Book #128 of 2020: Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram (Darius The Great #1) A charming YA novel about an American teenager traveling to his family’s home in Iran for the first time, rich in #ownvoices details drawn from debut author Adib Khorram’s mixed-race Persian heritage and struggles with mental health. (In …
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Book #127 of 2020: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings #1) As a foundational text of the fantasy genre that’s inspired countless homages and knock-offs — and as a product of the mid-twentieth century — you might expect The Lord of the Rings to seem generic …
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Book #126 of 2020: The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale This 2017 tract has a provocative title, but it provides ample data supporting its revolutionary stance. Although not every reader will agree with sociologist Alex S. Vitale’s ultimate conclusion that police systems should be abolished entirely, anyone involved in a discussion of potential …
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Book #125 of 2020: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks I enjoy the middle of this historical fiction piece, but it’s a little slow to start and goes somewhat off the rails by the end. Still, the core of the plot — about the true case of a 17th-century British village whose residents chose to …
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Book #124 of 2020: Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson The twists in this mystery thriller make it hard to discuss without spoilers, but they don’t always land satisfyingly for me as a reader. There are also some pacing issues about when certain revelations come to light, and a few instances of characters not asking …
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Book #123 of 2020: Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein Author Alexander Weinstein has a real talent for thinking up interestingly disturbing sci-fi premises based on new and emerging technologies, like the parents in the title story who have to delete their digital offspring after a malware infection or the couple from “Openness” …
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Book #122 of 2020: Clique Bait by Ann Valett This high school revenge novel is lightweight but fun, playing out vaguely along the lines of Mean Girls (or Hannah Capin’s recent Foul is Fair, minus that book’s heavy-handed Shakespearean conceit). A teenage nobody infiltrates the popular kids with ulterior motives to take them down, gets …
Book #121 of 2020: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins The idea of a Hunger Games prequel about the young Coriolanus Snow isn’t necessarily a bad one, but I feel like there are three key elements that such a project would need to deliver in order to be successful. Namely, the book …
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TV #19 of 2020: Better Call Saul, season 5 This is not my favorite run of the Breaking Bad prequel, but it remains a meticulous character study punctuated by electrifying moments of sheer audacity. (I’m not sure I breathed once during the last scene of episode nine, I was so edge.) Everyone this year feels …
Book #120 of 2020: Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #5) The fifth novella in this loose series about children longing to return to the fantasy worlds they once visited is most similar to the third, featuring a group of the kids again traveling to someone else’s magical realm to help resolve a …
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