Book #53 of 2025: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson (Virgin New Adventures #3) This volume doesn’t quite deserve its reputation as a series low point — it’s far better than Lungbarrow, for instance — but it’s an early indication of the limitations of the concept here. Classic Doctor Who wasn’t exactly a consistently …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson”
Book #52 of 2025: A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones Some Diana Wynne Jones stories — both Archer’s Goon and the Chrestomanci series come to mind — I read and reread countless times as a child and found that they still carried that same magic when I returned to them later in …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones”
TV #13 of 2025: The Bear, season 2 I wasn’t as immediately impressed with this sophomore effort, since the switch from the characters managing a struggling restaurant to launching a fancy new one made everything feel somewhat tamer. There’s still a great deal of chaotic scrambling and neurotic vulgarity, but in this case it’s all …
Book #51 of 2025: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte This collection of interconnected stories offers some pretty sharp observations on modern internet culture, and it reminds me of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface in its sympathetic depictions of certain objectively horrible protagonists, whom we can at least understand no matter how much we presumably disapprove. Author Tony …
Continue reading “Book Review: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte”
Book #50 of 2025: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins I wasn’t a huge fan of author Suzanne Collins’s first prequel effort The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but this new title thankfully recaptures the old Hunger Games magic. It’s a challenging target for this sort of release to hit — similar enough to …
Continue reading “Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins”
Book #49 of 2025: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge Nearly but not quite the last of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic adaptations, as this volume — already smaller than the first two — for some reason …
Book #48 of 2025: Vallista by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #15) In this installment, Vlad Taltos goes full Gormenghast, and the results are somewhat underwhelming. I do appreciate how author Steven Brust continues to periodically shake up his usual storytelling rhythms for this series, and it’s hard to name a bigger change than this adventure, …
Book #47 of 2025: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (Ring of Solomon #1) [Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.] Overall a solid entry in the Percy Jackson genre of middle-grade fiction, where tweens battle fantastical monsters drawn from some culture’s traditional mythology (increasingly #ownvoices for the writer’s particular background, as here). In …
Continue reading “Book Review: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros”
Book #46 of 2025: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard This Discord-exclusive story is a lightweight snippet, depicting Kip Mdang from The Hands of the Emperor as a young person at university. It’s fun to glimpse him at that age with friends and family we’ve previously seen when they’re substantially older — namely …
Continue reading “Book Review: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard”
Book #45 of 2025: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi An interesting overview of the author’s time in politics, though this is mostly a matter of emphasizing what had been obfuscated or ignored in the public record, rather than providing any revelatory new insights. …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more