Book #95 of 2017: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a Gone Girl for the early twentieth century, an exquisitely gothic tale of a young woman haunted by the legacy of her new husband’s late wife and of the secrets about her life and death that everyone at their manor home …
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TV #15 of 2017: The Mindy Project, season 1 Honestly, I’m not a fan. Yes, there are laughs in every episode, but the plot and characterization are just so lazy and all over the place. Morgan is a cartoon character with no stable motivations, the show can’t decide on what sorts of stories it wants …
Book #94 of 2017: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach This book about dead human bodies – what happens to them biologically and what cultural practices have developed regarding their disposal – was educational but tough to read. It literally made my stomach churn, and I frequently had to put the …
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TV #14 of 2017: Bosch, season 3 Bosch is one of those weird middle-of-the-road crime shows where it’s nowhere near as popular (or as bad) as something like Law and Order, but it’s also nowhere near as critically-adored (or as good) as something like The Wire. A good comparison might be The Good Wife, I …
Book #93 of 2017: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn Gillian Flynn’s first novel Sharp Objects is more plausible than Gone Girl or Dark Places, but it’s also a much more difficult read due to its themes of child abuse and self-harm. Flynn’s customary knack for flawed female characters is on full display here, from the …
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Book #92 of 2017: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness A powerful novel of grief and guilt, where a boy struggling to come to terms with his mother’s cancer must also face down the primeval creature that has crawled out of his dreams with harsh truths of its own. There’s a reading of this story …
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Book #91 of 2017: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett Individual passages of this book are gorgeously written, but the plot of a group of hostages gradually becoming friends (and in one case, lovers) with the gun-wielding terrorists keeping them prisoner made me supremely uncomfortable. It would be one thing if the story were intended as …
Book #90 of 2017: The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick I mostly liked this story of an elderly widower who breaks out of the solitary routine he’s been in since his wife’s death, rediscovering his own love for life as he tries to learn more about her life before she met him. …
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Book #89 of 2017: White Sand, Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius Gopez (White Sand #1) White Sand is an unpublished manuscript by author Brandon Sanderson, and this graphic novel is an adaptation of the first part of that unreleased novel, with two more planned volumes to follow. I had hoped that …
Book #88 of 2017: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond A dry but interesting account of world history through the lens of cultural materialism, an anthropological theory holding that differences in environment can explain much of the variation that exists across cultures. For historian Jared Diamond, this approach essentially …
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