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 …
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Book Review: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
Book #110 of 2020: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas This is a difficult read, challenging the widespread mode of philanthropy — in both direct charity and private-sector services — that aims to improve people’s lives but does little to address any underlying systemic forces at play. (For …
TV Review: Bosch, season 6
TV #16 of 2020: Bosch, season 6 Amazon’s middlebrow police procedural starts off strong this year, but seems to lose a little focus as it goes along. I think the news that only one more batch of episodes remains has also put pressure on the writers to wrap up several long-running subplots, resulting in a …
Book Review: Onyx & Ivory by Mindee Arnett
Book #109 of 2020: Onyx & Ivory by Mindee Arnett (Rime Chronicles #1) This YA fantasy debut has clear potential that I’m hoping the sequel improves upon, with more worldbuilding details about the wider setting and less interpersonal drama that it seems like one good open conversation would resolve. I do like these protagonists and …
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TV Review: Shameless, season 2
TV #15 of 2020: Shameless, season 2 I like how this show seems to be following the Friday Night Lights model of jumping forward a few months in between seasons, using the time skip to refresh and reorient the plot by dropping some threads, advancing others, and introducing still more. I also appreciate that this …
Book Review: The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones
Book #108 of 2020: The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #6) This last Chrestomanci novel to be published is also the latest within the setting’s chronology and the final volume in author Diana Wynne Jones’s suggested reading order. I don’t know that it completely works as a grand finale for the series — …
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TV Review: The Good Wife, season 1
TV #14 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 1 The first year of this CBS legal procedural starts out a little clumsier than I remember, with a bit too much focus on the title character’s children and some of the main cast feeling just lightly sketched-in. But the cases (and judge personalities, a rarity for …
Movie Review: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend (2020)
Movie #6 of 2020: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs the Reverend (2020) This new interactive Kimmy Schmidt sequel is a whole lot of fun! It’s not remotely necessary for providing further closure or anything after last year’s series finale, but it also doesn’t seem like it walks back that conclusion at all either. It’s mostly …
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Book Review: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent
Book #107 of 2020: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent A clear and powerful account of the American eugenics and anti-immigration movements of the early twentieth century, and how the two were inextricably linked. Author Daniel …
Book Review: The Traitor’s Game by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Book #106 of 2020: The Traitor’s Game by Jennifer A. Nielsen (The Traitor’s Game #1) There’s not enough worldbuilding in this YA novel to distinguish the setting from any generic fantasy realm, which makes it harder to track or care about all the opposing factions. Character loyalties also seem pretty easily swayed, which further impedes …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 