Book #183 of 2021: Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher This 2008 memoir from actress Carrie Fisher — actually an adaptation of her autobiographical one-woman stage show, if we’re splitting hairs — is short but punchy, packing a lot of sensitive subjects in and around the wry comedy. She opens with her recent electroshock therapy to …
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Book #182 of 2021: This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism by Don Lemon Consciously modeled on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this 2021 title from CNN anchor Don Lemon is a similar attempt to grapple with the history and ongoing problem of American racism and suggest a way …
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Book #181 of 2021: The Stranger by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #7) My favorite book of this adult reread yet. The action is exciting and the dilemmas are clearly defined, and that’s even before the surprise pivot into a genuinely unexpected development around a third of the way through the text (much earlier than the …
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Book #180 of 2021: 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino This novel follows the various residents of a Philadelphia neighborhood over the course of a single ‘Christmas Eve Eve,’ culminating in a few of their respective threads intersecting at the local jazz club. With so many characters it’s a little challenging to …
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Book #179 of 2021: Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman I’m getting big Midge Maisel vibes from this novel about a 1960s Jewish housewife who leaves her husband and ends up pursuing a new career as a newspaper crime reporter. I love her brashness as a person finding her own path through a tough …
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Book #178 of 2021: Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by Kenneth Cain, Andrew Thomson, and Heidi Postlewait I have profoundly mixed feelings on this 2004 book, which documents its three authors’ experiences as United Nations peacekeepers in the 1990s. They initially meet while stationed together in Cambodia, but …
TV #53 of 2021: Star Wars Rebels, season 3 Another mixed bag of a season. The best element is clearly the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn, making his long-overdue introduction into proper Star Wars canon a full quarter-century after first appearing in the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire. I actually haven’t read any of the …
Book #177 of 2021: Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #18) Four solid but generally unremarkable short mystery stories, also published in the US under the title Dead Man’s Mirror. There are murders disguised as suicides and vice versa, stolen military documents (in one of author Agatha Christie’s rare moments of letting …
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TV #52 of 2021: Master of None, season 3 Returning to this series four years after its latest run gives the producers a chance to reinvent the narrative — and distance it from co-creator and original star Aziz Ansari, still under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations — and to their credit, they’ve seized that …
Book #176 of 2021: The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes (The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone #2) Another strong entry in this unfairly-obscure fantasy quartet. I don’t like it quite as much as the previous volume, in part since a couple of the new storylines — Anne’s to some extent, but especially Aspar’s — seem …
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