TV #8 of 2020: His Dark Materials, season 1 For all its spoken exposition, this literary adaptation somehow manages to be downright inscrutable in terms of motivation and worldbuilding, such that neither the characters nor their setting feel anywhere near as fleshed-out as they do on the page. (The climactic battle for the panserbjørne throne, …
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Book Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz
Book #74 of 2020: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz As a self-help book, this text seems difficult — albeit worthwhile — to implement in day-to-day life for salary discussions, vehicle purchases, and so on. Anyone interested in using its tips to improve …
Book Review: The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum
Book #73 of 2020: The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum With a few caveats, this is an informative look at massive disease outbreaks from the ‘Spanish’ influenza of 1918 through more recent crises like Ebola, Zika, and SARS. The book could have been structured better in terms …
Book Review: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore
Book #72 of 2020: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore I really adore this high-concept book about a woman who travels to a different year of her life every birthday at midnight. (When she turns nineteen, she finds herself in her fifty-one-year-old body, and so on.) The inherent drama of interacting with loved ones …
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Book Review: The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood
Book #71 of 2020: The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood (The Serpent Gates #1) I love this science-fantasy setting and its radical diversity of race and sexuality with no bigotry in sight, but the actual plot here is dreadfully slow. And the protagonist who should be fascinating — a lesbian orc priestess who flees …
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Book Review: The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones
Book #70 of 2020: The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #4) Returning to a book from one’s childhood can sometimes be a letdown, but I’m pleased to report that this fourth Chrestomanci volume (in the author’s preferred reading order; actually the second to be published and roughly the fifth chronologically) is far …
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Book Review: Girls with Razor Hearts by Suzanne Young
Book #69 of 2020: Girls with Razor Hearts by Suzanne Young (Girls with Sharp Sticks #2) I imagine it must be challenging to plot out a sequel to a book that ended by blowing up its status quo, but I’m pretty underwhelmed by the authorial choices here. Having broken free of their programming and committed …
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Book Review: All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban
Book #68 of 2020: All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban The premise to this novel sounds like a delirious blend of The Breakfast Club and the Saw horror franchise: six high schoolers are invited to an exclusive scholarship dinner, only to find themselves locked in a room with a ticking bomb, a vial of …
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Book Review: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
Book #67 of 2020: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich The most effective parts of this novel are lifted straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and although there’s certainly room for multiple writers to tackle dystopian societies treating fertile women as chattel, we get too little information here about what that actually …
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Book Review: Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin
Book #66 of 2020: Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin (Foul Is Fair #1) I love the concept of a high school Macbeth, but the execution here — which plays out more like The Count of Monte Cristo meets Mean Girls, with a sixteen-year-old changing her appearance to seek revenge on the boys who drugged …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 