Book #28 of 2026: Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #1) This 1934 novel introduces the character of Nero Wolfe, as well as his assistant Archie Goodwin and a few other members of their inner circle. The former is a genius consulting detective in the style of Hercule Poirot (who had debuted in 1920) or …
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Book Review: Empire Builders by Ben Bova
Book #27 of 2026: Empire Builders by Ben Bova I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed …
TV Review: The Sopranos, season 6
TV #7 of 2026: The Sopranos, season 6 As with its contemporary crime drama The Shield, the infamous ending to The Sopranos was one of the few concrete spoilers I knew about the show going into it, which admittedly shaped my expectations along the way. (To quickly weigh in on the controversy: I don’t think …
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell
Book #26 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell As usual, a strong episode of Doctor Who leads to one of the better novelizations, helped along in this case by a few neat additions that author Gareth L. Powell has sprinkled in throughout. (In an afterword, he mentions that he grew up …
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Movie Review: Rocky III (1982)
Movie #7 of 2026: Rocky III (1982) “Eye of the Tiger” is a great song, but I’m not sure in the final analysis if Rocky III is a great movie or not. Length isn’t always a determination of that, but this one shaves about 20 minutes off the runtime of its predecessors, resulting in a …
Book Review: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire
Book #25 of 2026: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10) This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find …
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Book Review: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang
Book #24 of 2026: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang I’m not familiar with the 14th-century Chinese novel Water Margin / Outlaws of the Marsh / All Men Are Brothers, but I’ve still really enjoyed this modern genderbent retelling, in which the central bandits are now predominantly female and/or queer. Even approached as a …
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Book Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Book #23 of 2026: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz This 2025 novella imagines a future in which robots are free but second-class citizens, their status a contested compromise between those humans who see them as worthy of full equal rights and those who would deny their sentience and return them to a state of legal …
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TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 3
TV #6 of 2026: 12 Monkeys, season 3 I still think this sci-fi series was more interesting back when its time-traveling protagonists were more straightforwardly trying to avert a plague and the subsequent dystopian future, rather than opposing an evil cult that’s nebulously aiming to somehow break the timeline itself. But with that caveat, this …
Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams
Book #22 of 2026: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams The assembled titles in this collection of time travel short fiction get nearly the full range of ratings from me, which is often true of such anthologies. But since there are only six stories here, I guess I might as well review …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 