TV #49 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 3 I rated the first two seasons of this show as three stars each, and in some ways, this closing run feels like a minor improvement. I especially like the episode that flashes back to the regular protagonists’ mothers as teenagers themselves, which arrives with a surprising degree …
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Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
Movie #12 of 2025: The Bourne Supremacy (2004) The problem with giving your hero a happy ending is that when a sequel gets greenlit — presumably over studio desire to keep monetizing a successful IP, rather than anyone’s feeling that the Jason Bourne story as presented in the first movie was at all unfinished — …
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Book Review: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy
Book #151 of 2025: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy This is a cute middle-grade novel about two thirteen-year-old boys who are stuck repeating their common bar mitzvah weekend over and over again. I like the distinctiveness of the two protagonists, who narrate in alternating chapters: hyperactive Finn is an …
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Book Review: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Book #150 of 2025: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith This 2023 title is an informative popular science book, with a handful of caveats. My first issue is that it’s really two works in one, and that …
Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland
Book #149 of 2025: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland This Star Wars novel is misleadingly labeled, and I suspect I would have given it a pass if it had been correctly identified as a part of the franchise’s High Republic line — which I largely haven’t read — rather than a prequel …
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Movie Review: The Bourne Identity (2002)
Movie #11 of 2025: The Bourne Identity (2002) I haven’t seen this movie in a solid decade or two, but it caught my eye on a recent flight and I decided to give it a go. (I’m still undecided if I’ll continue on with the sequels or not, some of which I know I missed …
TV Review: Crusade, season 1
TV #48 of 2025: Crusade, season 1 A pretty underwhelming spinoff to Babylon 5 following the events of the TV movie A Call to Arms, which ended with an alien plague infecting everyone on earth. That’s an effective cliffhanger, and its resolution was supposed to be provided by the characters on this 1999 series, who …
Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab
Book #148 of 2025: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire …
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Book Review: Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green
Book #147 of 2025: Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green (Nightside #7) The initial story arc of this series came to an effective crescendo in the previous volume, so it’s only fitting that this next installment feels like a bit of a breather by comparison. It’s a back-to-basics sort of plot that returns the …
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Book Review: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Book #146 of 2025: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth This 2004 alternate history strikes me as a modernized take on Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, again imagining the United States of that era following Europe’s descent into strongman fascism. But whereas Lewis was writing contemporary fiction with invented characters, Philip …
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