TV #23 of 2016: The Good Wife, season 7 The Good Wife’s seventh season was also its last one, which makes it hard to reflect just on this season and not on the show as a whole. (Especially when so many parts of the finale are pitched to mirror / echo moments from the pilot.) …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
TV Review: Veep, season 2
TV #22 of 2016: Veep, season 2 This season’s humor is sharper than the first, and the characters are better-realized. But they’re still all terrible people, to the point where I’m not really rooting for anyone while watching. (If anything, I’m sometimes rooting against one character more than another based on who’s been relatively more …
Book Review: Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan
Book #36 of 2016: Daughter of Deep Silence by Carrie Ryan Another take on the Count of Monte Cristo bit, where a person who’s been presumed dead actually survives and takes on a new identity in order to enact revenge. In this case, that person is a teenage girl, one of only three passengers to …
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Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Book #35 of 2016: Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub (The Talisman #2) Most of Stephen King’s books connect to his other stories in one way or another, a process that’s aided by his Dark Tower series positing that all worlds are intertwined. Sometimes these connections between stories can be as simple as …
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TV Review: Star Trek, season 2
TV #21 of 2016: Star Trek, season 2 I’m still liking TOS, and still spotting some major influences on the TV shows and movies I’ve liked from the past half-century. This season also did a lot to establish the idea of the Prime Directive, which feels quintessentially Star Trek but wasn’t really a thing in …
Book Review: Golden Son by Pierce Brown
Book #34 of 2016: Golden Son by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #2) Given their common themes of dystopian wargames and rebellion against a corrupt government, The Hunger Games remains the go-to comparison for the Red Rising series of books. But this second novel of the series deepens the plot outside of the arena far more …
TV Review: iZombie, season 2
TV #20 of 2016: iZombie, season 2 iZombie may well be the best show airing on TV right now. I know the basic premise sounds gimmicky as hell, but it reliably delivers a solid character-driven drama and ever-ratcheting plot week after week. The last few episodes of this season also suggest that the fake-psychic-solving-crimes gimmick …
Book Review: Imago by Octavia E. Butler
Book #33 of 2016: Imago by Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis #3) This is the final book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (also called Lilith’s Brood, which is such a worse and more misleading title). Then again, calling these books a trilogy is misleading in its own way: they do build on one another as the …
Movie Review: Election (1999)
Movie #8 of 2016: Election (1999) Meh. This film kept popping up on those lists of “great stuff leaving Netflix this month” or whatever, so I finally got around to watching it… and did not care for it at all. Matthew Broderick’s character is a jerk and a creep, and the narrative only seems to …
Book Review: Red Rising by Pierce Brown
Book #32 of 2016: Red Rising by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #1) Red Rising at its heart is telling a story like The Count of Monte Cristo or Gattaca, where someone from a lower class has to infiltrate the upper class in order to take them down from within. Except in this case, doing so …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 