Book #10 of 2022: The Proposal by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #35) This is ghostwriter Jeffrey Zeuhlke’s second and final contribution to the Animorphs series, and I must say, I like it a lot less than his previous outing, #25 The Extreme. The best part is the focus on a crisis in narrator Marco’s mental …
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Book #9 of 2022: Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights #2) I was on the fence between a three-star and four-star rating for the first volume of this YA duology, and since I rounded up then, I suppose I’ll go with the lower score for this sequel, which I haven’t enjoyed quite …
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Movie #5 of 2022: Encanto (2021) Disney’s 60th animated feature is a real breath of fresh air, breaking from the studio’s usual patterns in a few startlingly welcome ways. The heroine doesn’t just have two living parents: she has a whole household full of siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins too, a rowdy ensemble …
Movie #4 of 2022: Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) Finally decided to rent this one, since I still hadn’t seen it and at this point it doesn’t seem as though it’ll ever make its way over to Disney+ with the rest of the MCU. It’s fun! The explosion-y climax goes on a bit long in …
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Movie #3 of 2022: Eternals (2021) The very definition of a skippable MCU title. I suppose the visuals are striking, and the diversity of the cast is appreciated, but outside of Kumail Nanjiani’s quippy efforts, it’s altogether a dour film of people standing around proclaiming ominously (in between exchanging laser blasts and/or punches) with little …
Book #8 of 2022: The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier There’s a fine sci-fi premise to this 2020 French novel (released in English translation the following year), but I don’t know — something about the enterprise just leaves me cold. Partly the problem is that author Hervé Le Tellier takes far too many pages to …
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TV #4 of 2022: Station Eleven, season 1 Nearly two years into a real-life pandemic — one which delayed this very production — it’s maybe hard to believe that a tale about that sort of devastation and its aftermath could register as remotely feel-good. And the general premise here, of a roving troupe of Shakespearean …
Book #7 of 2022: A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #1) An utterly charming gay adult fantasy from debut author Freya Marske. Set in Edwardian England, the story follows a young baronet appointed to a seemingly meaningless civil service role, only to discover that its innocuous title masks a true duty of …
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TV #3 of 2022: Fringe, season 4 I didn’t have much patience for this penultimate run the first time I watched through Fringe, as the literal retcon of the rebooted timeline struck me as a lazy excuse for the writers to stop caring about continuity at all. They keep coy about everything that’s now different …
TV #2 of 2022: ReBoot, season 4 Oh, that wicked cliffhanger! 20 years later, it still stings that we leave Mainframe in such a perilous position, and that the eventual semi-sequel to this show, aside from being awful all-around, never even tries to provide any resolution to it. Like the teams on Angel or Animorphs, …
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