TV #16 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 3 This animated family sitcom has been getting better year over year, and this third season produces what I’d call its first all-time classic episode, Mother Daughter Laser Razor. No other half-hour in this run quite matches that one’s fantastic blend of action, comedy, and character growth, but …
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Book Review: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
Book #61 of 2022: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen #1) This 1999 debut is an incredibly dense high fantasy adventure that I can’t honestly say I’ve enjoyed too much. Author Steven Erikson clearly has an epic scope in mind for this saga, but this first thick tome — …
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Movie Review: Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils (2022)
Movie #8 of 2022: Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils (2022) I’ve been treating standalone TV events like this as movies in my reviews, but that does feel a little silly for a title that, at just 48 minutes long, is the shortest special of modern Doctor Who thus far. I liked it a …
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Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Book #60 of 2022: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel This sci-fi novel starts off pretty disjointedly, repeatedly jumping ahead by literal centuries (1912, 2020, 2203) to no immediately discernible purpose or connection between successive protagonists. If not for the overall shortness of the volume and for my abiding affection towards author Emily …
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Book Review: Crooked House by Agatha Christie
Book #59 of 2022: Crooked House by Agatha Christie This 1949 standalone novel is one of the more excellent Agatha Christie mysteries, with a tight plot, a plethora of solid suspects, and a fiendishly distinctive — though totally fair — ultimate solution to its puzzle. I think it helps that the protagonist is not one …
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Book Review: The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate
Book #58 of 2022: The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #2) Here is the nicest thing I can say about this second Animorphs choose-your-own-adventure title: it is better than the first one. (It’s not a sequel, though: the “you” before was another kid who was wandering through the abandoned construction site of …
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TV Review: Scandal, season 6
TV #15 of 2022: Scandal, season 6 This penultimate outing starts with a bang, and winds up structuring its entire year a bit like a whodunnit mystery. For a while, the show is almost hypnotically-recursive, returning Rashomon-like to Election Night again and again, each time filling in yet another person’s perspective along with some additional …
Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Book #57 of 2022: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon As a satire, this 1966 novel about an apparent conspiracy surrounding an illegal alternate postal system is sporadically effective, with a handful of amusing developments and witty turns-of-phrase. As pretty much anything else, it’s not really what I’m looking for in a story. …
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Book Review: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
Book #56 of 2022: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith A deeply-moving account of author Clint Smith’s visits to sites across the country (and one abroad, in Senegal) that have links to slavery, from former plantations like Angola Prison and Jefferson’s Monticello estate to …
Movie Review: Luca (2021)
Movie #7 of 2022: Luca (2021) This Disney-Pixar adventure about an underwater creature who appears human when dry is probably unlikely to go down as an all-time classic, but it’s still charmingly fun. The coming-of-age storyline involves the hero first hiding and then embracing his true self alongside an older boy who shares his identity …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 