Book #119 of 2017: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson A sobering and deeply moving account from death row lawyer Bryan Stevenson on the injustices that pervade our justice system, particularly those concerning southern black defendants. This is not a book like The New Jim Crow that constructs elaborate academic …
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Book #118 of 2017: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott A dry but interesting book from Yale professor James C. Scott, about how centralized power tends to simplify on-the-ground complexity, imposing cookie-cutter paradigms to ensure legibility by the state. These simplifications are often …
Book #117 of 2017: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #15) This second Discworld City Watch novel is an improvement over the first, thanks mostly to some appreciated deepening of the characters of Carrot and Sam Vimes. But it’s still not great, and the satire on affirmative action involving the appointment of fantasy creatures …
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Book #116 of 2017: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig (The Girl from Everywhere #1) There were some interesting ideas in this story of a father and daughter who can navigate their pirate ship time machine to any harbor on a dated map, but ultimately none of it really hangs together. The protagonist and …
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Book #115 of 2017: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (Gemma Doyle #1) I liked this book, but I didn’t quite love it. Author Libba Bray is talented at writing realistically flawed teenagers, and the downside is that her heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as very selfish, impetuous, and otherwise immature. I also …
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Book #114 of 2017: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #1) A gorgeously-written fantasy novel about a boy raised in a library, who spends his early life chasing down obscure references to the faraway city whose name was removed from the world by magic. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Kingkiller Chronicle, …
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Book #113 of 2017: Star Wars: Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn It turns out that “Star Wars meets Ocean’s Eleven” is a better idea in concept than in execution. Or at least, this novel about Han Solo putting together a team for a heist soon after the destruction of the first Death Star — which has …
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TV #18 of 2017: The Flash, season 3 The Flash is kind of in a weird place right now, where it’s trying to be both as comic-book-bonkers as DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and as dark and brooding as their big brother Arrow. So as a result you have this show where there are time remnants …
Book #112 of 2017: I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who survived being shot by the Taliban for her public advocacy on female education rights, is undeniably an inspiring figure. Unfortunately, …
Book #111 of 2017: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen Fanny Price is a somewhat passive heroine (which I gather was more of a virtue in Jane Austen’s time), but I still found myself liking Mansfield Park more than I did Pride and Prejudice. Call me a sap, but Edmund’s lifelong decency towards Fanny warms my …
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