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 …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss”
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 — …
Continue reading “Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)”
Book Review: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy
Book #151 of 2025: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy This is a cute middle-grade novel about two thirteen-year-old boys who are stuck repeating their common bar mitzvah weekend over and over again. I like the distinctiveness of the two protagonists, who narrate in alternating chapters: hyperactive Finn is an …
Continue reading “Book Review: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy”
Book Review: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Book #150 of 2025: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith This 2023 title is an informative popular science book, with a handful of caveats. My first issue is that it’s really two works in one, and that …
Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland
Book #149 of 2025: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland This Star Wars novel is misleadingly labeled, and I suspect I would have given it a pass if it had been correctly identified as a part of the franchise’s High Republic line — which I largely haven’t read — rather than a prequel …
Continue reading “Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland”
Movie Review: The Bourne Identity (2002)
Movie #11 of 2025: The Bourne Identity (2002) I haven’t seen this movie in a solid decade or two, but it caught my eye on a recent flight and I decided to give it a go. (I’m still undecided if I’ll continue on with the sequels or not, some of which I know I missed …
TV Review: Crusade, season 1
TV #48 of 2025: Crusade, season 1 A pretty underwhelming spinoff to Babylon 5 following the events of the TV movie A Call to Arms, which ended with an alien plague infecting everyone on earth. That’s an effective cliffhanger, and its resolution was supposed to be provided by the characters on this 1999 series, who …
Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
Book #148 of 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire …
Continue reading “Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 