Book #227 of 2017: The History of Bees by Maja Lunde Taken individually, I suppose I like the three different strands that make up this novel, although the stories set in 2098 China and 1852 England are far more compelling than the one set in 2007 America. (Respectively: a woman trying to track down her …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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