Book #220 of 2017: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before …
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Book #219 of 2017: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #1) The first Miss Marple mystery is as fun as it is implausible, requiring readers to suspend our disbelief enough to accept both that a criminal could be as devious as the denouement reveals and that a town gossip could be …
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Book #218 of 2017: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt This memoir about growing up dirt-poor (first in Brooklyn, then in Ireland) is tremendously funny and moving in equal measures. I didn’t always care for author Frank McCourt’s conceit of writing from the supposed perspective of his childhood self – largely because there are a lot …
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Book #217 of 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward The prose in this novel is just as lyrically beautiful as Jesmyn Ward’s earlier Salvage the Bones, but the story is more magical realist than southern gothic, and I feel like it suffers for it. The portrait of a Mississippi family dealing with racism, poverty, …
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Book #216 of 2017: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #19) Terry Pratchett’s City Watch novels have been steadily improving as the Discworld sub-series goes along, and this third book continues that happy trend. Whereas the introduction of nonhuman characters into the Watch in the previous volume felt largely like an unfunny joke about …
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Book #215 of 2017: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters I have to admit, I had some doubts that a white author like Ben H. Winters would be able to bring the necessary sensitivity for this alternate-history novel of a modern America that never fully abolished slavery. Ultimately, though, I decided to trust Winters on …
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Book #214 of 2019: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne On both a plot and a writing level, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child falls far below the previous Potter books — perhaps reflecting the fact that J. K. Rowling was not involved in the actual writing process. (She’s merely one of …
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Book #213 of 2017: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #2) Although this second novel in the Dark Tower series takes place just after the first, author Stephen King hits the ground running with immediate deadly peril and a propulsive cross-dimensional adventure. It’s a dramatic shift in pace from the …
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Book #212 of 2017: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger A short but intriguing read on how close social ties may help mitigate against depression, PTSD, and other mental conditions. I thought the author relied on several assumptions that a longer work could have better interrogated, but it’s an interesting thesis with some …
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Book #211 of 2017: The Fate of the Tearling by Erika Johansen (The Queen of the Tearling #3) There are a lot of scenes in this final novel of the Tearling trilogy that feel intended to be climactic but have little narrative build behind them – either in this book or the two before it …
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