Book #125 of 2020: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks I enjoy the middle of this historical fiction piece, but it’s a little slow to start and goes somewhat off the rails by the end. Still, the core of the plot — about the true case of a 17th-century British village whose residents chose to …
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Book #124 of 2020: Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson The twists in this mystery thriller make it hard to discuss without spoilers, but they don’t always land satisfyingly for me as a reader. There are also some pacing issues about when certain revelations come to light, and a few instances of characters not asking …
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Book #123 of 2020: Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein Author Alexander Weinstein has a real talent for thinking up interestingly disturbing sci-fi premises based on new and emerging technologies, like the parents in the title story who have to delete their digital offspring after a malware infection or the couple from “Openness” …
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Book #122 of 2020: Clique Bait by Ann Valett This high school revenge novel is lightweight but fun, playing out vaguely along the lines of Mean Girls (or Hannah Capin’s recent Foul is Fair, minus that book’s heavy-handed Shakespearean conceit). A teenage nobody infiltrates the popular kids with ulterior motives to take them down, gets …
Book #121 of 2020: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins The idea of a Hunger Games prequel about the young Coriolanus Snow isn’t necessarily a bad one, but I feel like there are three key elements that such a project would need to deliver in order to be successful. Namely, the book …
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TV #19 of 2020: Better Call Saul, season 5 This is not my favorite run of the Breaking Bad prequel, but it remains a meticulous character study punctuated by electrifying moments of sheer audacity. (I’m not sure I breathed once during the last scene of episode nine, I was so edge.) Everyone this year feels …
Book #120 of 2020: Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #5) The fifth novella in this loose series about children longing to return to the fantasy worlds they once visited is most similar to the third, featuring a group of the kids again traveling to someone else’s magical realm to help resolve a …
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Book #119 of 2020: Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner At turns inspirational, eye-opening, and infuriating, activist Judith Heumann’s account of her lifelong fight to enshrine civil rights protections for people with disabilities deserves to be read widely. It’s easy to not think about matters …
TV #18 of 2020: Shameless, season 3 As always, I wish I could separate the parts of this series that I like from the ones I really don’t. There’s a compelling family drama here, but it’s generally couched amid so much tasteless shock humor and tedious subplotting that it’s hard for anything to ever land …
Book #118 of 2020: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester As with much of 1950s science-fiction, this novel is as full of big ideas and fun characters as it is of regrettable social attitudes and bizarre plot leaps. I like the core concept of a marooned astronaut learning to teleport and reinventing himself to …
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