TV #34 of 2020: Shameless, season 10 And with that I’m all caught up on Shameless, after my wife and I watched all 122 episodes in roughly as many days. The show has passed through several different versions of itself in that time, from an interestingly flawed family drama to (briefly) a pretty compelling one, …
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Book Review: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones
Book #202 of 2020: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones The difficulty with millennial memoirs is that for the most part, our generation has not yet reached a stage where we can honestly put the arc of our lives into a complete coherent narrative for ourselves or others. Such is the case …
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Book Review: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
Book #201 of 2020: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #24) Author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is reliably hilarious, and I appreciate how his City Watch subseries blends that humor with wry philosophizing and a detective story structure. The question for me as a reader is always whether the writer can stay out of his …
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Book Review: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao
Book #200 of 2020: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao I wasn’t sure what to expect of a standalone spinoff sequel to the Rise of the Empress duology, whose cruel first volume of an antiheroine’s ascension engaged me far more than its softer follow-up tracking her defeat. For this new book, author …
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Book Review: Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer
Book #199 of 2020: Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer A fascinating and even-handed account of how America and Russia / the Soviet Union have each played a role in other countries’ elections — sometimes openly and sometimes not — from the end of World War I …
Book Review: Mirage by Somaiya Daud
Book #198 of 2020: Mirage by Somaiya Daud (Mirage #1) I love the rich cultural history that author Somaiya Daud pours into this YA sci-fi debut, much of it drawn from her own Moroccan heritage. She has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the politics of occupation and resistance, and although the plot …
Book Review: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
Book #197 of 2020: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix This story of a haunted IKEA-type store plays out about as expected, but I think it’s my least favorite of the four Grady Hendrix novels I’ve read so far. Too much in the early chapters seems like a cartoonish satire on corporate retail culture, so when the …
Book Review: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
Book #196 of 2020: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison This 1992 book is a short but super interesting piece of literary criticism, adapted from a series of lectures given by author Toni Morrison several years before. She argues for viewing classic works by white American writers through a …
Book Review: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior
Book #195 of 2020: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior Moderately informative about the pre-2016 Donald Trump, but significantly hampered by author Sarah Kendzior constantly begging the question on his corruption and guilt rather than presenting neutral facts and building a convincing argument towards …
Book Review: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Book #194 of 2020: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio (The Sun Eater #1) This feudal space opera reads like a sci-fi version of The Kingkiller Chronicle, in which a dreaded figure of whispered legend recounts his humble beginnings (including a lengthy sojourn reduced to a street urchin — the parallels are at times so …
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