Movie #20 of 2017: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) If you consider this movie as an attempt to recapture the magic (pun very much intended) of Harry Potter, it’s hard to see it as anything but a failure. The stakes are muddled, this version of the Wizarding World feels more hazily drawn, …
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TV #46 of 2017: The West Wing, season 6 Oh man, late West Wing is such a mixed bag. I think season 5 is unquestionably the worst, and that lingers a little bit into the start of this next one. The primary campaign is a real shot of adrenaline, though, and it definitely works as …
Book #238 of 2017: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King Another solid collection of short fiction from author Stephen King. The standout entry is Ur, a Dark Tower-adjacent novella about an e-reader that can access books from alternate realities, but King also offers up some delightful creepiness in Morality, Under the Weather, and …
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Book #237 of 2017: My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier As with Daphne du Maurier’s earlier novel Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is the sort of dark and gothic book Gillian Flynn might have written had she been born half a century earlier. In this one, narrator Philip Ashley’s cousin is abroad in Italy when …
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Book #236 of 2017: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Seraphina #1) This novel depicts a fascinating world in which dragons and humans were once enemies but now live under an uneasy peace, with the dragons who take on human form (for diplomacy, study, or trade) forced to publicly identify themselves and live in ghettos within human …
Book #235 of 2017: Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #2) This is a dark little fairy tale about twin sisters who fall into a world of vampires and mad scientists and must make choices about who they want to be as they grow up. It’s technically a prequel to …
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TV #45 of 2017: House of Cards, season 5 We had watched all but the last two episodes of this season before the Kevin Spacey news broke, and we finally got around to finishing it up. Even if you set aside everything we now know about the star actor, this was a pretty awful season …
Movie #19 of 2017: Thor: Ragnarok (2017) By far the best Thor movie, and one of the better Marvel Cinematic Universe movies overall. Lots of humor, neat worldbuilding, and actual character growth for Thor and Loki! It could have done better by its female characters, but all in all it was a fun ride and …
Book #234 of 2017: The Book of Swords edited by Gardner Dozois This is a collection of short stories in the “sword and sorcery” genre, which as far as I can tell is fantasy on the smaller scale, with no evil overlords threatening the world. (I’d say the stakes are lower than epic fantasy, but …
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Book #233 of 2017: The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #2) As this series goes along, it’s starting to feel like author N. K. Jemisin is more interested in showing off her admittedly awesome and intricate worldbuilding than in telling a story with compelling emotional stakes for her characters. It’s still …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more