter White has always struck me as being evil right from the start – Breaking Bad could be exciting and horrifying, but …
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