Book #70 of 2017: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson A rather haunting Sliding Doors-type story about a woman who starts having realistic dreams about an alternate life she could be living if some small moment from her past had gone differently. In one life she’s married with children and in the other she runs a …
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Book #69 of 2017: Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer A tough read about five women in Missoula, Montana who were raped by members of the local college football team and faced incredible difficulty in bringing their rapists to justice when the athletes were protected by police, university …
Book #68 of 2017: Storm Front by Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files #1) A pretty generic urban fantasy with an irritating sexist as its hero and narrator. I love a good hardboiled detective story, and adding magic into the mix usually produces some interesting wrinkles, but I still found myself wincing through much of this …
TV #11 of 2017: Marvel’s Iron Fist, season 1 Iron Fist improved a little bit in the back half of its first season, but it was still pretty bad. The plot meandered all over the place, the writing was awful, and the lead actor was horribly miscast. Even setting aside the fact that an Asian-American …
Book #67 of 2017: A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety by Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter is not exactly the most impartial narrator of his own career, but this memoir manages to stay fairly apolitical while still recounting his term as our 39th president. Carter also devotes a good portion of this book to his occupations …
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Book #66 of 2017: 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means This began as kind of a frustrating read, in that the author assumed far more initial familiarity with the Kent State shootings than I personally was able to bring to the table. That got better as it went …
Book #65 of 2017: It Happens All the Time by Amy Hatvany A raw and emotional novel about a rape and its aftermath, told in alternating perspectives of the victim and the friend who assaults her. Author Amy Hatvany presents a compulsively readable narrative of an issue that, as her title suggests, is all too …
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Book #64 of 2017: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg This 1967 story of a brother and sister running away from home to live in a museum – and the old lady chronicling their adventure – is simply darling. Two kids on their own in New York City …
Book #63 of 2017: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Years ago, the aristocratic Blackwood family sat down to dinner at their New England estate, but poison in the dishes left only three survivors. Now Merricat, her sister, and her uncle live on in the home where the rest of their …
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Book #62 of 2017: The Regulators by Richard Bachman This pseudonymous Stephen King novel has too many characters with not enough characterization, which makes it hard to keep track of them or even care when they kept getting gunned down. It doesn’t help that most of the characters share names – but not much else …
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