Book #96 of 2025: King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby Another excellent slice of southern crime fiction from author S. A. Cosby, this time riffing rather obviously off The Godfather: an adult son comes home and gets increasingly involved in the local criminal activity, despite people repeatedly cautioning him that he could do so …
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Book #95 of 2025: Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson An intentionally-provocative political treatise that attempts to diagnose from the center-left why modern America seems to underperform in arenas from housing to manufacturing to scientific innovation. I would say it’s written primarily for Democratic-leaning readers who are open to intra-party criticism, as authors Ezra …
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Book #94 of 2025: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid As fully expected, she’s done it again: author Taylor Jenkins Reid has once more delivered a triumphantly emotional novel about fictional historical celebrities, this time turning her attention to the second class of female American astronauts in the early 1980s. (Trailblazer Sally Ride is at least …
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Book #93 of 2025: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis This 2025 title — a collection of previously-published Washington Post articles — is an attempt to put a face to the American federal government and the ranks of civil servants who work on complicated problems for immeasurable benefit …
TV #30 of 2025: Leverage: Redemption, season 3 Another fine but generally unremarkable run of this legacy sequel, which by now has thoroughly cemented its tone as a zanier version of the original parent show. The disguises for the cons are broader and the villains a lot more gullible, which means that the heroes rarely …
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Book #92 of 2025: Agents of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green (Nightside #2) [Note: this is a modified version of my review from 2018.] This urban fantasy series still has issues like an oversexualization of its female characters, but this second novel is better than I remembered and a vast improvement over the …
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Book #91 of 2025: All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall Theoretically, this is gentle post-apocalyptic fiction in the Station Eleven tradition, tracking a small family unit as they lose their home to the rising floodwaters and attempt to find refuge elsewhere. Our teenage heroine has only dim memories of life before the …
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Book #90 of 2025: The Glassblower by Victoria Goddard (The Glassblower Diptych #1) “This was another story beginning, the tale unfurling beneath her feet with every breath she took, every question on her tongue.” That line comes at 97% of the way through this slim novella in author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, …
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Book #89 of 2025: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams I first heard about this book through the news that Facebook had unsuccessfully sued to prevent its publication, which of course cemented my desire to read the thing. It’s easy to see why the company’s not happy, …
TV #29 of 2025: Doctor Who, season 2 The Whoniverse is in a weird place right now. Back in 2022, the BBC struck a deal with Disney to co-produce 26 new episodes of the long-running British franchise, after which the parties would reassess the viability of the brand going forward. And now it appears we’ve …
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