TV #48 of 2025: Crusade, season 1 A pretty underwhelming spinoff to Babylon 5 following the events of the TV movie A Call to Arms, which ended with an alien plague infecting everyone on earth. That’s an effective cliffhanger, and its resolution was supposed to be provided by the characters on this 1999 series, who …
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Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
Book #148 of 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire …
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Book Review: Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green
Book #147 of 2025: Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green (Nightside #7) The initial story arc of this series came to an effective crescendo in the previous volume, so it’s only fitting that this next installment feels like a bit of a breather by comparison. It’s a back-to-basics sort of plot that returns the …
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Book Review: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Book #146 of 2025: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth This 2004 alternate history strikes me as a modernized take on Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, again imagining the United States of that era following Europe’s descent into strongman fascism. But whereas Lewis was writing contemporary fiction with invented characters, Philip …
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Book Review: Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard
Book #145 of 2025: Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard Author Victoria Goddard’s latest Nine Worlds title offers her usual brand of wholesome cozy fantasy, fleshing out a new corner of that ever-expanding saga. This time it’s a prequel to her Greenwing & Dart series, which normally centers around a young gentleman scholar named …
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TV Review: Ripley, season 1
TV #47 of 2025: Ripley, season 1 It’s been seven years since I read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I’ve never seen any of the previous adaptations, so I’ll mostly be judging this Netflix miniseries on its own terms. And the first thing to note is that it’s a strikingly gorgeous production, filmed …
Book Review: Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle
Book #144 of 2025: Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle (Drowned Gods #1) I like the worldbuilding and the initial premise of this fantasy novel, in which a student is returning to her magical school for the new semester after her best friend and several classmates tragically died. (It turns out they were pursuing some sort …
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TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3
TV #46 of 2025: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3 I enjoyed the first two seasons of this Discovery spinoff / TOS prequel immensely, but have unfortunately found this third year to constitute a significant step down. The show still occasionally manages to fire on all cylinders — both 3×6 “The Selat Who Ate …
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Book Review: The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Book #143 of 2025: The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro These days, Amelia Earhart is probably best remembered for two things: her status as a pioneering female pilot, including her being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, …
Book Review: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew
Book #142 of 2025: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew The Jewish High Holy Days are approaching, which means my library’s circulation figures for this self-help title are seeing their usual annual bump. This year I remembered to place my …
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