TV #16 of 2017: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, season 4 The season finale was kind of a letdown, but the season itself was the best S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever been – and close to the best the MCU in general has offered in terms of character-driven informed storytelling and really meaty material for its actors. I …
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Book #101 of 2017: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (The First Law #1) An overall solid fantasy novel, very much in the George R. R. Martin tradition of court intrigue and gratuitous violence. Unfortunately the plot was slow-moving and fairly opaque, and I found myself struggling to care about most of the characters. Still, …
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Movie #6 of 2017: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017) This sequel takes everything I loved about the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and turns it up to 11. It helps that the team is already in place at the start of the film, so we get more of their banter and prickly …
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Movie #5 of 2017: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) I hadn’t seen this movie since it was in theaters, and my wife hadn’t seen it at all, so we streamed it through Amazon before heading out to see the sequel. Even three years later, it’s still really impressive how much this movie stakes out its …
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Book #100 of 2017: The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke An odd little story, focused on a pair of brothers in 21st-century Venice who run away from home to join a gang of thieving street urchins. As when I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I initially found it a little …
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Book #99 of 2017: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (The Shining #2) I’m still not convinced that Stephen King needed to write a sequel to his classic book The Shining, especially after the original had stood on its own for over 30 years. But for an author who struggled with addiction for much of his …
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Book #98 of 2017: His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #1) The plot of this novel moves at glacier speed, which is fairly agonizing when the premise is as rich as this fantastic alternate history of dragons fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. So although I did love the characters, I’m not sure if I’m …
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Book #97 of 2017: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander A truly stunning work of scholarship, describing how the current U.S. program of mass incarceration – and the War on Drugs that feeds it – systematically oppresses people of color in similar ways to the Jim Crow …
Movie #4 of 2017: Arrival (2016) Honestly just a terrific movie all around. I had some minor gripes about the way linguists and linguistics are presented in the film, but it’s still probably the closest Hollywood’s ever gotten or that we could have reasonably hoped for. The script stuck pretty close to the beats of …
Book #96 of 2017: Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson As a racially-conscious progressive, I was hoping Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America would be a powerful tract that I could quote from and recommend to others in the hope of opening their eyes to …
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