Book #159 of 2025: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #1) Tom Ripley, as depicted in this 1955 crime thriller, its four sequels, and their various screen adaptations, is a pretty great creation. He’s insecure and sociopathic, with author Patricia Highsmith painting him as almost pedestrian in his casual amorality and petty …
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Book #158 of 2025: The Unnatural Inquirer by Simon R. Green (Nightside #8) One of the blander adventures in this urban fantasy series, further hampered by a streak of sexism and unaddressed poor behavior from the protagonist. And look, I get that John Taylor is something of an antihero — the whole crux of this …
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Movie #14 of 2025: The Bourne Legacy (2012) The beginning of this piece is choppy and overwrought, doing little to sell the already-flimsy idea of telling a Jason Bourne story without Jason Bourne. It weaves in and out of the events of the previous film, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), in a manner that’s alienatingly hard …
Book #157 of 2025: Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser Interesting and well-written, and yet beholden to a bizarre structure that ultimately weakens the work. Essentially there are four threads that author Caroline Fraser develops here, interweaving them as she goes: 1) a true-crime history of American serial …
Book #156 of 2025: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison I appreciate that this vampire title is less straightforward than author Rachel Harrison’s earlier werewolf novel Such Sharp Teeth, but as it turns out, unpredictability doesn’t necessarily translate to a stronger work. Although I didn’t know quite where the plot was going, its tale of two …
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Book #155 of 2025: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton (Mickey7 #1) A fine little science-fiction novel that never quite kicks into a higher gear. The premise and obvious anticapitalist themes seem fun: the protagonist is of the ‘expendable’ underclass on his inhospitable colony world, meaning that he’s given all the truly dangerous tasks and cloned from …
Movie #13 of 2025: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, …
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Book #154 of 2025: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on …
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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 …
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 …
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