Book #125 of 2016: The Magicians by Lev Grossman (The Magicians #1) Thematically, The Magicians is a story about wizards with depression, and about how getting your heart’s desire isn’t always enough to make you happy. That’s a perspective that’s pretty rare in the fantasy genre, and I appreciated author Lev Grossman giving his characters …
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TV #47 of 2016: Vixen, season 2 This is still a pretty lightweight entry in the CW Arrowverse, to the point where I’m not even sure if it’s fully canonical or not. (It doesn’t help that each “season” is about 45 minutes long, and it’s hard to remember individual “episodes” when they’re only a few …
Book #124 of 2016: Armada by Ernest Cline This follow-up to Ernest Cline’s first novel Ready Player One is (perhaps inevitably) a bit of a let-down, as it is nowhere near as inventive as that other story. Like RPO, Armada is packed full of Cline’s signature nerd culture references, but the plot they’re in service …
Book #123 of 2016: Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia by Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz #3) Another fun entry in Brandon Sanderson’s Alcatraz series, again harnessing his love of creative magical systems into something more whimsical than his typical fantasy novels for older readers. In this third book in the series, the politics get murkier and …
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Book #122 of 2016: Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral by Mary Doria Russell (Doc Holliday #2) More of a follow-up than a true sequel to the author’s earlier novel Doc, Epitaph focuses on roughly the same set of historical figures but is not particularly beholden to the first book for any crucial context. …
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Book #121 of 2016: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill I don’t usually care for experimental narrative styles like stream-of-consciousness or forgoing all character names, but the disjointed nature of Jenny Offill’s writing adds a lovely etherealness to this short novel on depression, introversion, and infidelity. Her nameless narrator goes on quite the interior journey …
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Book #120 of 2016: Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton When I requested this book from my local library, I expected that I would be reading it during the presidential election, to better understand Hillary Clinton myself and to be more informed about her record and her vision for America when debating the issues with …
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TV #46 of 2016: The Grinder, season 1 The Grinder is pretty funny as a sitcom, but it’s absolutely amazing for the meta-commentary it delivers on the TV industry. (It’s also impressively serialized for a half-hour comedy show.) It lovingly pokes fun at the genre tropes of legal dramas like The Good Wife, by telling …
Book #119 of 2016: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness A moving YA novel that brought to mind both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the Buffy episode “The Zeppo.” Like those stories, The Rest of Us Just Live Here focuses on the people who are background characters in large epic …
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Book #118 of 2016: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #3) One thing I really appreciate about this book series, beyond its great character work and fairly original spin on werewolves, is how much the status quo changes from novel to novel. Structurally speaking, Forever is largely an inverse of the first …
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