Book #167 of 2017: Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming A soul-baring memoir from actor Alan Cumming on his abusive father, the resulting trauma, and how learning more about his family history caused him to reevaluate everything he thought he knew about himself. I already admired Cumming as an actor, but I now have …
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Book #166 of 2017: House Rules by Jodi Picoult Taken on its own merits, House Rules is a decent story of a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome on trial for murder. The solution to the mystery is painfully obvious just a third of the way into the book, but the characters are fairly well-developed and …
Book #165 of 2017: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware This murder mystery sort of fizzles out in the end, but for most of the book, it’s a creepy psychological thriller that most resembles The Girl on the Train with its alcoholic Londoner narrator whose blackouts make it difficult for a reader to …
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Book #164 of 2017: Pyramid Schemes by Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing #4) I loved the first Sir Apropos of Nothing book back in high school (although I have no idea how well it holds up now), but even back then I felt like the two sequels that immediately followed offered diminishing returns on …
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Movie #14 of 2017: The Dark Tower (2017) This movie was pretty fun – not great, but far better than the Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest. Very cool to see things like gunslingers and North Central Positronics on the big screen after so many years. For fans of the Dark Tower novels, it was largely …
Book #163 of 2017: The Gunslinger by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #1) It’s probably been a good decade or more since I last read this book, and I was surprised to find it better than I had remembered. I still stand by my usual advice for the Dark Tower series, which is that you …
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TV #28 of 2017: Party Down, season 1 If you don’t enjoy The Office or Veep’s brand of awkward humor, then this is probably not the show for you either. But it’s a pretty hilarious sitcom about an LA catering crew largely made up of struggling actors, and there are so many famous guest stars …
Book #162 of 2017: Finders Keepers by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy #2) This second novel in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy presents a more interesting case than the first, even if the detective and his partners feel largely extraneous to the story. The principal conflict centers on a villain who killed a famous author …
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Book #161 of 2017: Room by Emma Donoghue A masterful story from the point of view of a 5-year-old child who’s spent his entire life in a small shed with just his mother and occasional visits from the man who kidnapped her. Author Emma Donoghue excels at conveying Jack’s perspective of his world in a …
Book #160 of 2017: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes Drawing on interviews with over 100 campaign insiders and political allies, Shattered offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as she faced off against first Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump. It’s an interesting look at …
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