Book #226 of 2017: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Flavia de Luce #1) The precocious eleven-year-old detective in this story alternates between cute and grating, but even at her worst it’s a shock to see her kidnapped and physically assaulted in the story’s climax. It’s overall an interesting murder …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley”
Book #225 of 2017: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #1) Great fantasy worldbuilding and effortless diversity of race, gender identity, and sexuality, but it bothered me a little that the three different storylines felt so isolated from one another (even after I developed a suspicion about how they were connected …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin”
Movie #18 of 2017: Little Evil (2017) The last fifteen minutes or so redeem this movie somewhat, when things take a Good Omens sort of turn and start emphasizing the antichrist child’s free will. But for most of the runtime, it’s a pretty lackluster effort. I think the idea is supposed to be that Adam …
Book #224 of 2019: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah Given that comedian Trevor Noah has risen to international prominence as Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, I was expecting this memoir to be a typical rags-to-riches narrative (or at least something like Bossypants where a struggling artist …
Continue reading “Book Review: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah”
Book #223 of 2017: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1) If you read science-fiction primarily for the science, this is definitely your book, with all sorts of experimental particle physics and theoretical issues in astronomy. There’s just unfortunately not much of a plot or characters worth caring about. The flashbacks …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin”
Book #222 of 2017: Night by Elie Wiesel It’s hard to find the words to describe Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. No matter what you know about the horrors of the Holocaust — and as a Jew born in the late twentieth-century, those horrors formed part of my earliest …
Book #221 of 2017: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz A Freakonomics for the modern age, this book explores the provocative notion that we can get more reliable information from people’s Google searches and other online activity than from their …
Book #220 of 2017: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland”
Book #219 of 2017: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #1) The first Miss Marple mystery is as fun as it is implausible, requiring readers to suspend our disbelief enough to accept both that a criminal could be as devious as the denouement reveals and that a town gossip could be …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie”
Book #218 of 2017: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt This memoir about growing up dirt-poor (first in Brooklyn, then in Ireland) is tremendously funny and moving in equal measures. I didn’t always care for author Frank McCourt’s conceit of writing from the supposed perspective of his childhood self – largely because there are a lot …
Continue reading “Book Review: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more