TV #35 of 2020: The Office, season 1 This 2005 debut was a little rough at the time, and another decade and a half of evolving cultural norms haven’t made it any better. Michael Scott is of course a walking HR complaint of offensive and inappropriate behavior, but even our ostensible hero Jim would be …
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Book Review: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Book #207 of 2020: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente (Space Opera #1) I love the concept for this novel, which is basically Eurovision meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, that Douglas Adams series seems to be the exact model for author Catherynne M. Valente, from the zany screwball comedy to the …
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Book Review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Book #206 of 2020: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson This title didn’t grip me right away, I think because I was expecting the sort of powerful testimony in author Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, with its deep ethnographic dive into the lived experiences of a rarely discussed segment of …
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Book Review: A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost
Book #205 of 2020: A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost An entertaining if rambling celebrity memoir, which I’ve found most interesting for its backstage look at the production of Saturday Night Live. But there’s also a surprising amount of gore in the descriptions of author Colin Jost’s more memorable injuries and infections, and some …
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Book Review: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Book #204 of 2020: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #2) This is a strange sequel to Gideon the Ninth, retaining the excellent focus on lesbian space necromancers but shifting perspectives from the snarky cavalier of the first book to her bitter former enemy. Harrowhawk has also gone mad and literally forgotten …
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Book Review: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson
Book #203 of 2020: The Illearth War by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever #2) This fantasy sequel is structured somewhat like The Empire Strikes Back, a downbeat middle chapter that recontextualizes an earlier victory as a minor skirmish and not the decisive blow it may have seemed. In Lord Foul’s …
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TV Review: Shameless, season 10
TV #34 of 2020: Shameless, season 10 And with that I’m all caught up on Shameless, after my wife and I watched all 122 episodes in roughly as many days. The show has passed through several different versions of itself in that time, from an interestingly flawed family drama to (briefly) a pretty compelling one, …
Book Review: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones
Book #202 of 2020: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones The difficulty with millennial memoirs is that for the most part, our generation has not yet reached a stage where we can honestly put the arc of our lives into a complete coherent narrative for ourselves or others. Such is the case …
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Book Review: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett
Book #201 of 2020: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #24) Author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is reliably hilarious, and I appreciate how his City Watch subseries blends that humor with wry philosophizing and a detective story structure. The question for me as a reader is always whether the writer can stay out of his …
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Book Review: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao
Book #200 of 2020: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao I wasn’t sure what to expect of a standalone spinoff sequel to the Rise of the Empress duology, whose cruel first volume of an antiheroine’s ascension engaged me far more than its softer follow-up tracking her defeat. For this new book, author …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 