Book #211 of 2019: Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #4) This final volume in The Rain Wild Chronicles embodies all of the problems of that fantasy quartet. It’s long and uneventful and curiously detached from its characters, none of whom seem to have much of an arc or any particular …
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Book #210 of 2019: Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal by Renia Spiegel with her sister Elizabeth Bellak I have mixed feelings about this diary of a Polish Jew who was killed by the Nazis at age 18. The obvious comparison point is fellow Holocaust victim Anne Frank, but Frank was a consummate observer who hoped …
Book #209 of 2019: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt This is an interesting topic, and I appreciate the array of studies that author Tom Vanderbilt has assembled for the task, but I find many of his arguments hard to parse, reliant on unjustified …
Book #208 of 2019: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson This is one of those popular history volumes that’s a deep dive into a fairly narrow topic, and I definitely learned a lot about the shipwreck incident that’s usually rendered as just a sentence or two in the account of …
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Book #207 of 2019: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2) This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between …
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Book #206 of 2019: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo This intergenerational drama reads fine on the surface, but so many elements ring false upon a moment’s reflection. Like the fact that the central family is repeatedly described as Catholic but never shown doing anything religious, or that the college professor complaining …
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Movie #11 of 2019: Cooties (2014) Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by …
Book #205 of 2019: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner This story of a New York City Jewish family on the verge of divorce has well-drawn (albeit realistically frustrating) characters and some sharp observations on marriage, parenting, and gender roles. I like the late perspective shift that complicates our understanding of the Fleishman dynamics …
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Book #204 of 2019: Nightbooks by J. A. White In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and …
Book #203 of 2019: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall This experimental novel starts out like a cross between Memento and House of Leaves before taking a detour through Neverwhere and ending up finally at Jaws. In other words, it’s a story about an amnesiac receiving messages from his former self, wherein the actual …
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