TV #18 of 2020: Shameless, season 3 As always, I wish I could separate the parts of this series that I like from the ones I really don’t. There’s a compelling family drama here, but it’s generally couched amid so much tasteless shock humor and tedious subplotting that it’s hard for anything to ever land …
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Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Book #118 of 2020: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester As with much of 1950s science-fiction, this novel is as full of big ideas and fun characters as it is of regrettable social attitudes and bizarre plot leaps. I like the core concept of a marooned astronaut learning to teleport and reinventing himself to …
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Book Review: The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco
Book #117 of 2020: The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco (The Never Tilting World #1) I don’t know if it’s intentional on author Rin Chupeco’s part, but there’s a definite Brandon Sanderson vibe to this fantasy novel of theirs. From the title concept of a planet stuck half in sunlight and half in dark …
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Book Review: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow
Book #116 of 2020: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow An incredibly frustrating read. From the coercive romance between an alien conqueror and the human prisoner he’s blackmailing, to their instant feelings for one another, to the pointless miscommunication drama that a simple conversation could have avoided, to the meandering plot, random unearned ending, …
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Book Review: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
Book #115 of 2020: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me from The Hobbit as a bedtime story, so it may not be a title I can review with any sort of critical objectivity. It both introduced me to the fantasy genre and …
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Book Review: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
Book #114 of 2020: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline There’s great potential and a distinctive character voice in this YA First Nations dystopia, but the overall effort is only sporadically effective for me. One of the particular strengths of sci-fi / fantasy as a genre is its ability to allegorically heighten and externalize real-life …
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Book Review: Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin
Book #113 of 2020: Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin I’ve been reading up on last century’s ‘Spanish’ Flu pandemic, which seems the closest historical precedent for the ongoing COVID-19 crisis of today. And this title is a generally solid contribution to that body of knowledge, but it has …
Book Review: The Plague by Albert Camus
Book #112 of 2020: The Plague by Albert Camus This 1947 novel is pretty astonishing to encounter in 2020, in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Albert Camus was not seeking to predict the future, and his presentation of a fictional outbreak in his own decade is of course not a perfect match for …
TV Review: Dead to Me, season 2
TV #17 of 2020: Dead to Me, season 2 The first season of this show felt somewhat at war with itself, trying to marry a serious exploration of grief with an over-the-top, twist-heavy plot in a way that ultimately hindered either aim. This time around, the writers have largely jettisoned the former element — and …
Book Review: Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Book #111 of 2020: Exhalation by Ted Chiang This long-awaited second collection of science-fiction from author Ted Chiang more than lives up to the promise of his earlier Stories of Your Life and Others (which contained the basis for the alien linguistics movie Arrival). These tales don’t just posit exciting technologies or shed light into …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 