Book #132 of 2023: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings A breezy survey of different ideas about the hereafter: both those of various world religions and the ones dreamed up for particular works of fiction, from Riverworld to Dead Like Me to San Junipero to …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine
Book #131 of 2023: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just …
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Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023)
Movie #9 of 2023: Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023) In hindsight, I probably should have approached these three David Tennant/Catherine Tate Doctor Who specials as a single season of television, miniature though it’d be, rather than a trilogy of discrete movie equivalents. More even than the previous round of Tennant specials that followed series 4 …
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Book Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Book #130 of 2023: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh This sci-fi novel starts and ends pretty well, but it loses its way rather dramatically for a large section in-between. The early worldbuilding presents us with something like Ender’s Game (or perhaps Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse) by way of The Giver — a dystopian militarized society …
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Book Review: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea
Book #129 of 2023: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea This debut novel and its heroine should have been right up my alley: an #ownvoices queer Black teen, striving to prove herself in the cutthroat and frequently racist world of French ballet, who makes a pact with …
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Movie Review: Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder (2023)
Movie #8 of 2023: Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder (2023) The second of three David Tennant / Catherine Tate specials we’re getting this year is even better than the first. It’s less busy, for starters, with a premise that’s mostly just the Doctor and Donna exploring a derelict spaceship at the very edge of existence. …
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Book Review: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Book #128 of 2023: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer This 2023 title is an expansion of author Claire Dederer’s viral 2017 article, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” She’s no closer to coming up with a definitive prescriptive answer to that question of how one should treat Woody Allen …
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TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 9
TV #59 of 2023: Classic Doctor Who, season 9 Narrowly more good than great in my opinion, and certainly less innovative than the Third Doctor’s first two seasons, which radically overhauled the series on several levels and then introduced the delightful recurring villain the Master. The main change this year is just that the Doctor …
TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1
TV #58 of 2023: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1 I can’t complain too much about this show. It’s an animated half-hour comedy that, sure, makes me laugh most episodes. But I don’t think it’s really living up to its mission or its potential, at least in this first year. The series takes its name …
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Book Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells
Book #127 of 2023: System Collapse by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #7) The second half of this latest Murderbot adventure lives up to my high expectations for the series, but the first part is an experimental departure that doesn’t really work for me. We start in media res, with the neurodivergent cyborg showing unusual …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 