TV #19 of 2022: Saturday Night Live, season 47 This is the fifth season of SNL in a row that I’ve watched straight through as it aired, so at this point I feel pretty confident in my ability to rate a given span against the program’s typical output. So, what was different for the long-running …
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Book #76 of 2022: The Test by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #43) This Animorphs novel is a direct sequel to ghostwriter Ellen Geroux’s earlier story #33 The Illusion, in which Tobias gets tortured by the unhinged sub-visser “Taylor.” The same antagonist is back for this tale, quickly recapturing the hawk boy after he makes the …
Book #75 of 2022: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #3) I’m still enjoying this alternate-history sci-fi series about the ramifications of a natural disaster accelerating the space program as humanity in the mid-twentieth century seeks a way to get most of the population off-planet, but I consider this third volume to …
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Book #74 of 2022: Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long The protagonist of this YA novel reminds me strongly of Katniss Everdeen: a teen girl, cold and toughened beyond her years, forced to enter into a deadly spectacle where she puts her wilderness survival skills to good use and gradually comes to …
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Book #73 of 2022: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files #1) This 2004 publication — which in my edition includes the novel The Atrocity Archive followed by a sequel novella “The Concrete Jungle” — introduces the Laundry, a secret British intelligence division dealing with magic and related otherworldly threats. It’s urban fantasy, …
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Book #72 of 2022: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of …
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Book #71 of 2022: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #4) As far as mystery hooks go, it’s hard to beat an ad being placed in a sleepy village newspaper, politely informing its readers of the place and time of an upcoming murder — where sure enough, someone winds up killed and …
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Book #70 of 2022: The Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #42) In another riff on a classic sci-fi premise, this Animorphs novel by ghostwriter Emily Costello — fresh off her dubious success with Alternamorphs #2 — finds the team shrinking down to microscopic size, in order to chase a squad of Helmacrons who have …
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TV #18 of 2022: Moon Knight, season 1 I’ve enjoyed the first half of this six-episode miniseries as a character study of a meek man coming to realize his blackouts and sleepwalking are the result of undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder — and that his opposite persona is a confident ex-mercenary who’s also the superpowered avatar …
Book #69 of 2022: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz This book is primarily a biography of Smedley Darlington Butler, a now-obscure figure from the late nineteenth / early twentieth century who was once a household name as a military leader-turned-reformist. In …
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