Book #169 of 2020: Be Not Far from Me by Mindy McGinnis A short but harrowing person-vs-nature novel, about a seventeen-year-old who gets lost in the woods with an injured foot and just the clothes on her back. I feel drawn into this story almost immediately by the sharp interior voice of the heroine, and …
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Book #168 of 2020: How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM This new 2020 release is probably the best book I’ve yet read on global pandemics like the still-unfolding COVID-19 scenario — although admittedly not much of the text actually addresses its title claim, and those recommendations for individual steps during an …
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Book #167 of 2020: Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff This title is pitched as a deep dive into the Trump administration’s draconian policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, but it’s instead somewhat narrowly focused on author Jacob Soboroff’s personal experiences investigating that story, including tedious …
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Book #166 of 2020: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust I like how this new fantasy novel of a princess whose touch is poison — so inadvertently appropriate for our pandemic era of masks and social distancing! — blends #ownvoices Persian folklore with elements of the Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel fairy tales, by way of …
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TV #27 of 2020: Shameless, season 7 Although still recognizable, this is a quieter and more thoughtful year of Shameless, with arcs that build gradually to a boil rather than the show’s typical frenetic style. It doesn’t always work with what we know of these characters — Fiona’s new focus on business and disinterest in …
Book #165 of 2020: Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson I remember liking this historical fiction title when I first encountered it as assigned reading back in middle school, so when my library acquired the digital audiobook in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I figured it might be worth revisiting. And overall, I’d …
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Book #164 of 2020: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire I have mixed feelings about this story of psychic twins, separated at birth, who nevertheless find each other via telepathy and end up forging an unshakable bond. I like the protagonists themselves, and the plot reads like classic Stephen King as they use their special talents to …
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Movie #11 of 2020: Palm Springs (2020) This is a fun spin on the old time-loop story, situating it as a romantic comedy with both leads stuck in the same repeating day (which happens to include a wedding, a classic romcom setting to begin with). It’s as funny as you’d expect from Andy Samberg and …
TV #26 of 2020: Altered Carbon, season 2 I still have some issues with the logic of this sci-fi series, from the frequent foolishness of its elite super-soldiers to the persistence of sexism centuries after humans have started casually swapping their minds from body to body. (If anything, that decoupling of mental and physical should …
Book #163 of 2020: The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade #2) I love the first volume in this series, a poignant character study of a queer woman sacrificing her morals and steeping herself in the politics of her people’s conquerors in a long game to bring down their bigoted empire from within. …
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