Book #210 of 2017: What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton This book represents a deeply personal reflection from Hillary Clinton on her loss in the 2016 presidential election. She knows full well that many people are tired of relitigating the campaign, and that some would even like her to disappear from public life forever, but …
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Movie #17 of 2017: La La Land (2016) I liked this movie, but I certainly didn’t love it or think it deserved all of its awards and accolades. I think a lot of my reaction stems from Ryan Gosling’s character, who I never thought showed anything close to a redeeming quality. (Seriously, he gets fired …
Book #209 of 2017: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach Mary Roach’s in-depth look at the human digestive process is pretty gross, but thankfully less stomach-churning than her earlier book on dead bodies. (The author’s irreverent tone works better here too, where the lighter subject matter makes her jokes come off as …
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Book 208 of 2017: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann A creepy true-crime account of the serial murders that plagued the Osage Indian Nation in the early 20th century, as outsiders sought to gain access to the tribe’s lucrative oil business. The investigation into …
Book #207 of 2017: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #1) Taken in its own right, this is a charming little collection of cozy mysteries, packaged as a novel but really more like a succession of independent cases with a little bit of a character …
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Movie #16 of 2017: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) This series has always been goofy, but this movie felt particularly lazy in justifying its various set pieces. Most of it also didn’t seem all that impossible? Like, it was still a solid enough action movie, but most of the scenes could have been lifted …
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Book #206 of 2017: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, …
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Book #205 of 2017: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1) My feelings about this book are all over the place! I ended up really liking it, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy, but it was sort of a rough journey to get …
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Book #204 of 2017: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood This book was good, but I don’t think it quite lived up to its full potential as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey, especially given author Margaret Atwood’s bonafides. Presenting Odysseus’s bloody homecoming from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her murdered serving girls is …
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Book #203 of 2017: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #2) I don’t know if Hollow City is any worse than Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but it certainly doesn’t improve on that first book’s problems. There are the same under-developed characters, the same sketchy romance between a sixteen-year-old and his …
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