TV #33 of 2024: Farscape, season 1 Another sci-fi series that I missed at the time and am belatedly getting into now. I like this one a lot so far! It feels a bit like Star Trek crossed with Stargate — the latter in part because Farscape stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black would later …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memoirs of an Impossible Blue Box by Steve Cole
Book #109 of 2024: Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memoirs of an Impossible Blue Box by Steve Cole A cute idea with a fairly adequate execution, attempting to retell nearly all of Doctor Who — from An Unearthly Child in 1963 through The Legend of Ruby Sunday in 2024 — from the perspective of the alien …
Book Review: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie
Book #108 of 2024: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie This Agatha Christie collection, published posthumously in 1979, turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, as all nine of its assembled stories are ones that had been previously collected in decades past: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories …
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Book Review: The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton
Book #107 of 2024: The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton This 2024 sci-fi novel develops into a cute queer hopepunk piece by the end, but it takes some time to get there and makes a lot of strange choices along the way. I’ve found it difficult to remember that the main characters are supposed …
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Book Review: Second Sight by Chris Archer
Book #106 of 2024: Second Sight by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #4) This fourth Mindwarp novel follows the same general structure as the first three: another kid in this fictional Wisconsin town turns thirteen, discovers they have special powers, and then quickly has to use them to avoid falling into the clutches of a shapeshifting alien …
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Book Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Book #105 of 2024: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin While not quite as strong as author Gabrielle Zevin’s recent bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this 2014 title is the first of the three books I’ve now read from her backlist that clearly demonstrates her creative talents growing in that …
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Book Review: Teckla by Steven Brust
Book #104 of 2024: Teckla by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #3) Another crisis with antihero Vladimir Taltos, sorcerer-assassin and crime boss of his local fantasy city. This third adventure takes place soon after book one (the second volume being a prequel), and offers probably the most straightforward plot yet: the protagonist’s wife has gotten involved …
Book Review: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
Book #103 of 2024: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is not The Way of Kings, the debut novel in the series The Stormlight Archive that author Brandon Sanderson published in 2010. It’s rather his initial attempt at telling a story …
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Book Review: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard
Book #102 of 2024: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #2) I’m still not loving the Greenwing & Dart sub-series nearly as much as the other books I’ve read in author Victoria Goddard’s broader Nine Worlds saga, but this second volume is a marked improvement over the first. Taking place only a …
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Book Review: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia
Book #101 of 2024: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia A quintessential mixed-bag anthology. There are some legitimately great short stories in here, and if I assigned a rating to each of the 33 entries and took their average, I suspect I would wind up at a mean value of three-out-of-five-stars or so. At their …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 