Book #183 of 2020: Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh At first, this novel seems like it will be a simple whodunnit, perhaps even a Miss Marple pastiche, with its 72-year-old heroine making inquiries among the residents of her small town. The case stems from an unsigned note she’s found in the woods nearby: …
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Book #182 of 2020: Starsight by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #2) This sci-fi sequel goes in a pretty unexpected direction, but it’s all the stronger for it. After spending the first book training as a fighter pilot to defend her planet from alien attack, Spensa is suddenly whisked across the galaxy to the enemy capital on …
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Book #181 of 2020: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This American history title offers an in-depth look at Reconstruction — the short period immediately after the Civil War, marked by a measure of meaningful progress towards racial equality — and the Jim Crow …
Book #180 of 2020: Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson (Chronicle of the Dark Star #1) I’ll give a charitable three stars to this middle-grade sci-fi adventure, which hasn’t quite gripped me but may prove more exciting for younger readers. I do like that it’s basically a junior version of The Martian, with a …
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Book #179 of 2020: The Street by Ann Petry Upon reading this novel from 1946 I am stunned, both by the sheer raw power of the text and by the fact that I’d never even heard of it before seeing a friend’s rave review earlier this year. The title clearly had an impact at the …
Book #178 of 2020: Jingo by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #21) This is a reasonably funny satire on the pointlessness of war, but as with many of Terry Pratchett’s books, there’s a certain degree of low-level racism and sexism underpinning some of the jokes. (Although the most overtly bigoted characters are generally positioned as fools, the …
TV #29 of 2020: Shameless, season 8 What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes …
Book #177 of 2020: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. An interesting yet not particularly surprising look at the Trump dynasty from the president’s estranged niece, detailing her grandfather’s emotional abuse of Donald and his other children and how that unloved arrogant …
Book #176 of 2020: The Running Man by Richard Bachman I still love the propulsive adrenaline rush of this pseudonymous Stephen King dystopian piece, but I had forgotten just how needlessly steeped in bigotry it is. Presumably in an effort to make his protagonist more of a hard case, the author has him think and …
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Book #175 of 2020: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Metamorphosis #1) This Ukrainian novel offers a dark spin on the fantasy boarding school trope, more in the vein of The Magicians than Harry Potter. The pupils are essentially blackmailed into enrolling via threats to their family, the curriculum consists of memorizing arcane texts …
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