TV #33 of 2019: Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 4 Another season of Star Trek that’s generally solid, but not exactly spectacular on an episode-by-episode basis. The sinister Starfleet xenophobia in “The Drumhead” definitely makes me sit up and pay attention, and there are a few other gems like “Future Imperfect” and “Clues” scattered …
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Book #167 of 2019: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone A quick novella about two women on opposite sides of a reality-spanning conflict, who use time-travel to counter one another’s moves (and counter-moves, and counter-counter-moves, and so on). Each field operative has more in common with her …
Book #166 of 2019: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson This nonfiction book is partly about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and partly about the serial killer H. H. Holmes, who operated his infamous ‘murder castle’ nearby during that same time. Both …
Book #165 of 2019: Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy #5) This final Hitchhiker’s book is, unfortunately, mostly toothless. It skates by on some borrowed goodwill from earlier in the series, but it also abandons numerous plots, concepts, and figures that really deserved a proper send-off of their own. And …
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Book #164 of 2019: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson I reread this title for my book club meeting tonight, but I mostly stand by my previous review from 2017: “A sobering and deeply moving account from death row lawyer Bryan Stevenson on the injustices that pervade our justice system, …
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Book #163 of 2019: Golden Child by Claire Adam I like this novel’s #ownvoices setting of rural Trinidad in the 1980s, but am fairly unmoved by the plot of a father whose least-favorite son has gone missing. It’s a short book already, and this character’s central conflict point is both relegated to the very end …
Book #162 of 2019: Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane Overall a sharp, character-driven novel exploring the ties between two Irish-American families living next-door to each other in suburban New York. Author Mary Beth Keane excels at depicting the long shadows that childhood trauma can cast, and the difficulty of not repeating the patterns …
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Book #161 of 2019: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller I didn’t have much patience for this generic post-apocalypse story about a widower living in rural isolation with his dog and his somehow-more-misanthropic neighbor. (That guy shoots anyone who tresspasses into their compound. Our narrator does too; he just feels bad about it.) The tone …
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Book #160 of 2019: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Little Women #1) This 1868 novel is understandably old-fashioned, and the episodic early chapters can sometimes make it feel more like a short story collection than a single cohesive narrative. Yet its characters are so charming and well-realized that it’s simply a joy to follow …
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TV #32 of 2019: Orange Is the New Black, season 7 Netflix’s flagship dramedy has always had two distinct modes of storytelling, which sometimes complement each other but more often work at cross-purposes. In the first, the program aims to tell grounded, realistic stories, using its prison setting and signature flashback structure to shine a …
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