Book #103 of 2019: Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker Oddly enough, I think the main selling points of this novel are some of its weakest elements: namely that it’s a prequel to Dracula and that it features a fictionalized Bram Stoker facing off against the famous vampire. Co-written by Stoker’s great-great-nephew and based …
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Book #102 of 2019: The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara An interesting biography of an early special-effects artist, including how her contributions were obscured by jealous male contemporaries and the difficulties author Mallory O’Meara has faced in trying to piece together her story …
Movie #5 of 2019: Yes, It’s Really Us Singing: The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Concert Special! (2019) A bit of a victory lap for the cast and crew of this musical comedy series at the end of their (fantastic) final season. The live special is fun and funny, but it’s also pretty lightweight and definitely just a …
TV #19 of 2019: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, season 4 On the one hand, it’s a little frustrating that this is the second season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in a row to immediately walk back its lead-in cliffhanger. On the other hand, the batch of episodes that follows is probably the strongest since the first, and I really …
Book #101 of 2019: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton [Note: I’ve used the original British title for this book, which was changed to ‘The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’ for publication in America to avoid confusion with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s unrelated novel ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.’ I prefer the …
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Book #100 of 2019: Golden Fool by Robin Hobb (The Tawny Man #2) This second Tawny Man novel is as slow-paced as the rest of author Robin Hobb’s wider Elderlings saga, but it benefits tremendously by situating its hero back at his old home of Buckkeep with a variety of interesting people to bounce off …
Book #99 of 2019: Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling (Nightrunner #1) There are some fun moments of swashbuckling fantasy spycraft in this 1996 series debut, but the worldbuilding is fairly minimal and the plot often feels like a generic tabletop campaign that anyone could have wandered into rather than anything arising from these …
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TV #18 of 2019: Bosch, season 5 The weird thing about Bosch — which can strike me as either brilliant or lazy storytelling depending on my mood — is that it regularly eschews all the rhythms of a typical TV show. There’s seldom any particular plot difficulty or thematic throughline tying a single hour together, …
Book #98 of 2019: Giant’s Bread by Mary Westmacott This 1930 novel is the first of six that Agatha Christie published under a pseudonym due to their divergence from her typical whodunnit fare and her desire to have this other work ‘judged on its own merits and not in the light of previous success,’ per …
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TV #17 of 2019: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 6 This show isn’t really surprising me anymore, but it’s still nice as a hangout sitcom with funny writing and great, only-somewhat flanderized characters. This first season on NBC is also a bit of a retooling for the program, with some occasional infodumps for the new audience members …
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