Book #61 of 2017: Touch by Claire North A neat spy thriller about a character who can flit from body to body through skin contact, temporarily taking over other people’s lives while they black out. The entity known as Kepler has lived for hundreds of years that way, ever since discovering the power when facing …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin
Book #60 of 2017: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin Early on in Gretchen Rubin’s year spent practicing habits aimed at her own happiness (and writing about it), an acquaintance tells …
Book Review: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Book #59 of 2017: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States is really two books, and one of them is significantly better than the other. Author Howard Zinn’s thesis is that any telling of history is inherently political, and his stated goal is to present …
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TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet, season 1
TV #10 of 2017: Santa Clarita Diet, season 1 It seems like every time I convince myself that zombies are played out, some new property comes along and shows just how much rich material there still can be in the concept. In this case, it’s a laugh-out-loud half-hour sitcom about a middle-class suburban mom turning …
Book Review: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Book #58 of 2017: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond A brutal firsthand study of eviction, emphasizing both its high frequency and the devastating toll it takes on families. Matthew Desmond, an ethnographer who spent years living in low-income neighborhoods and trailer parks to research this book, shows how precarious …
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Book Review: It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Book #57 of 2017: It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis This political satire from 1935 imagines a blustering American politician ascending to the presidency on a nationalistic campaign, aggressively insisting on anti-immigrant falsehoods and demonizing the media for disputing them. Although many citizens are opposed to his politics, they blithely reassure themselves that fascism …
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Book Review: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
Book #56 of 2017: A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Zones of Thought #1) A neat space opera, overflowing with intelligent alien lifeforms at various stages of development – think Star Trek or Mass Effect for a rough idea of the setting, but with the added wrinkle that approaching the galactic center makes …
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Book Review: The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
Book #55 of 2017: The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #6) An overall solid Hercule Poirot mystery, although definitely one that leans a bit hard on coincidences and on the detective knowing facts that aren’t made available to the reader. Not Poirot’s best outing, but still a far cry from …
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Book Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Book #54 of 2017: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (St. Leibowitz #1) A slow-paced but intriguing vision of the Catholic church in the centuries after the fall of western civilization and the loss of most earthly knowledge, where monks painstakingly copy manuscripts of electronic blueprints out of faith that one day …
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Book Review: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Book #53 of 2017: Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia A rare fresh take on vampires, as original as Octavia Butler’s Fledgling but without that novel’s uncomfortable issues of age and consent. I loved this novel’s characters and its Mexico City setting almost as much as I loved that its vampires were clearly drawn from …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 