TV #39 of 2016: Star Trek: The Animated Series, season 1 I was expecting this show to be a pretty shameless cash-grab (kind of like 1975′s awful Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon), but it ended up being a pleasant surprise. Yes, the animators sometimes take shortcuts like having a character’s face take …
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Book #64 of 2016: Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate This novel about a giant talking cat that only the protagonist can see really ended up being more about the boy’s family falling on hard times, and how his imaginary friend was something of a coping mechanism for that. It was honestly a very stressful read for …
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Book #63 of 2016: Terrier by Tamora Pierce (Beka Cooper #1) This was only my second ever Tamora Pierce book — counting the four-part The Song of the Lioness as a single volume, as my edition was — but I liked it even better than the first. This prequel world feels very lived-in, with fun …
Book #62 of 2016: The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (Millennium #2) Not nearly as good as Larsson’s first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in large part due to the sudden genre shift. Tattoo was primarily a detective novel, with a central mystery, two investigator protagonists, and clues that a …
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TV #38 of 2016: Deadwood, season 3 It’s surprising this final season works as well as it does, given that (as I understand it) it wasn’t originally intended to close out the series. The original plan was for Deadwood to run for at least four seasons, most likely culminating in the fire that burned down …
TV #37 of 2016: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 2 Wow, Kimmy Schmidt really came into its own this season. The first season was very funny in a 30 Rock sort of way, but it didn’t really do much on the emotional level for me. Season 2 maintained that humor, but it also became very interested …
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Movie #14 of 2016: Star Trek Beyond (2016) This new Star Trek film feels exactly like a feature-length episode, which unsurprisingly works great as a showcase for the series. I think I still like the first movie in this new continuity the best, but Beyond is lightyears ahead of Into Darkness, and that’s really all …
Book #61 of 2016: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks The Sarajevo Haggadah is a real book, a 500-year-old illustrated manuscript depicting scenes from the Jewish Passover saga. People of the Book is a beautiful work of historical fiction, tracing a possible history of the Haggadah back through the centuries with a series of …
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Book #60 of 2016: Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #2) Ancillary Sword is just as good as its predecessor, but with the added bonus that the reader now understands Leckie’s odd system of ancillaries, ships, and tea ceremonies right from the start. (I ended up loving Ancillary Justice, but that story took far …
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Book #59 of 2016: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Millennium #1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a satisfyingly well-told detective story; I was quite surprised to learn after reading it that it was a first novel, found among the author’s papers and published after his death. I enjoyed that …
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