TV #54 of 2018: Veep, season 3 This season’s election plot injects something more like stakes into the show’s proceedings, but overall it’s the same steady comedy of detestable people in politics. That’s never been entirely my jam, and it feels even more dissonant to watch in the era of Trump (even though this batch …
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TV Review: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 2
TV #53 of 2018: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 2 There’s definitely a nuanced conversation to be had about what this show gets right and wrong about its portrayal of American Jewish life, but overall I consider it to be a positive representation that I can regularly see myself and my family in. And it’s …
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Book Review: Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
Book #251 of 2018: Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Princess Academy #1) Situated right on the boundary between middle-grade and young adult fiction, this little book is pretty delightful. It’s more grounded — and more feminist — than the fairy tale it at first resembles, and is filled with strong female friendships and the struggles …
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Book Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Book #250 of 2018: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers #3) I adore every book in this warmhearted series about humanity’s future amid a coalition of other intelligent space-travelers, but this latest volume feels like a minor step down on a technical level. The five new viewpoint characters, all human residents of …
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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Book #249 of 2018: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #7) And so my Harry Potter reread comes to an end with what I consider the weakest volume of the series (not counting oddities like the Cursed Child screenplay or the flimsy textbook tie-ins). The major problem in this …
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Book Review: The Book of Magic edited by Gardner Dozois
Book #248 of 2018: The Book of Magic edited by Gardner Dozois Gardner Dozois was a prolific editor of speculative fiction, and this is most likely his final project, having come to publication soon after his death in 2018. It’s a series of stories about sorcery — the companion to last year’s Dozois fantasy collection …
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Book Review: The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal
Book #247 of 2018: The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal This short fitness memoir — titled after Jim Fixx’s 1977 classic The Complete Book of Running — is a lot of fun, especially for readers who run themselves. I don’t always agree with author Peter Sagal’s advice, like that runners should do without …
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Book Review: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Book #246 of 2018: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Roxane Gay is a talented writer, but I must confess that I don’t find this 2014 essay collection as engaging as her later work Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. There’s little thematic cohesion across the pieces in this volume, most of which were independently published …
Book Review: Elevation by Stephen King
Book #245 of 2018: Elevation by Stephen King A lackluster novella from a writer who should know (and can obviously do) much better. Part of the problem is the warmed-over premise of a man gradually losing his body weight, which can’t help but recall the author’s earlier novel Thinner — which if not quite a …
Book Review: How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin
Book #244 of 2018: How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin A few of these short stories miss the mark for me, and the ones I like best seem front-loaded in the first half of the collection, giving the book at large an uneven feel. Still, author N. K. Jemisin’s imagination is …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 