Book #117 of 2022: The Verifiers by Jane Pek A story curiously out of time. There’s a lot of talk in this debut book about online dating, corporate collection/abuse of confidential user data, and artificial intelligence, but it’s all conveyed in a fairly breathless manner to the characters and reader alike when none of the …
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TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7
TV #36 of 2022: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 7 A curiously bifurcated run. The first half of this last year almost seems to sputter, with some episodes that are absolutely up to the usual high dramatic standards of the series and others that represent some of the laziest, most self-indulgent writing ever. (I’m …
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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 6
TV #35 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 6 I’ve now reached the point of this Bob’s Burgers rewatch where I’m caught up with the seasons that I reviewed the first time I saw it, starting in 2016. So here’s what I wrote then, at somewhat less than my now-typical length: “I feel like Bob’s Burgers …
TV Review: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1
TV #34 of 2022: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1 A confident launch to a mockumentary sitcom with the simple yet irresistible premise of several vampires sharing a house in Staten Island. (I haven’t seen the movie that preceded this, but I understand it follows a different set of characters and isn’t directly …
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Book Review: The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska
Book #116 of 2022: The Midnight Girls by Alicia Jasinska A fun little queer enemies-to-lovers YA fantasy, but with some tonal and worldbuilding issues that are keeping me at a slight distance. The two antiheroines are teenaged assistants to rival witches, tasked with hunting down victims and ripping their hearts out to fuel their mistresses’ …
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Book Review: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
Book #115 of 2022: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #2) 1976’s Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn’t nearly so good, but it still has …
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Movie Review: Knives Out (2019)
Movie #12 of 2022: Knives Out (2019) A decent murder mystery, albeit one I feel I might have liked better absent the years of people hyping it up so much. The colorful ensemble of plausible suspects is certainly fun, as is the steady puncturing of their bigotry towards the dead patriarch’s nurse and her immigrant …
Book Review: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg
Book #114 of 2022: The Jewish Book of Horror edited by Josh Schlossberg As usual for a genre anthology, some of these stories strike me as stronger than others, but they are collectively rather great, presenting a uniquely Jewish chorus of voices interpreting and exploring horror in that particular context. Here we find beings of …
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Book Review: The Late Show by Michael Connelly
Book #113 of 2022: The Late Show by Michael Connelly (Renée Ballard #1) [Warning: discussion of sexual assault and transphobic violence ahead in this review. Additional content warnings for the book listed below.] Theoretically, author Michael Connelly’s 30th novel should be a reasonable introduction to new character Renée Ballard, the latest protagonist to join the …
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Book Review: The Return by K. A. Applegate
Book #112 of 2022: The Return by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #48) At this point in the Animorphs series, the overarching plot of the Yeerk invasion and teenage guerilla resistance war is entering its endgame. The companion books are all finished, and each of the six core protagonists has one more adventure to relate to …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 