Book #141 of 2025: Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs I’ve read — and, okay, written — quite a lot about Doctor Who, so please believe me when I say that this new history from author John Higgs is truly remarkable within that space. It’s an engaging account of how the …
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Movie #10 of 2025: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (1983) For the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who in 1973, the producers hit upon a great idea: since the show is about a time-traveler, they could devise a story where the previous incarnations of the main character turn up to help the current version, then played …
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Book #140 of 2025: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Eternal Path Trilogy #1) A seriously strong fantasy debut. I thought while reading this novel that I might wind up giving it my top rating of five-out-of-five stars, and though it falls short of that in the end, I’ve still really enjoyed the piece and …
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Book #139 of 2025: Disney Adults: Exploring (And Falling in Love With) a Magical Subculture by AJ Wolfe An insider’s look at the phenomenon of Disney obsessives, and particularly those fixated on the company’s domestic theme parks in Florida and California. Like many of the people whom author AJ Wolfe has spotlighted or interviewed for …
Book #138 of 2025: Star Wars: Sanctuary: A Bad Batch Novel by Lamar Giles The animated Star Wars series The Bad Batch ended in 2024 after a respectable run of 47 episodes, so I’m a little confused about this new title that just came out, more than a year later. It does not appear to …
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TV #45 of 2025: Galavant, season 2 A welcome improvement over its debut. As I’d hoped, the writers finally seem to have locked into which elements of this fantasy musical-comedy sitcom work well and which ones don’t, and the result is an overall stronger season. It’s too bad the series wasn’t renewed for a third …
Book #137 of 2025: Firestorm by John Peel (2099 #6) After a couple weaker entries that passed without much action, the final volume of this middle-grade sci-fi series thankfully delivers with a bang. Everyone is scrambling to defeat the villain Devon’s terrorist threat to end all life on Earth (via a crashing ship full of …
Book #136 of 2025: Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth by Simon R. Green (Nightside #6) A satisfying enough conclusion to the initial arc of this early 2000s urban fantasy series. The protagonist’s mother has been built up as the big bad of the Nightside over all the previous volumes, and here her threat is finally …
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Book #135 of 2025: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with one of the editors.] Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand is a massive post-apocalyptic classic — over 1100 pages in its revised …
TV #44 of 2025: The Sopranos, season 2 Even more so than in its debut, this second run of The Sopranos feels built around its quieter domestic scenes rather than the explosive moments of mob violence that periodically surface to puncture them. Richie Aprile, for example, is instantly recognizable as a certain character type: the …
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