Movie #16 of 2017: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) This series has always been goofy, but this movie felt particularly lazy in justifying its various set pieces. Most of it also didn’t seem all that impossible? Like, it was still a solid enough action movie, but most of the scenes could have been lifted …
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Book #206 of 2017: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, …
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Book #205 of 2017: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1) My feelings about this book are all over the place! I ended up really liking it, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy, but it was sort of a rough journey to get …
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Book #204 of 2017: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood This book was good, but I don’t think it quite lived up to its full potential as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey, especially given author Margaret Atwood’s bonafides. Presenting Odysseus’s bloody homecoming from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her murdered serving girls is …
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Book #203 of 2017: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #2) I don’t know if Hollow City is any worse than Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but it certainly doesn’t improve on that first book’s problems. There are the same under-developed characters, the same sketchy romance between a sixteen-year-old and his …
Book #202 of 2017: The Odyssey by Homer I liked this story a lot better than The Iliad, in part because it maintained a tight focus on a small number of characters rather than bouncing around among a sprawling Greek host. I also preferred the larger-than-life nature of Odysseus’s adventures to the endless battle scenes …
TV #42 of 2017: Game of Thrones, season 4 I try to keep these reviews fairly spoiler-free, even this long after the fact, so let me just say vaguely that after three years of Game of Thrones airing shocking plot twists at the end of each season, it’s nice to have the major moment in …
Book #201 of 2017: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson This is a creepy atmospheric story of people staying in a haunted house, although it’s never completely clear whether we’re witnessing actual spirits or just troubled human minds. It’s a solid story and probably the definitive take on this sort of plot, and …
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Book #200 of 2017: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin (The Tales of Dunk and Egg #1-3) This book is a collection of three novellas from George R.R. Martin, set in the century before his major series A Song of Ice and Fire. Presenting these stories in a single volume is …
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Book #199 of 2017: Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell This is such a warm, cozy story of a baby found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck and the absentminded scholar who adopts her. Other characters may not understand Charles and Sophie’s unique little family, but they’re happy with one another and I just wanted …
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