Book #241 of 2017: Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #2) The first novel in this trilogy grew on me as it went along, its early Twilight trappings of a high school girl falling in love with a beautiful inhuman stranger giving way to something rich and dark …
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Book #240 of 2017: Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green (Nightside #1) I loved Simon R. Green’s Nightside series back in high school, when it was my first introduction to the urban fantasy genre. These books tell hardboiled detective stories in a weird world of gods and monsters, sort of like a cross …
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Movie #21 of 2017: Big Trouble (2002) This is a family favorite, but it had been several years since I watched it last. Sometimes things like that can age poorly, but this one is still great, and the comedy holds up really well. I’m always surprised that this movie isn’t better known, but I guess …
TV #47 of 2017: Stranger Things I know I’m about a year behind on this, but this show was a lot of fun. It wears its 80s homages right there on its sleeve, and although it never quite deconstructs those inherited tropes as much as I’d like, it at least manages to surprise me with …
Book #239 of 2017: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez Julia Reyes is the best sort of YA protagonist, flawed but sympathetic and with an incredibly distinctive voice. She struggled under the weight of her immigrant parents’ expectations even before her older sister died, but now everything feels like it’s …
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Movie #20 of 2017: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) If you consider this movie as an attempt to recapture the magic (pun very much intended) of Harry Potter, it’s hard to see it as anything but a failure. The stakes are muddled, this version of the Wizarding World feels more hazily drawn, …
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TV #46 of 2017: The West Wing, season 6 Oh man, late West Wing is such a mixed bag. I think season 5 is unquestionably the worst, and that lingers a little bit into the start of this next one. The primary campaign is a real shot of adrenaline, though, and it definitely works as …
Book #238 of 2017: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King Another solid collection of short fiction from author Stephen King. The standout entry is Ur, a Dark Tower-adjacent novella about an e-reader that can access books from alternate realities, but King also offers up some delightful creepiness in Morality, Under the Weather, and …
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Book #237 of 2017: My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier As with Daphne du Maurier’s earlier novel Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel is the sort of dark and gothic book Gillian Flynn might have written had she been born half a century earlier. In this one, narrator Philip Ashley’s cousin is abroad in Italy when …
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Book #236 of 2017: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Seraphina #1) This novel depicts a fascinating world in which dragons and humans were once enemies but now live under an uneasy peace, with the dragons who take on human form (for diplomacy, study, or trade) forced to publicly identify themselves and live in ghettos within human …
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