Book #146 of 2019: Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman One part memoir of an American journalist’s life abroad in Paris, one part ethnography of French attitudes and approaches towards childraising. Mostly, the latter boils down to firmer rules, not feeling pressure to meet particular milestones, …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum
Book #145 of 2019: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum In this 2019 collection of essays, most previously published elsewhere, culture critic Emily Nussbaum explores many facets of television as a medium and how it has grown as an avenue for artistic expression over the past few …
Book Review: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams
Book #144 of 2019: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy #4) This novel is packed with the usual dry witticisms and absurdist observations of author Douglas Adams, but it carries a very different tenor to the rest of this comic sci-fi series. The new …
Continue reading “Book Review: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams”
Book Review: Pennyroyal Academy by M. A. Larson
Book #143 of 2019: Pennyroyal Academy by M. A. Larson (Pennyroyal Academy #1) This middle-grade fantasy novel keeps its heroine a cipher for far too long, and when readers finally learn her peculiar backstory, it doesn’t really track with what we’ve seen or elucidate her driving goals. (Why does she want to be a warrior …
Continue reading “Book Review: Pennyroyal Academy by M. A. Larson”
Book Review: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
Book #142 of 2019: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan A deep dive into a fairly short span of Roman history, from the defeat of the enemy city-states Corinth and Carthage in 146 BCE to the death of the general Sulla in 78 BCE. …
Book Review: Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix
Book #141 of 2019: Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix A lightweight Regency romp with a sprinkling of fantasy elements. I’d like to see more of how the magic works — especially coming from Sabriel author Garth Nix — but that fuzziness doesn’t get in the way of the quick-paced story Nix is telling. His tale …
Book Review: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope
Book #140 of 2019: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope I appreciate this novel’s Israeli kibbutz setting — and debut author Jessamyn Hope’s inclusion of so many non-religious aspects of Jewish life there — but I find the characters to be a uniformly miserable bunch. It’s hard to root for any of them to do anything but …
Continue reading “Book Review: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope”
TV Review: Stranger Things 3
TV #30 of 2019: Stranger Things 3 My biggest issue with this series as a whole is its tendency to fracture the narrative into engaging yet isolated small-group subplots that never intersect much with one another. And that’s definitely on display in this third outing, which is especially rough at the beginning before those disparate …
TV Review: iZombie, season 5
TV #29 of 2019: iZombie, season 5 iZombie has been a bit lifeless for a while now, and it finally shambles to a rest here. I hate to say it about a series that I once loved, but the last season of this zombie-cop comedy is just awful. The case-of-the-week stuff occasionally still delivers, but …
Book Review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Book #139 of 2019: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Written in the wake of her father’s death, this 2014 memoir from author Helen Macdonald is an unsettling and complicated account of how she felt drawn to train a young goshawk as a way of processing her emotions. Alongside this personal narrative, she also …
Continue reading “Book Review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 