Book #178 of 2024: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman This historical fiction novel unfolds across two alternating timelines, set six decades apart. In the 1920s, teenager Augusta “Goldie” Stern works in her father’s Brooklyn pharmacy, growing close with his delivery boy Irving and learning some of her great-aunt’s homeopathic medicine …
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Book #177 of 2024: Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson This 1913 short story collection consists of six entries initially published in various British magazines a few years prior, all concerning the titular occult detective, Thomas Carnacki. His methods are somewhat like those of Sherlock Holmes, but his domain is the supernatural and especially …
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TV #49 of 2024: Babylon 5, season 2 This science-fiction series has been steadily improving and growing darker in tone, but I’m still not ready in this second season to bump my critical rating up out of the midrange three-star tier. At its best, I’m really interested in the larger serialized story that the show …
Book #176 of 2024: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #5) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] Another 1300-page epic fantasy tome that very nearly justifies its massive length. (I listened to the audiobook on 2.5x speed, which still took literally 24 hours to complete.) The extended climax of this …
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TV #48 of 2024: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 3 Somewhere between three and four stars for me as a viewer, but I’ll round up due to my enjoying this TV outing more than the novel it’s based on, Michael Connelly’s fifth Lincoln Lawyer story The Gods of Guilt. (That means the Netflix series has now …
Book #175 of 2024: Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase In my opinion this is the best of the three original Fifteenth Doctor novels released this year (i.e. not counting the episode novelizations), for the simple reason that author Abi Falase does a better job than the other writers at capturing the distinctive happy-go-lucky …
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Book #174 of 2024: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Arcana Imperii #1) This 2021 space opera debut exhibits one of my favorite sort of plot structures, which is to drill down into the minutiae of daily life in a strange environment while major storylines play out slowly in the background, surfacing occasionally but only really …
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Book #173 of 2024: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. I feel as though this 2014 volume has given me immense insight into the people I know (or even suspect) have suffered traumatic experiences as either children or adults, as well …
TV #47 of 2024: The Umbrella Academy, season 3 As a series, The Umbrella Academy has benefited from the time it’s had to develop its main characters, who are interestingly dysfunctional and comfortably grown into their respective superpowers at this point. But the plot around them is a mess, simultaneously dragging on and seeming to …
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Book #172 of 2024: Meltdown by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #10) A weird end to a chaotic series, and probably the first one that really earns the “Mindwarp” title. These books have always been like a middle-grade sci-fi sampler project, and so it’s only fitting that the final volume introduces its younger readers to another few …
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