Book #130 of 2025: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt (Virgin New Adventures #7) A continuation (and end) of the Cat’s Cradle arc solely in that the TARDIS remains largely out of commission while it finishes its repairs, thereby stranding Ace and the Seventh Doctor in modern rural Wales. There they proceed …
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Book #129 of 2025: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn (The Legendborn Cycle #3) It’s rarely a good sign when an author revises the projected length of a series midway through to tack on some additional volume(s). This particular YA fantasy story, for instance, winds up taking quite a lot of pages and yet accomplishing very little …
Book #128 of 2025: Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD This is not a weight-loss book. Rather, it’s an overview from former FDA Commissioner David Kessler (no relation) on the current medical understanding of nutrition and dieting, the widespread problem that he calls food …
Book #127 of 2025: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt On paper, there’s perhaps not much of a plot to this 700-page winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a thirteen-year-old boy acquires a famous piece of artwork under extraordinary circumstances, and then spends the next decade-and-a-half fretting about it while falling steadily into a …
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Movie #9 of 2025: Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999) This was the first of Babylon 5‘s various TV movies to air after the show ended its regular run, and my understanding is that it functions primarily as a bridge to the upcoming spinoff Crusade, which ran for one abbreviated season later that year. …
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TV #41 of 2025: The Sopranos, season 1 I’ve never seen The Sopranos before, but my understanding is that the show is widely considered both great on its own terms and very influential on the television industry at large. (Personally The Americans kept coming to mind as a relevant successor program as I watched this …
Book #126 of 2025: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer At the beginning of the fourth Thomas Covenant volume The Wounded Land, the returning protagonist tells the new one, “I’m on the inside of this thing, and you aren’t. I know it. You don’t. It can’t be explained[…] It’s a question of experience. You’re just …
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Book #125 of 2025: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green (Nightside #5) This is one of the better entries of its urban fantasy series, I think, propulsively moving the major plot arc along while also delivering immediate thrills and significant character work. After several volumes of throat-clearing on that first front, the previous novel …
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Book #124 of 2025: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade now, but back when I was working as a sociolinguist, I studied how people use language on the internet and how traditional emblems of group identity in speech can …
TV #40 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 2 Another funny year of a show that nevertheless seems like it could be doing more with its distinctive setting and its character work. There are a few recurring bits, but nothing that resembles any sort of ongoing storyline or concern that’s maintained over multiple episodes (though that’s …
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