Book #138 of 2025: Star Wars: Sanctuary: A Bad Batch Novel by Lamar Giles The animated Star Wars series The Bad Batch ended in 2024 after a respectable run of 47 episodes, so I’m a little confused about this new title that just came out, more than a year later. It does not appear to …
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TV #45 of 2025: Galavant, season 2 A welcome improvement over its debut. As I’d hoped, the writers finally seem to have locked into which elements of this fantasy musical-comedy sitcom work well and which ones don’t, and the result is an overall stronger season. It’s too bad the series wasn’t renewed for a third …
Book #137 of 2025: Firestorm by John Peel (2099 #6) After a couple weaker entries that passed without much action, the final volume of this middle-grade sci-fi series thankfully delivers with a bang. Everyone is scrambling to defeat the villain Devon’s terrorist threat to end all life on Earth (via a crashing ship full of …
Book #136 of 2025: Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth by Simon R. Green (Nightside #6) A satisfying enough conclusion to the initial arc of this early 2000s urban fantasy series. The protagonist’s mother has been built up as the big bad of the Nightside over all the previous volumes, and here her threat is finally …
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Book #135 of 2025: The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with one of the editors.] Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand is a massive post-apocalyptic classic — over 1100 pages in its revised …
TV #44 of 2025: The Sopranos, season 2 Even more so than in its debut, this second run of The Sopranos feels built around its quieter domestic scenes rather than the explosive moments of mob violence that periodically surface to puncture them. Richie Aprile, for example, is instantly recognizable as a certain character type: the …
Book #134 of 2025: At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #2) The Hands of the Emperor is my very favorite novel, which perhaps paradoxically is why I took my time in getting to this direct sequel. While Hands remains a great entry point for the wider Nine Worlds …
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TV #43 of 2025: Classic Doctor Who, season 20 Doctor Who’s 1983 season may not have any all-time classic stories, but overall it’s a fun watch that I would say is stronger than the sum of its parts. The big idea for the twentieth anniversary run was to feature returning villains in every serial, and …
Book #133 of 2025: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco I haven’t loved this 1980 Italian classic as much as I expected to from the premise, which seems like it should be right up my alley: two fourteenth-century monks investigating a string of suspicious deaths at a secluded monastery. They aren’t called detectives, …
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TV #42 of 2025: Bob’s Burgers, season 15 I’m rounding up a bit on the basis of the delightful (if sadly relatable) finale “InsomniBob,” which finds our hero growing increasingly unhinged as he sacrifices sleep for extra creativity time in his ‘night kitchen,’ but overall, this is another winning season from the Bob’s Burgers crew. …
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