TV #29 of 2020: Shameless, season 8 What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.
Book #177 of 2020: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. An interesting yet not particularly surprising look at the Trump dynasty from the president’s estranged niece, detailing her grandfather’s emotional abuse of Donald and his other children and how that unloved arrogant …
Book Review: The Running Man by Richard Bachman
Book #176 of 2020: The Running Man by Richard Bachman I still love the propulsive adrenaline rush of this pseudonymous Stephen King dystopian piece, but I had forgotten just how needlessly steeped in bigotry it is. Presumably in an effort to make his protagonist more of a hard case, the author has him think and …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Running Man by Richard Bachman”
Book Review: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Book #175 of 2020: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Metamorphosis #1) This Ukrainian novel offers a dark spin on the fantasy boarding school trope, more in the vein of The Magicians than Harry Potter. The pupils are essentially blackmailed into enrolling via threats to their family, the curriculum consists of memorizing arcane texts …
Continue reading “Book Review: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko”
Book Review: Empty by Susan Burton
[CW: Eating disorders. Cover removed due to concerns raised that it might be triggering itself.] Book #174 of 2020: Empty by Susan Burton Well-written but tough to face head-on, this is a fairly agonizing account of the author’s childhood and adult anorexia, bookending her arguably worse difficulty with binge-eating in high school and college. Susan …
Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu
Book #173 of 2020: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu”
Book Review: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Book #172 of 2020: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi This book by Jason Reynolds attempts to condense Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America into a more streamlined version for younger readers. (Both men are credited as authors, but …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 4
TV #28 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 4 There’s a lot that I enjoy in this run of episodes, from the trustee played by Nathan Lane to Alicia’s growing disillusionment with her firm’s management style (which really pays off next year, but is fun to watch build up gradually for now). Since the initial …
Book Review: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
Book #171 of 2020: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn With their farmhouse and associated livelihood repossessed, 50-year-old Raynor Winn and her husband elect to pack up their few remaining possessions and hike a 630-mile trail around the coastline of southwest England. This resulting memoir is a good travelogue of that region, but I find …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn”
Book Review: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson
Book #170 of 2020: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #2) I’m not quite loving this fantasy trilogy, but the second volume is a major improvement, offering an expansive plot of castle intrigue and warfare preparations in place of the somewhat stilted morality play of the first novel. The addition …
Continue reading “Book Review: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 