Book #197 of 2017: Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray (Firebird #2) This middle book in Claudia Gray’s Firebird trilogy suffers from the same problem as a lot of sequels: a somewhat clunky effort to kickstart the plot and present new stakes now that the main conflict from the previous story has been …
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TV #40 of 2017: The Mindy Project, season 2 Honestly I don’t think this show knows what it wants to be. Even ignoring all the cast changes, the writing too feels like it careens wildly from one sort of story to the next without always bringing in solid character logic to back those plays. On …
Book #196 of 2017: The Iliad by Homer I had only ever read isolated portions of Homer before, so this was my first time through the Iliad as a whole. This epic poem is a bit odd to modern ears, more a series of brief vignettes than a single cohesive narrative (which is why reading …
Book #195 of 2017: Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb (Farseer #2) This middle book in the Farseer trilogy was formative in my teenage years, speaking to the idealism and anger that most young people probably feel to some degree. There’s something universal in youths chafing against authority figures who will not see reason, and author …
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Book #194 of 2017: Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia A. McKillip (Riddle-Master #2) This middle volume in the Riddle-Master trilogy is probably the strongest, but it still moves to the strange internal logic of a dream, often leaving its readers grasping after oblique shades of meaning in under-explained references to this world’s history …
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Book #193 of 2017: Moby Dick by Herman Melville There’s a decent story submerged in this book, but it’s utterly swamped by the narrator’s endless didactic asides on whales and whaling. For every page about Ahab’s obsessive quest or Ishmael and Queequeg’s sweet friendship or even the fate of minor characters like poor Pip, readers …
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Book #192 of 2017: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo (Grisha #1) This is the first novel in Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy, a series I’m reading after (and on the strength of) the author’s Six of Crows and its sequel Crooked Kingdom. Those books share a world with this series and take place after it, …
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Book #191 of 2017: The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel Lane Roanoke has never known any family except her mother Camilla, who left home when she was pregnant with Lane and cut off all ties to her past. But when Camilla kills herself, the orphaned teen is sent to live at the Roanoke family estate …
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Book #190 of 2017: The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. García Jr., and Linda Antonsson The World of Ice & Fire is a Silmarillion to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, providing an exhaustive (and somewhat …
TV #39 of 2017: Jane the Virgin, season 3 Same great cast, same terrific writing, and definitely a return to form after season 2 got a little lost in the weeds with its plot. I was a little bit afraid that this season was going to feature more wheel-spinning as we approached the midpoint, but …
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