Book #18 of 2018: Doctor Who: A History of Humankind by Justin Richards This is another in the line of licensed Doctor Who children’s books presented as annotated reference materials, but I like it a lot better than the earlier effort How to Be a Time Lord. Partly that’s because it has a better gimmick …
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Book #17 of 2018: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray (Constellation #1) There’s a bit of a rocky start to this novel, but it’s not long before the story kicks off into a careening sci-fi adventure. It’s got so many things I love about the genre: an exploration of the souls of advanced robots, people …
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Book #16 of 2018: Morning Star by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #3) When I first read this book in 2016, I wrote the following review: “A thrilling end to a spectacular trilogy. I do think this book was a minor step down from the first two Red Rising volumes, which had more cohesive plot structures …
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Book #15 of 2018: First Test by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #1) This is the start of a new quartet within author Tamora Pierce’s larger Tortall series, and it benefits from the worldbuilding that the earlier books have established without doing much to further things here. Set a decade or so after Pierce’s …
TV #5 of 2018: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 1 I don’t care much for either the beginning or end of this show (which seem to tell us little we didn’t already know about the character), but the middle section is surprisingly solid. I’m also really impressed with Ben Barnes’s acting and accent work — I …
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Book #14 of 2018: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign right from the start, often finding herself publicly singled out by the candidate with alternating praise and insults in his signature volatile style. Trump broke political …
Book #13 of 2018: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Historical fiction is not generally my cup of tea, but I appreciate this Pulitzer-winning novel of a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France, especially for its short, staccato scenes that manage to be poignant but never maudlin. I do think the novel goes …
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Book #12 of 2018: Origin by Dan Brown (Robert Langdon #5) I’m not going to belabor the usual Dan Brown tropes, because if you’ve read this far into his Robert Langdon series, you know what to expect. Someone gets murdered just before sharing a big secret, Langdon races around an old city trying to solve …
Book #11 of 2018: Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao (Rise of the Empress #1) I have some minor quibbles about character motivations, but overall this is an impressive debut novel that retells the beginning of the classic Snow White fairy tale without ever feeling unoriginal. Partly this is due to the …
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Book #10 of 2018: Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo (Grisha #3) This final novel in Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy is the first one that I feel really approaches the quality of her later Six of Crows series. (Or to put that more charitably, the five Bardugo books that I’ve now read get steadily better …
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