Book #171 of 2017: Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan #1) If you can get past all the early-twentieth-century racism, this first Tarzan novel is a pretty fun adventure story. It’s complete pulp fiction with larger-than-life escapades and improbable developments, but sometimes that sort of romp is just what you need in …
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Book #170 of 2017: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer This 1954 book draws on interviews with German citizens to explore the typical actions and attitudes of everyday members of the Nazi party, with particular focus on why they were drawn to the movement and how they viewed their …
TV #29 of 2017: Game of Thrones, season 2 As mentioned before, we are watching this show for my wife’s first time and my first time since catching it live as it first aired. It’s fun to rediscover the beginnings of everyone’s stories, especially the ones that have changed the most over the years. On …
Book #169 of 2017: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal #1) Johannes Cabal isn’t a very compelling Faustian figure. He’s trying to win back his soul from the devil (by tricking 100 other people out of theirs), but he’s not particularly clever, or funny, or decent, or righteous as he goes …
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Book #168 of 2017: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud This 1966 Pulitzer-winning novel tells the story of a nonpracticing Jew in late Tsarist Russia who is arrested and falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy for ritualistic purposes. It’s a fictionalized version of the case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, and author Bernard Malamud nails the …
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Book #167 of 2017: Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming A soul-baring memoir from actor Alan Cumming on his abusive father, the resulting trauma, and how learning more about his family history caused him to reevaluate everything he thought he knew about himself. I already admired Cumming as an actor, but I now have …
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Book #166 of 2017: House Rules by Jodi Picoult Taken on its own merits, House Rules is a decent story of a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome on trial for murder. The solution to the mystery is painfully obvious just a third of the way into the book, but the characters are fairly well-developed and …
Book #165 of 2017: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware This murder mystery sort of fizzles out in the end, but for most of the book, it’s a creepy psychological thriller that most resembles The Girl on the Train with its alcoholic Londoner narrator whose blackouts make it difficult for a reader to …
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Book #164 of 2017: Pyramid Schemes by Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing #4) I loved the first Sir Apropos of Nothing book back in high school (although I have no idea how well it holds up now), but even back then I felt like the two sequels that immediately followed offered diminishing returns on …
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Movie #14 of 2017: The Dark Tower (2017) This movie was pretty fun – not great, but far better than the Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest. Very cool to see things like gunslingers and North Central Positronics on the big screen after so many years. For fans of the Dark Tower novels, it was largely …
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