Book #108 of 2025: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6) Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus …
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Book #107 of 2025: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on …
Book #106 of 2025: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, …
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Book #105 of 2025: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer I read this novel back in high school, a few years after it was first published in 2000, and when I saw it recently on my mom’s shelf, I remembered it vaguely as a Michael Crichton kind of science-fiction, channeling the writer’s deep background research …
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Book #104 of 2025: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the latest “Secret Project,” a name that author Brandon Sanderson gives to the books he’s written in his spare time outside his regular public writing schedule and produced via crowdfunding instead of traditional publishing. …
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Book #103 of 2025: Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green (Nightside #3) Not great, but I like it better than I did on my last read in 2019. I’ve described the Nightside books before as having rhythms similar to a police procedural TV show, and after a pilot outing and a fairly thrilling followup, this …
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Book #102 of 2025: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow Ron Chernow is a consummate biographer, probably best known for popularizing the tale of an overlooked Founding Father into an account that became the basis for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Here he turns his attentions a century forward to the life of author Mark Twain, …
TV #34 of 2025: Classic Doctor Who, season 19 I’m maybe overly charitable towards Peter Davison’s first season as the Fifth Doctor, but there were inevitably going to be growing pains after seven years of his predecessor Tom Baker. And to be clear, I am still not saying that this is great television, as a …
TV #33 of 2025: Reservation Dogs, season 3 I rated the first two seasons of this show as 4-out-of-5 stars apiece, and I’m tempted to lower my rating of this last one to a 3. Structurally, it’s kind of a mess, without nearly enough scenes of the kids all hanging out together as friends. Instead, …
Book #101 of 2025: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1) This is currently my very favorite book, which I’ve now read three times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual reread, but I’m not ruling it out, either.) Like Kip scribbling additions to …
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