Book #225 of 2020: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas There’s a certain climactic reveal in this YA urban fantasy novel that I found disappointingly telegraphed from early on, but that’s honestly one of the only critiques I can make about it. What a refreshingly original story overall, populated with delightful personalities who ring with #ownvoices …
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Book #224 of 2020: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik This 2015 book is a solid overview of the major events in the life and career of the titular Supreme Court justice, and a bittersweet read in the wake of her recent passing. It’s not …
Book #223 of 2020: The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman There’s a fun Diana Wynne Jones-meets-Norton Juster vibe to the start of this children’s fantasy novel, in which a bored eleven-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother are gifted a life-sized magical steam train by their eccentric uncle. The ensuing adventure doesn’t quite live up to …
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Book #222 of 2020: Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram (Darius the Great #2) This YA sequel is another fantastic #ownvoices slice-of-life narrative, following its overweight and depressed Persian-American teen hero after he returns home from his visit to Iran in the first book. Even more so than that initial volume, it’s hard …
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Book #221 of 2020: Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence This 1926 memoir was the inspiration for the classic movie Lawrence of Arabia, about a British soldier’s experiences aiding the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks. I haven’t seen the film, and I also don’t know a whole lot about that …
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Book #220 of 2020: Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley Any new rendition of Beowulf is an achievement, but this modernized and feminist approach to the Old English epic is particularly exciting. Author Maria Dahvana Headley has retained the poetic structures of the original, with its internal rhymes, alliterations, and kennings, but she …
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Book #219 of 2020: The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #2) This second Miss Marple book (published as The Tuesday Club Murders in the U.S.) is a fun collection of short mystery stories, presented in the loose framework of a group of friends trying to stump one another with puzzling cases each has …
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Book #218 of 2020: Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Last Survivors #1) I already loved this novel when I first read it five years ago, and I’ve only grown more appreciative over time. The narrator is a realistically flawed teenager, alternately moody and intensely caring, and her slice-of-life diary entries document …
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Book #217 of 2020: I Killed Zoe Spanos by Kit Frick I love the idea of a (loose) YA retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, but the danger in that sort of project is that I’m probably not going to enjoy the new take as much as I do the original. Here, for instance, although …
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TV #38 of 2020: The Office, season 2 There may be better individual seasons of television than this, but I can’t think of another program that improves so much from its first year to its second (except maybe The Office’s spiritual descendant Parks and Recreation). The tweaks to the cringe-humor formula inherited from this show’s …
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