TV #45 of 2018: Better Call Saul, season 4 I’ve mentioned this before, but one reason that I prefer Better Call Saul to its parent show is that Walter White has always struck me as being evil right from the start – Breaking Bad could be exciting and horrifying, but the story was never really …
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Book Review: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
Book #196 of 2018: The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade #1) A fascinating character and culture study, most reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books. Baru Cormorant is a young woman whose homeland gets annexed by an expanding empire, after which she privately vows to rise through her conquerors’ ranks to take …
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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
Book #195 of 2018: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #3) This has always been my favorite book in the Harry Potter series, and it is no less excellent even now that I’m closer in age to the second title character than the first. Harry and his friends …
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Book Review: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
Book #194 of 2018: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover This memoir is a difficult read, recounting author Tara Westover’s fundamentalist survivalist childhood in rural Idaho and her decision as a teenager to finally pursue an education away from home, which leads her to realize just how sheltered and unhealthy her early life has been. …
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Book Review: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
Book #193 of 2018: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #1) I love this book, and I think my review from when I first read it in 2017 still stands: “A gorgeously-written fantasy novel about a boy raised in a library, who spends his early life chasing down obscure references to the …
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Book Review: Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson
Book #192 of 2018: Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson (Legion #1-3) This new book collects the three novellas in author Brandon Sanderson’s Legion series (technically unrelated to the X-Men character / FX show of the same name, although there are similarities that Sanderson maintains are coincidental). I had read the …
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Book Review: The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir
Book #191 of 2018: The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir I’m not quite sure what to make of this book, in which the secretly pregnant teenage daughter of a prominent televangelist family arranges to marry a gay classmate in order to provide cover for them both. It’s technically well-written, but the characters all …
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Movie Review: The Shining (1980)
Movie #18 of 2018: The Shining (1980) Nearly four decades on, this movie is still terrific. I do think the pacing could be a lot tighter, especially early on, and even though it’s true to the book and what gives the film its title, I don’t think the little boy’s psychic abilities really add much …
Book Review: Theonite: Planet Adyn by M. L. Wang
Book #190 of 2018: Theonite: Planet Adyn by M. L. Wang (Theonite #1) This YA novel has a neat hook: its thirteen-year-old protagonist has spent her whole life hiding superpowers, only to discover that her new neighbors have special abilities of their own and are here from a parallel dimension in search of a dangerous …
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Book Review: All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Book #189 of 2018: All Systems Red by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #1) A fun novella in what I would have to call the robo-noir genre, with a hardboiled cyborg protagonist reluctantly working security on a planetary survey mission. Murderbot’s narrative perspective is hilarious and relatable: who among of us doesn’t also have bosses …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 