Book #86 of 2019: The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons (A Chorus of Dragons #1) I like that this massive fantasy tome from debut author Jenn Lyons takes some stylistic risks, presenting much of its story as dual-timeline narratives interspersed with comments from a later narrator reviewing both accounts. But there’s so much info-dumping …
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Book #85 of 2019: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain I’ve never been especially familiar with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, but I was struck by all the fans who tearfully praised his warm, empathetic approach to food culture after his suicide in 2018. I heard over and over again that he …
Book #84 of 2019: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #2) Having really enjoyed author Naomi Novik’s later standalone fantasy novels Spinning Silver and Uprooted, I figured I should go back and give her debut series another chance. Unfortunately, I feel similarly about this second Temeraire volume as I do the first: delightful characters …
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Book #83 of 2019: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #1) I gave up on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles at some point, and I don’t know if I’ll ever resume and finish the series, which seemed to get lost in its own convoluted mythology along the way. But having enjoyed the …
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TV #12 of 2019: Breaking Bad, season 5 Are we ultimately meant to root for Walter White? That’s a question that divides Breaking Bad viewers, and although I am firmly in the camp that the show’s central figure is an awful, terrifying cancer of a person, I think the writers are at least somewhat to …
Book #82 of 2019: The Black Ice by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #2) I’m of two minds about this second Bosch novel. On the one hand, the detective and his associates feel more like the versions that I know from the TV adaptation of the series, which presumably means that they’ve settled more into their …
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Book #81 of 2019: A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn This is a weird book, and although I enjoy some of the individual strands, I ultimately don’t feel like they add up to a satisfactory whole. The main plot is a loose retelling of Joseph’s slavery from Genesis, split between a tech genius …
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Book #80 of 2019: A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams I expected to really love this anthology, based on its foreword and stated goal of bringing a Howard Zinn recentering of marginalized perspectives to the world of tomorrow. The authors and characters include women, LGBTQ people, …
TV #11 of 2019: Friday Night Lights, season 4 On a macro level, my biggest criticism of FNL thus far is that every season seems radically different from the one before it — and never in a way that feels especially organic or planned-out as part of a larger design. This year the program shifts …
Book #79 of 2019: Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson (Truly Devious #1) This novel has a great hook of an unsolved kidnapping from the 1930s and a modern teenage crime buff going off to the boarding school where it happened. Unfortunately, it all rather falls apart for me by the end. Author Maureen Johnson is …
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