Book #321 of 2021: The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #4) This 1980 sci-fi finale is honestly worse than the miserable third volume, although it picks up slightly for its closing stretch, in which the tower at the headwaters of the river is finally reached and breached. Not that that goal has ever …
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Book #320 of 2021: ReDawn by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Skyward Flight #2) I’m still not entirely sure why these Skyward novellas have been produced as co-written supplements to the main series that many readers will inevitably skip (accidentally or otherwise), but so far they’ve been worth seeking out, both as engaging independent tales …
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Book #319 of 2021: The Attack by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #26) A whole twenty volumes after Jake saw a vision of a malevolent red eye turning his way as the Yeerk inside him starved to death back in book #6, we finally learn something of this terrible presence. His name is Crayak, and he …
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Book #318 of 2021: Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #25) This mystery — published in the U.S. under the much cooler title Murder in Retrospect — stands out in its series as a rare cold case for Hercule Poirot to take up, a fatal poisoning for which the victim’s wife was convicted …
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Book #317 of 2021: The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #2) This sequel is a bit straightforward and anticlimactic, but it remains fun to watch criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller at work, staying narrowly inside the ethical bounds of his profession in general and covering his tracks well when circumstances lead him to …
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Book #316 of 2021: The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling For nearly half of this novel, it seems a competent yet somewhat unremarkable iteration of the standard Bluebeard-esque gothic plot — see Rebecca, Jane Eyre, etc. — of a young woman warned not to dig into her brooding new husband’s secret past or …
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Book #315 of 2021: The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward This horror thriller isn’t an absolute trainwreck, and it undeniably picks up near the end, but the whole thing is built around a series of twists that are painfully obvious from the start and tiresome in their dragged-out execution. Ostensibly the plot …
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Book #314 of 2021: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (The Radiant Emperor #1) This incredible debut is a queer fantasy retelling of the founding of China’s Ming Dynasty, in which a penniless 14th-century monk-turned-rebel helped topple the Yuan Mongol rulers and forged a new empire with himself at the head. Only in …
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Book #313 of 2021: The Extreme by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #25) As a kid, I never knew that many of the latter Animorphs books were ghostwritten, with credited series author K. A. Applegate — already a pen name for the joint efforts of Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, likewise unknown to younger …
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TV #81 of 2021: ReBoot, season 2 The first four episodes this season are about on par with the previous year: competent yet disposable pieces of 90s children’s entertainment, more notable for the technological graphics achievement of the time than for any appreciable complexity or storytelling ambitions. (And in the initial airing of the show, …
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