TV season #9 of 2017: House of Cards, season 4 Well, the Underwoods’ continual victories get harder to believe with every passing season, and I’m getting mighty tired of this revolving door of characters opposing them. (Opposition and setbacks are great, but it’s always somebody new picking up the mantle, because the writers don’t know …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Dark Talent by Brandon Sanderson
Book #52 of 2017: The Dark Talent by Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz #5) This whimsical series for young readers has been getting steadily darker, but the ending of this “final” book still feels jarringly out of place in its levels of death and suffering. It’s also deeply unsatisfying as a conclusion, so the revelation that one …
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TV Review: Black Mirror, season 3
TV #8 of 2017: Black Mirror, season 3 It’s now a Netflix original production, but Black Mirror is still every bit as great as its previous seasons, with the same focus on exploring the often-ghoulish potential ramifications of emerging technologies. As an anthology show there are obviously some episodes that are better than others, but …
Book Review: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
Book #51 of 2017: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman A neat retelling of old myths about Odin, Thor, and the other Norse gods, synthesized by Neil Gaiman from a variety of original sources. It doesn’t read like a novel (because it isn’t one), nor does it bear much resemblance to Gaiman’s other work. But it’s …
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Book Review: The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket
Book #50 of 2017: The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #12) Probably the best book of the series so far, with plenty of characters from earlier novels making surprise returns and the lines between good and evil continuing to blur. The Baudelaires and Count Olaf are all shaded into more …
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Book Review: Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Book #49 of 2017: Swing Time by Zadie Smith Very reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, in part because the narrator isn’t really at the center of her own story. Here, our unnamed protagonist alternates between childhood memories and more recent life history, each of which sees her drastically eclipsed by another figure: first …
Book Review: Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce
Book #48 of 2017: Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce (The Immortals #1) More confident and less problematic than author Tamora Pierce’s earlier work Song of the Lioness, but with its same fun sense of magic and adventure. The Lioness Alanna and her friends return as supporting characters this time, with the main focus given over …
Book Review: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
Book #47 of 2017: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen (The Queen of the Tearling #1) This post-apocalyptic fantasy was a little bit underbaked, but I still enjoyed it for the most part. (It helps to have a protagonist whose first act as queen is to storm in Daenerys-like, freeing a bunch of …
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Book Review: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
Book #46 of 2017: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t by Nate Silver The prose is sometimes lacking (and the baseball sections could not have been more boring), but FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver writes an easy-to-follow introduction to the science of analysis and prediction. It’s less of a …
Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Book #45 of 2017: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance An outstanding memoir of life in rural Appalachia at the turn of the 21st century. A lot has been said about this book inadvertently offering insight into the angry voters who swept Donald Trump into office, but …
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