Book #255 of 2021: The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster So far Cribsheet is still my favorite data-driven parenting title by economist Emily Oster, but this latest one is a solid self-help book for household organizing and thorny decision-making about raising kids particularly …
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TV Review: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2
TV #71 of 2021: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2 Just like its initial run, a lot of the bits in this season of the sketch comedy show take weird and unpredictable turns by the end — which sometimes yields absolute hilarity, but more often produces a skit I only partially …
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Book Review: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon
Book #254 of 2021: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon This provocative title relates the current scientific consensus that most weight-loss programs of diet and/or exercise simply don’t produce long-term stable results for most users, explores the systemic way that our culture is organized around the assumption of …
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Book Review: The Underground by K. A. Applegate
Book #253 of 2021: The Underground by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #17) On the one hand, raids on the Yeerk pool already seem like the most generic and frequent Animorphs plots by this point in the series. On the other hand, this is the novel that gives us a specific variety of oatmeal as a …
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Book Review: Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Book #252 of 2021: Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Expanding on a viral New Yorker article, this short book from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares her experience with mourning her father, who passed away in June 2020. (He didn’t die of the coronavirus, but travel restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic kept her …
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Book Review: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker
Book #251 of 2021: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni #2) This long-awaited sequel to 2013’s The Golem and the Jinni is another lovely piece of historical fantasy, following those two beings from Jewish and Arabian folklore as they navigate the next stages of their life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York …
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Book Review: The Narrows by Michael Connelly
Book #250 of 2021: The Narrows by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #10) This is one of the more serialized Harry Bosch adventures, at least of what I’ve read so far. Terry McCaleb, protagonist of Blood Work and the detective’s reluctant partner in A Darkness More Than Night, is dead. His widow suspects foul play, and …
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Book Review: The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson
Book #249 of 2021: The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Gap Cycle #3) After a curious series debut and a more promising immediate sequel, this third Gap volume lands somewhere in between, delivering a decent yet slightly perfunctory follow-up. As is often the case for the …
Book Review: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
Book #248 of 2021: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint The latest Greek myth to be retold as an extended novel, in the way that Madeline Miller famously did for Circe in 2018. This effort doesn’t soar quite as much as that one in either the quality of its prose or its basic character and plot work, …
Book Review: The Warning by K. A. Applegate
Book #247 of 2021: The Warning by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #16) The internet stuff in this novel is fairly dated, with AOL-style chat rooms and explanations of screen names and browser cookies, but only because the technology has moved on in the decades since 1998, never in a way that seems like author K. …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 