Book #209 of 2019: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt This is an interesting topic, and I appreciate the array of studies that author Tom Vanderbilt has assembled for the task, but I find many of his arguments hard to parse, reliant on unjustified …
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Book Review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
Book #208 of 2019: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson This is one of those popular history volumes that’s a deep dive into a fairly narrow topic, and I definitely learned a lot about the shipwreck incident that’s usually rendered as just a sentence or two in the account of …
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Book Review: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan
Book #207 of 2019: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2) This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between …
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Book Review: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Book #206 of 2019: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo This intergenerational drama reads fine on the surface, but so many elements ring false upon a moment’s reflection. Like the fact that the central family is repeatedly described as Catholic but never shown doing anything religious, or that the college professor complaining …
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Movie Review: Cooties (2014)
Movie #11 of 2019: Cooties (2014) Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by …
Book Review: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Book #205 of 2019: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner This story of a New York City Jewish family on the verge of divorce has well-drawn (albeit realistically frustrating) characters and some sharp observations on marriage, parenting, and gender roles. I like the late perspective shift that complicates our understanding of the Fleishman dynamics …
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Book Review: Nightbooks by J. A. White
Book #204 of 2019: Nightbooks by J. A. White In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and …
Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
Book #203 of 2019: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall This experimental novel starts out like a cross between Memento and House of Leaves before taking a detour through Neverwhere and ending up finally at Jaws. In other words, it’s a story about an amnesiac receiving messages from his former self, wherein the actual …
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Book Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Book #202 of 2019: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Another entry in the burgeoning genre of #ownvoices fantasy books that draw upon the traditional folklore of their authors’ cultural heritage. In this case, that’s Mayan mythology, which I knew little about beforehand. I’d call the result a win for representation, but somewhat …
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Book Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Book #201 of 2019: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #1) This mature urban fantasy is a major departure for author Leigh Bardugo, both in genre and in tone. Although its college-age characters aren’t significantly older than her YA Grishaverse bunch, the traumas they face are so much darker than anything encountered in that …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 