Book #44 of 2025: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden I was initially worried that this satire would be a two-star read for me, but it’s significantly funnier in the back half as it leans more into the absurd tropes that riddle this suburban crime thriller genre. Secret identical twins! Characters who might …
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Book #43 of 2025: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider Mark Twain (1835-1910) didn’t actually write an autobiography. That is to say, he wrote — and dictated — many things over the last forty years of his life that he characterized as part of that great undertaking, but they were disjointed, incomplete, …
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Book #42 of 2025: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks (Virgin New Adventures #2) Categorically an improvement over the John Peel title that launched this series, thank goodness. We’re still traveling with final Classic Who TV heroes the Seventh Doctor and Ace, but the writing this time feels more sure of itself, with less …
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Book #41 of 2025: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow An atmospheric modern gothic / romantasy, in which a feisty heroine from the wrong side of the tracks is drawn to the creepy haunted house in her community and its reclusive and volatile caretaker. My favorite part of this story is its rural Kentucky setting, …
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Book #40 of 2025: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura This is an odd little story. It’s a translated version of a Japanese bestseller, and I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that I’m missing, as I’ve had a particularly hard time swallowing the basic premise here. Not the mirror that magically transports …
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Book #39 of 2025: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (The Wild Robot #1) A cute but aimless little story about an industrial robot who washes ashore on an island after a shipwreck and begins to make a home for itself. She’s fresh from her factory and there are no humans around to give her …
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Book #38 of 2025: Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #26) Circling back to one of the Discworld novels I’d never read before. I’ve been away from the series for a while, but this one strikes me as even more of a random mishmash than usual, with characters wandering in from other titles and …
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Book #37 of 2025: Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14) Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home …
TV #12 of 2025: Agatha All Along, season 1 I had initially brushed off this show — an unnecessary-seeming spinoff of Marvel’s WandaVision, with the villain now reframed as an antihero — only to belatedly circle back to it on the basis of a few rave reviews. Ultimately I think it was better than I …
Book #36 of 2025: Betrayal by John Peel (2099 #2) A propulsive sequel that picks up right where the first installment of this middle-grade sci-fi series left off, with a doomsday computer virus ravaging all of New York City. It’s actually impressive how well author John Peel, writing in the 1990s and imagining a century …
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