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 …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel”
Book Review: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi”
TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 4
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 …
Book Review: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket
Book #77 of 2020: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #4) I’ve been somewhat lukewarm on this prequel series, but it goes out on a suitably climactic high note, with most of the action confined to the tight spaces of a speeding train. Lemony Snicket …
Continue reading “Book Review: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket”
Book Review: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
Book #76 of 2020: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland (Dread Nation #2) This Reconstruction-era zombie sequel is enough of an improvement over the debut that I’m happy to bump my rating up to four stars. Overall the various elements are maybe still pulling in too many different directions, but a nebulous plot works better here …
Continue reading “Book Review: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland”
Book Review: And I Darken by Kiersten White
Book #75 of 2020: And I Darken by Kiersten White (The Conqueror’s Saga, #1) I like the idea of this YA alternative history about the young life of a female Vlad the Impaler, but the plot throughout this first volume hasn’t gripped me just yet. Although Lada and her brother are captives of the Ottoman …
Continue reading “Book Review: And I Darken by Kiersten White”
TV Review: His Dark Materials, season 1
TV #8 of 2020: His Dark Materials, season 1 For all its spoken exposition, this literary adaptation somehow manages to be downright inscrutable in terms of motivation and worldbuilding, such that neither the characters nor their setting feel anywhere near as fleshed-out as they do on the page. (The climactic battle for the panserbjørne throne, …
Book Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz
Book #74 of 2020: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz As a self-help book, this text seems difficult — albeit worthwhile — to implement in day-to-day life for salary discussions, vehicle purchases, and so on. Anyone interested in using its tips to improve …
Book Review: The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum
Book #73 of 2020: The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum With a few caveats, this is an informative look at massive disease outbreaks from the ‘Spanish’ influenza of 1918 through more recent crises like Ebola, Zika, and SARS. The book could have been structured better in terms …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 