Movie #14 of 2025: The Bourne Legacy (2012) The beginning of this piece is choppy and overwrought, doing little to sell the already-flimsy idea of telling a Jason Bourne story without Jason Bourne. It weaves in and out of the events of the previous film, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), in a manner that’s alienatingly hard …
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Book Review: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
Book #157 of 2025: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser Interesting and well-written, and yet beholden to a bizarre structure that ultimately weakens the work. Essentially there are four threads that author Caroline Fraser develops here, interweaving them as she goes: 1) a true-crime history of American serial …
Book Review: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
Book #156 of 2025: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison I appreciate that this vampire title is less straightforward than author Rachel Harrison’s earlier werewolf novel Such Sharp Teeth, but as it turns out, unpredictability doesn’t necessarily translate to a stronger work. Although I didn’t know quite where the plot was going, its tale of two …
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Book Review: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
Book #155 of 2025: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton (Mickey7 #1) A fine little science-fiction novel that never quite kicks into a higher gear. The premise and obvious anticapitalist themes seem fun: the protagonist is of the ‘expendable’ underclass on his inhospitable colony world, meaning that he’s given all the truly dangerous tasks and cloned from …
Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Movie #13 of 2025: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, …
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Book Review: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney
Book #154 of 2025: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on …
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Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang
Book #153 of 2025: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang This fantasy novel does a great job capturing the terrifyingly mundane lows of graduate school: the uncertainty, the depression, the stress, the disordered sleep and eating habits, the precarious financial situation, the emotionally abusive professors, and so on. My own experience wasn’t ever so bad that …
Book Review: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
Book #152 of 2025: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss (Virgin New Adventures #8) Mark Gatiss is a true Doctor Who multihyphenate, having written nine scripts for the revived post-2005 series and appeared as an actor in another five episodes (with one overlap, in the uncredited cameo role of a spitfire pilot in his own …
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TV Review: Derry Girls, season 3
TV #49 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 3 I rated the first two seasons of this show as three stars each, and in some ways, this closing run feels like a minor improvement. I especially like the episode that flashes back to the regular protagonists’ mothers as teenagers themselves, which arrives with a surprising degree …
Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Movie #12 of 2025: The Bourne Supremacy (2004) The problem with giving your hero a happy ending is that when a sequel gets greenlit — presumably over studio desire to keep monetizing a successful IP, rather than anyone’s feeling that the Jason Bourne story as presented in the first movie was at all unfinished — …
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