Movie #13 of 2025: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, …
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Book #154 of 2025: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on …
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Book #153 of 2025: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang This fantasy novel does a great job capturing the terrifyingly mundane lows of graduate school: the uncertainty, the depression, the stress, the disordered sleep and eating habits, the precarious financial situation, the emotionally abusive professors, and so on. My own experience wasn’t ever so bad that …
Book #152 of 2025: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss (Virgin New Adventures #8) Mark Gatiss is a true Doctor Who multihyphenate, having written nine scripts for the revived post-2005 series and appeared as an actor in another five episodes (with one overlap, in the uncredited cameo role of a spitfire pilot in his own …
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TV #49 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 3 I rated the first two seasons of this show as three stars each, and in some ways, this closing run feels like a minor improvement. I especially like the episode that flashes back to the regular protagonists’ mothers as teenagers themselves, which arrives with a surprising degree …
Movie #12 of 2025: The Bourne Supremacy (2004) The problem with giving your hero a happy ending is that when a sequel gets greenlit — presumably over studio desire to keep monetizing a successful IP, rather than anyone’s feeling that the Jason Bourne story as presented in the first movie was at all unfinished — …
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Book #151 of 2025: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy This is a cute middle-grade novel about two thirteen-year-old boys who are stuck repeating their common bar mitzvah weekend over and over again. I like the distinctiveness of the two protagonists, who narrate in alternating chapters: hyperactive Finn is an …
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Book #150 of 2025: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith This 2023 title is an informative popular science book, with a handful of caveats. My first issue is that it’s really two works in one, and that …
Book #149 of 2025: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland This Star Wars novel is misleadingly labeled, and I suspect I would have given it a pass if it had been correctly identified as a part of the franchise’s High Republic line — which I largely haven’t read — rather than a prequel …
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Movie #11 of 2025: The Bourne Identity (2002) I haven’t seen this movie in a solid decade or two, but it caught my eye on a recent flight and I decided to give it a go. (I’m still undecided if I’ll continue on with the sequels or not, some of which I know I missed …
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