Book #111 of 2025: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami This new science-fiction novel offers a modern spin on Minority Report, in which people can be arrested and indefinitely detained on the basis of an algorithm determining they’re statistically more likely to commit an upcoming violent crime. It’s a kafkaesque nightmare for the Moroccan-American protagonist, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami”
TV #37 of 2025: Galavant, season 1 This medieval-pastiche musical comedy marginally improves over the course of its first year, but it’s still pretty far from the ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend meets The Princess Bride‘ showcase that I want it to be. The songs by Alan Menken are fine — I’ve even added a few to my …
TV #36 of 2025: The Bear, season 4 A welcome improvement over the previous year, but still not quite as thrilling or affecting as the first couple seasons of this show. As usual, the standout moments tend to be found in the episodes that forgo the more typical rhythms of the restaurant kitchen to spark …
Book #110 of 2025: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh A fun take on the magical school archetype. The setting reminds me a lot of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance, where the spellwork attracts hungry monsters from a terrifying hell dimension, although at least this time the teenaged students aren’t locked-in and left fending for themselves. In fact, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh”
Book #109 of 2025: Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5) After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the …
TV #35 of 2025: Poker Face, season 2 I wasn’t a huge fan of this modern Columbo riff in its debut year, but it had enough charms that I gave it a grudging three-star rating overall. This followup, unfortunately, is considerably worse. I do like a few elements here and there — Giancarlo Esposito as …
Book #108 of 2025: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6) Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel”
Book #107 of 2025: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on …
Book #106 of 2025: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim”
Book #105 of 2025: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer I read this novel back in high school, a few years after it was first published in 2000, and when I saw it recently on my mom’s shelf, I remembered it vaguely as a Michael Crichton kind of science-fiction, channeling the writer’s deep background research …
Continue reading “Book Review: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more