Book #109 of 2025: Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5) After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the …
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TV Review: Poker Face, season 2
TV #35 of 2025: Poker Face, season 2 I wasn’t a huge fan of this modern Columbo riff in its debut year, but it had enough charms that I gave it a grudging three-star rating overall. This followup, unfortunately, is considerably worse. I do like a few elements here and there — Giancarlo Esposito as …
Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel
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 Review: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho
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 Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim
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 Review: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
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 Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
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 Review: Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green
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 Review: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
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 Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 19
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 …
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