Book #13 of 2019: Us Against You by Fredrik Backman (Beartown #2) This sequel feels somewhat aimless compared to the first Beartown novel and its vivid picture of a rural community’s complicated relationship with the local hockey team. Although I generally enjoy author Fredrik Backman’s writing style and his regular insights into his characters, there …
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Movie #3 of 2019: On the Basis of Sex (2018) The first act of this Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic is somewhat choppy, jumping from year to year in the 1950s without giving the audience enough room to really invest in its heroine and her struggles. Luckily once the film skips ahead to 1970, the narrative …
Movie #2 of 2019: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) I hadn’t watched this movie in many, many years, but it holds up better than a lot of comedies from that era. (The two lead characters are con men who prey on wealthy women, so there’s a slight degree of sexism, but the narrative undercuts them more …
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Book #12 of 2019: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Legacy of Orïsha #1) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A small band of commoners discover a secret that could bring down their evil empire and restore the old order, but when their home is attacked, they are forced to flee, …
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TV #2 of 2019: Orange Is the New Black, season 6 Moving the action over to the long-mentioned Maximum Security branch is a reasonable way for this prison show to keep itself fresh (and cut loose some of the huge cast it’s assembled over the years), but the writers have made some odd choices about …
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Book #11 of 2019: An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King There’s a solid dystopian premise for this story of a near-future China where genetic engineering and a cultural preference for sons has given rise to marriages of multiple men sharing the same wife, but all four of the viewpoint characters — a 40-year-old bachelor, …
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Book #10 of 2019: Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman This is a goofy little shaggy-dog story, made up of the series of outlandish excuses a father offers to his children for why he was late picking up some milk from the store. (And I do mean “little” — at an audiobook length of just …
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Book #9 of 2019: An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim A bittersweet sci-fi take on the immigrant / refugee experience, this debut novel from author Thea Lim imagines a world in which people can enter into indentured servitude and time-travel to when their services are needed, generally to pay off a loved one’s medical …
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Book #8 of 2019: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1) I’m pretty underwhelmed by this retelling of Beauty and the Beast by way of Twilight, which somehow captures some of the worst impulses of both those narratives. There’s no real build-up to the heroine’s …
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Book #7 of 2019: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon This book is hard to summarize without giving away meaningful plot events, but I definitely enjoy the way that its story unfolds. It’s something of a Great American Novel, one of those attempts to distill the experience of a particular place …
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