Book #91 of 2023: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] The latest Kickstarter novel from author Brandon Sanderson falls somewhere between the last two in quality for me. I don’t think it’s as strong a story as Tress of the Emerald Sea — nor that …
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Book #90 of 2023: Goldenhand by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #5) My original review of this novel from shortly after its publication in 2016: “A triumphant return to the Old Kingdom, finally resolving the fate of the lost Abhorsen, Clariel. (Note: Clariel’s early life is described in the prequel novel which bears her name, …
Book #89 of 2023: Doctor Who: Classics Omnibus Volume 1 by Pat Mills, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Dez Skinn, Paul Neary, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, John Ridgway, Bryan Hitch, and Steve Parkhouse Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This 2010 anthology gathers 19 comic book stories by a variety of authors and artists, originally published in the …
Book #88 of 2023: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #9) This 1962 novel, published in the U.S. as simply The Mirror Crack’d, offers a fun little murder mystery that’s kept me guessing throughout. No one seems to have had any motive that could account for the neighborhood woman’s …
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Book #87 of 2023: All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby Author S. A. Cosby’s latest novel is his best work yet, a gripping southern noir with heavy shades of True Detective and extreme depictions of mutilation out of something like Hannibal. Check my content warnings below — it’s definitely not for the faint …
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TV #34 of 2023: Seinfeld, season 2 A marginal improvement over the first year of this 90s sitcom, though it retains Jerry’s dreadful stand-up material on the binary differences he sees between men and women. Outside those scenes, the storytelling engine is working a little better now at spinning minutiae into twenty-minute comedy pieces, but …
Book #86 of 2023: She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran A creepy #ownvoices haunted house story that never quite clicks into gear, perhaps because the premise is just a bit too convoluted for my tastes. Our queer teenage protagonist, visiting her father in Vietnam while he fixes up an old manor home, is …
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TV #33 of 2023: Black Mirror, season 6 After four long years — twice the length of its previous longest gap — the infamous anthology series is back with another star-studded cast in five new twisted installments. Despite the program’s frequent focus on the dark underbelly of emerging technologies, I’ve always maintained that Black Mirror …
TV #32 of 2023: Classic Doctor Who, season 7 Previously for this rewatch, I’ve been assigning each season of Classic Who an average rating that’s the literal mean of my ratings for the individual serials within. I’m going to cheat a little this time, though, both since there are only four stories in season 7 …
Book #85 of 2023: Those Who Hold the Fire by Victoria Goddard This prequel to author Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor is rather short — the Nine Worlds wiki lists it as a novelette, not even a full novella — and it’s pretty dependent on the reader bringing outside context from that longer …
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