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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Book #117 of 2016: Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins #1) I haven’t seen the Disney movie of Mary Poppins since I was a very small child, so I can’t say how the film version compares to this novel. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Mary Poppins of the original …
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Book #116 of 2016: The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1) I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up …
Book #115 of 2016: Desperation by Stephen King Desperation is a decent Stephen King story, flavored with hints of Dark Tower connections but never really connecting with that other mythos. This novel features King at his scariest, but only for its first hundred pages or so, when it appears to be just about a deranged …
Book #114 of 2017: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman #1) Apocalyptic fiction and detective stories are two genres that I particularly enjoy, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen them blended. The result is The Last Policeman, a novel about a detective trying to solve the …
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