TV #9 of 2026: Our Flag Means Death, season 2 I gave the first year of this period comedy three-and-a-half out of five stars, rounded up, because although I enjoyed the gay pirate romcom, I felt like it took too long in a fairly limited number of episodes to fully establish itself as just that. …
Continue reading “TV Review: Our Flag Means Death, season 2”
Book #36 of 2026: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #11) At this point, the Wayward Children fantasy series has established a clear alternating pattern: the even-numbered novellas contain prequel stories about troubled young characters stumbling into other worlds that offer a respite from their ordinary lives alongside unexpected new …
Continue reading “Book Review: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire”
Book #35 of 2026: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth I like the glimpses we get throughout this novel of its story-within-a-story, a fantasy series called The Fallen Children that’s supposedly bigger than Harry Potter. (Perhaps, like Simon Snow, it will someday be spun off on its own.) The further wrinkle that its pseudonymous …
Continue reading “Book Review: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth”
Movie #9 of 2026: Rocky V (1990) This fifth Rocky movie has a reputation as a franchise-killer, performing poorly at the box office compared to its predecessors and likewise receiving worse marks from critics. (It didn’t wind up ending the series entirely, but another 16 years would have to pass before the next installment was …
Book #34 of 2026: UnWorld by Jayson Greene In the not-too-distant future of this novella, people can create digital copies of themselves to serve as a backstop for their fallible physical memories. Generally the uploaded consciousness stays close to the human original, but Ana’s has asked to be set free following the death by apparent …
Book #33 of 2026: Behooved by M. Stevenson The punny premise that lends this romantasy novel its title doesn’t technically spring until almost a quarter of the way through the text, which is late enough that I normally wouldn’t mention it in a review. But since the publisher’s description gives it away anyway, and it …
Book #32 of 2026: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7) I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. …
Continue reading “Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen”
Book #31 of 2026: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science #1) This 2024 title unfortunately hasn’t hit the mark for me, much as I love author Kate McKinnon’s work on Saturday Night Live. The …
TV #8 of 2026: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 4 I feel like this show is perpetually on the bubble between three and four stars for me, in that it’s a generally enjoyable legal thriller that isn’t doing anything remotely revolutionary in terms of its cinematography, plot, or so on (beyond I guess staging each season …
Movie #8 of 2026: Rocky IV (1985) There’s the seed of a good idea in this movie when Apollo Creed, by now close friends with his former rival Rocky, is killed in the ring while boxing against their latest opponent. (It is, notably, the thread that filmmaker Ryan Coogler would later pick up for his …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more