Book #131 of 2018: Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan Saga #6) The first few Vorkosigan books haven’t really gripped me, so I decided to jump forward to this one (which was the third to be published, anyway — these books are all out of chronological order). It’s more of a spinoff, sharing …
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Book #130 of 2018: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Grief memoirs are tricky; they’re obviously cathartic to write, but can easily turn into a wallowing in loss that shuts out their readers. Author Joan Didion largely avoids that trap by focusing on the more mundane aspects of her husband’s death, centering this …
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Book #129 of 2018: The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper Much like his on-air news persona, there’s a certain boyish earnestness to journalist Jake Tapper’s debut novel. It’s fun to see the author venturing into the world of historical fiction, and to speculate on possible connections between his tale of government intrigue during the heyday …
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Book #128 of 2018: O Pioneers! by Willa Cather A fierce and elegiac tale of early female empowerment, first published in the decade before (white) American women won the right to vote. The heroine, introduced shutting down a catcaller with an “Amazonian” glance, is the eldest sibling in her family and the one tasked with …
Book #127 of 2018: One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul A hilarious and heartfelt collection of essays from Canadian author Scaachi Koul, focusing on her life as the millennial daughter of Indian immigrants. It’s a short book that finds humor in heavy subjects, from online harassment …
Movie #13 of 2018: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) I went into this movie with fairly low expectations, but ended up really enjoying it. Jurassic Park films have a tendency to copy the major plot points of the original movie’s storyline, but this one takes serious risks that pay off tremendously for me as a …
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Book #126 of 2018: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly I think I would like this historical fiction novel better if it had focused solely on the Polish girl sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp to be the subject of Nazi medical experimentation. Her story is understandably poignant, but it’s weakened by splitting its time with …
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Book #125 of 2018: Star Wars: Rebel Rising by Beth Revis A solid if somewhat unremarkable Star Wars adventure, fleshing out Jyn Erso’s early life after she gets adopted by the terrorist Saw Gerrera at the beginning of Rogue One. The whole book reads mostly like a series of deleted scenes from that film, and …
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Book #124 of 2018: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë I know it’s not entirely fair to judge a book of 160 years ago by today’s standards, but I have some major issues with how this Victorian classic glorifies an abusive relationship and demonizes mental illness (to say nothing of the novel’s sporadic antisemitism, blackface, and …
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Book #123 of 2018: Blackout by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #3) I’ve enjoyed Mira Grant’s bloggers-fighting-zombies trilogy far more than I ever expected to, but the plot in this final volume is pretty slow and coincidence-heavy compared to what’s come before. One character spends the entire first half of the book quarantined in a CDC hospital, …
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