Book #80 of 2016: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King This is a mixed bag, as short story collections so often are, but three stories really stand out from the crowd. “The Mist,” like its film adaptation, is a tense thriller of man-versus-monster that captures the fragility of our everyday lives and how quickly a routine …
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Book #79 of 2016: The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman (Detective Jacob Lev #1) The Golem of Hollywood reads like a Jewish version of American Gods, as written by someone like Michael Connelly. It’s a strange genre mashup, mixing a police investigation of a serial killer with elements of Judaic mythology …
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Book #78 of 2016: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #1) “Sexy teen werewolves” is usually not my genre of choice, but Maggie Stiefvater’s characters are so well-realized that I was hooked on this novel regardless. Even a character like Isabel Culpepper, who could easily have been just a mean-girl stereotype, gains …
Book #77 of 2016: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber The obvious comparison here is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, another book about Christian missionaries preaching the gospel on an alien planet. And like that novel, this one uses their particular genre as an opportunity both to examine matters of faith and …
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Book #76 of 2016: The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate A short but charming novel for young readers, Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan is as much an educational piece about great apes and animal captivity as it is a story. Any primatologist will recognize the emotional and cognitive complexity in the …
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Book #75 of 2019: Uprooted by Naomi Novik Uprooted is a beautiful story set in a fantastic version of medieval Russia and Poland. I rolled my eyes at its initial premise, which involves a village sacrificing its young women to a “dragon” who is actually a powerful wizard living in a nearby tower, but the …
Book #74 of 2016: The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #8) I’m still reading A Series of Unfortunate Events for the first time, and I have to say, I’m getting a little frustrated at how slowly the overall plot details are getting revealed. I like that the series has diverged …
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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (Leviathan #1) Leviathan builds up a neat alternate history of World War I, wherein Austria-Hungary and its allies wield massive steampunk war-mechs against the bioengineered Lovecraftian monstrosities of the UK, France, and Russia. The worldbuilding here was deeply cool, with the promise of even more to come in the sequels. On …
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TV #41 of 2016: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 2 The main accomplishment of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s second season is definitely delivering on the Jake-and-Amy romantic tension that developed over the course of season 1. But watching this season for the second time, I was also struck by how much the character of Madeline Wunch adds to the …
Book #72 of 2016: The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #2) This is not Agatha Christie at her best. Too much of the plot here relies on weirdly biased assumptions on the part of her detective Hercule Poirot: a certain open grave must have been dug by a man because no …
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