Book #71 of 2021: We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper Struck by a lingering campus legend that she heard as a Harvard undergrad, author Becky Cooper began digging into the forty-year-old unsolved murder at its heart, sorting the facts from the mythic stature …
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Book Review: Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore
Book #70 of 2021: Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm #4) This has always been a pretty loose series, so I don’t mind that we’ve jumped forward four years for this latest sequel, or that it basically spins an entirely new story instead of picking up any existing thread. In the time since, Queen Bitterblue’s …
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Book Review: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
Book #69 of 2021: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis I don’t love this 1983 novel quite as much as its ritzy Netflix adaptation, but it remains the strong story of a (fictional) female chess prodigy growing from a shy orphan to a capable international contender, thrilling even for audiences who aren’t able to follow …
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TV Review: The Good Fight, season 4
TV #25 of 2021: The Good Fight, season 4 I want to acknowledge up-front that this latest run of the streaming Good Wife spinoff had its production cut short by the coronavirus outbreak, losing the final few episodes the writers must surely have expected they’d be able to use to wrap up various plotlines. As …
Book Review: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray
Book #68 of 2021: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray I wouldn’t call this YA adventure a must-read for Star Wars fans, but it’s a big step up from Light of the Jedi, the first book in this new prequel era for the franchise, roughly two centuries before The Phantom …
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TV Review: Community, season 3
TV #24 of 2021: Community, season 3 This stretch of Community is its most serialized yet (and possibly ever; I don’t recall the later stuff too clearly). That’s always impressive in a sitcom, and it adds a nice sense of momentum to the year as various arcs unfold. Of course, the downside is that fewer …
Book Review: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
Book #67 of 2021: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #10) A weaker effort from author Terry Pratchett, and a little too dependent on referential humor, where the entire joke is something like, “Wouldn’t a Discworld version of Gone with the Wind be hilarious?” I’m also still mostly familiar with this setting through the stories …
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Book Review: Chance: Escape from the Holocaust by Uri Shulevitz
Book #66 of 2021: Chance: Escape from the Holocaust by Uri Shulevitz This 2020 title is a little unusual among Holocaust memoirs, both for its aim at a middle-grade audience and for its depicting a life more distantly touched by Nazi violence. Jewish author Uri Shulevitz and his family fled German-occupied Poland into the Soviet …
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Book Review: Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han
Book #65 of 2021: Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han There’s a deep sense of sorrow pervading the four members of this novel’s Chinese-American immigrant family, all of whom seem utterly alienated — from their new country, from their homeland, and especially from one another. That estrangement is achingly rendered, and I’m sure it …
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TV Review: WandaVision
TV #23 of 2021: WandaVision Brilliant in concept and nearly flawless in execution, I have very few critical notes for this miniseries, the debut television project under the immediate creative control of producer Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios and the premiere event in his Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four. It’s a decade-by-decade journey across American …
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