Book #299 of 2020: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #6) I’m not a big fan of the first half of this novel, in which the three protagonists — a returning Eustace, his classmate Jill, and a rather miserable creature named Puddleglum — are very nasty toward one another as …
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Book #298 of 2020: The Way Back by Gavriel Savit It’s probably not a good sign when a book that feels so tailor-made for me as a reader struggles to keep my attention throughout. I do love the first quarter or so of this story, which sees a pair of Jewish kids fleeing their nineteenth-century …
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Book #297 of 2020: The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White (Camelot Rising #2) I don’t have much to say about this sequel, other than that it’s the sort of middle volume that largely treads water for its trilogy en route to a hopefully stronger conclusion. The plot and character arcs don’t really progress any further …
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Book #296 of 2020: Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo Although I agree with nearly everything that author Ijeoma Oluo opines in these pages, I’ve found it somewhat lacking as a single cohesive argument. Her stated thesis, that white men are so privileged by American society that many of us …
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Book #295 of 2020: The Poet by Michael Connelly (Jack McEvoy #1) Author Michael Connelly’s fifth crime thriller, the first not to feature detective Harry Bosch, has been written to stand on its own, although it introduces concepts and characters that will later cross over with the main series. Our protagonist this time is investigative …
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Book #294 of 2020: Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack (Anya #2) Another fun middle-grade fantasy adventure, albeit somewhat messier in plot than the first novel with this Russian Jewish heroine. Still, the representation in this series remains charming and relatable, from the opening scene with Anya building a sukkah to her pride about …
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TV #54 of 2020: The Office, season 8 The first stretch of this show without original star Steve Carell is a real mess, immediately confirming that the producers had no idea who would be taking over for his character as branch manager when they ended the previous season on that cliffhanger of interviews. And that’s …
Book #293 of 2020: The Ever Cruel Kingdom by Rin Chupeco (The Never Tilting World #2) In the first volume of this YA fantasy duology, twin sisters raised on opposite sides of a stationary world each fall in love and get caught up in a propulsive plot that brings them and their partners hurtling together …
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Book #292 of 2020: American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan I like how this true-crime book tells its story mostly as the authorities learned it, building gradually from a 2012 missing persons report to presumption of foul play and the arrest of a suspect …
TV #53 of 2020: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 5 Although still somewhat bifurcated in tone, this animated prequel show has been getting gradually stronger year over year, both in the quality of its better parts and the ratio of them to the worse. Here, for instance, it’s really only the 4-episode “D-Squad” arc …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more