Book #84 of 2019: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #2) Having really enjoyed author Naomi Novik’s later standalone fantasy novels Spinning Silver and Uprooted, I figured I should go back and give her debut series another chance. Unfortunately, I feel similarly about this second Temeraire volume as I do the first: delightful characters …
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Book #83 of 2019: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #1) I gave up on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles at some point, and I don’t know if I’ll ever resume and finish the series, which seemed to get lost in its own convoluted mythology along the way. But having enjoyed the …
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TV #12 of 2019: Breaking Bad, season 5 Are we ultimately meant to root for Walter White? That’s a question that divides Breaking Bad viewers, and although I am firmly in the camp that the show’s central figure is an awful, terrifying cancer of a person, I think the writers are at least somewhat to …
Book #82 of 2019: The Black Ice by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #2) I’m of two minds about this second Bosch novel. On the one hand, the detective and his associates feel more like the versions that I know from the TV adaptation of the series, which presumably means that they’ve settled more into their …
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Book #81 of 2019: A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn This is a weird book, and although I enjoy some of the individual strands, I ultimately don’t feel like they add up to a satisfactory whole. The main plot is a loose retelling of Joseph’s slavery from Genesis, split between a tech genius …
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Book #80 of 2019: A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams I expected to really love this anthology, based on its foreword and stated goal of bringing a Howard Zinn recentering of marginalized perspectives to the world of tomorrow. The authors and characters include women, LGBTQ people, …
TV #11 of 2019: Friday Night Lights, season 4 On a macro level, my biggest criticism of FNL thus far is that every season seems radically different from the one before it — and never in a way that feels especially organic or planned-out as part of a larger design. This year the program shifts …
Book #79 of 2019: Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson (Truly Devious #1) This novel has a great hook of an unsolved kidnapping from the 1930s and a modern teenage crime buff going off to the boarding school where it happened. Unfortunately, it all rather falls apart for me by the end. Author Maureen Johnson is …
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Book #78 of 2019: Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon This 2009 book from Michael Chabon is an excellent memoir, focused less on the novelist’s specific life history and more on his general musings about parenting and gender roles, as filtered through his own experiences. …
Book #76 of 2019: I’ll Mature When I’m Dead: Dave Barry’s Amazing Tales of Adulthood by Dave Barry Is Dave Barry’s new(er) material objectively less funny than what I read of his while growing up? Have my own tastes changed? Is our current cultural moment just vastly different than when this book was written in …
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