Book #40 of 2026: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a …
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Movie #11 of 2026: The Many Saints of Newark (2021) I came into this movie pretty skeptical — did The Sopranos really need a spinoff prequel, over a decade after the show went off the air? — but it grew on me a little by the end. Although I didn’t think there were any mysteries …
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Book #39 of 2026: The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #2) I’m enjoying this old mystery series enough to keep reading, but I have yet to be blown away by the execution. The most enjoyable aspect remains the narrator’s banter and overall relationship with his boss the reclusive detective, which means …
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Book #38 of 2026: Mars by Ben Bova This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it …
Movie #10 of 2026: Rocky Balboa (2006) Any story that restarts a dormant franchise carries an additional burden of justification that immediate sequels lack. The first five Rocky movies had their ups and downs, but together they formed a cohesive unit about the life and career of a Philadelphia boxer from roughly 1976 to 1990. …
Book #37 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick (Virgin New Adventures #12) This Doctor Who novel is so bad that it had me looking back over previous stories I’ve rated as three-out-of-five stars, wondering if I’d been too harsh on them. It’s both overstuffed and incredibly disjointed, offering not so much a …
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TV #10 of 2026: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 1 This show debuted in 1993, and knowing that it was based on a book by the journalist/producer David Simon who later went on to create The Wire, I was expecting a similar sort of crime drama here. And the parallels are there, seeing as …
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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. …
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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 …
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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 …
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