Book #206 of 2021: Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #17) This is one of the better entries in the series, I think, close in spirit to its famous sister volume Murder on the Orient Express, which likewise finds detective Hercule Poirot stumbling upon a deadly plot in a confined space whilst …
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Book #205 of 2021: The Android by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #10) I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a series-best Animorphs volume, but it’s one of the stronger entries for sure. It’s also the rare case of an item in this franchise with an unambiguous, straightforward title: this is in fact a …
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Book #204 of 2021: The Born Queen by Greg Keyes (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone #4) This high fantasy quartet never quite regains the propulsive rush of its initial entry, and there are a few too many dramatic reversals and reveals in the lengthy climax of this last novel for each to land with …
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Movie #4 of 2021: Star Trek Generations (1994) Filmed and released shortly after the final season of The Next Generation, this film reprises that show’s main cast along with William Shatner (and briefly, James Doohan’s Scotty and Walter Koenig’s Chekov) from the original Star Trek series, to officially pass the cinematic torch over from TOS …
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Book #203 of 2021: Survivor by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #4) Author Octavia E. Butler famously came to hate this volume in her Patternist series, letting it fall out of publication in 1981 (a sentiment still honored four decades on by whoever now holds the copyright). It’s never been officially released as an ebook or …
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Book #202 of 2021: Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell (Simon Snow #3) The new Simon Snow sequel is another loose entry in a series that reads ever more like fanfiction of someone else’s work. The previous volume at least had its great American road trip providing a basic sort of structure, but …
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TV #59 of 2021: Star Trek: Voyager, season 1 The overwhelming feeling I have about this particular sci-fi spinoff so far is one of wasted potential. I can see the Lost in Space angle that the writers are going for, isolating a starship far from the known setting of the rest of the franchise and …
Book #201 of 2021: Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon This is a strange narrative that changes shape at multiple junctures, so I’m loath to give too much away for prospective readers. But it begins with its fifteen-year-old heroine, the black albino intersex bride of the local reverend, fleeing from their fundamentalist cult compound to deliver her …
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Book #200 of 2021: The Only Pirate at the Party by Lindsey Stirling and Brooke S. Passey Dubstep violinist and YouTube sensation Lindsey Stirling has understandably not had the most conventional career path, and this co-written autobiography is an interesting look at the mind behind the music. Her perspective can be myopic and frustratingly twee …
Book #199 of 2021: The Secret by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #9) This is perhaps the classic example of a disposable Animorphs volume, one which doesn’t really move the plot forward or tell us anything new about the characters or their universe. The crisis du jour is so quintessentially 90s too: the Yeerks are illegally …
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