Book #149 of 2017: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray This novel is all over the place tonally, and the satire doesn’t always land the way I think author Libba Bray intends it to. But there’s still a lot to enjoy in this girl-power comedy of teenage beauty pageant contestants crashing on a deserted island and …
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Movie Review: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Movie #12 of 2017: War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) So… as you may have noticed over the past few days, I kind of love the Planet of the Apes franchise. (It’s one of those sleeper cell fandoms for me, where I don’t post about it for years at a time and then …
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Book Review: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
Book #148 of 2017: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt This is some very dense writing, and author Hannah Arendt can be a tad speculative and reductive, especially in her opening sections on antisemitism and imperialism. However, the closing section that gives the book its title is an improvement, and Arendt draws out key …
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Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)
Movie #11 of 2017: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) This movie is overshadowed in two directions: it doesn’t quite reach the storytelling heights of its predecessor Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) that revived the series, nor does it ever get as bonkers as Battle for the Planet of the …
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Movie Review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Movie #10 of 2017: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) I’ve seen every Planet of the Apes movie multiple times, and this one is definitely my favorite. It helps that it’s modeled closely on Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), my favorite of the original series, but Rise definitely carves out …
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Book Review: Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig
Book #147 of 2017: Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig (Aftermath #1) Star Wars: Aftermath was one of the first novels published in that franchise after the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe was reclassified as noncanonical ‘legends’ in 2014. (In other words, earlier Star Wars spinoff literature is no longer considered to have happened in …
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Book Review: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Book #146 of 2017: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart A terrific – and terrifically feminist – contemporary Young Adult novel about a wickedly clever teenage girl at an elite prep school with an all-male secret society / good old boys alumni network. Frankie’s frustrations with how she is held back because …
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Book Review: Mindswap by Robert Sheckley
Book #145 of 2017: Mindswap by Robert Sheckley This mid-twentieth-century book is an overlooked gem, more or less the missing link in literature’s progression from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s the delightful comic adventure of a broke college student who gets scammed out of his body by a …
Book Review: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Book #144 of 2017: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle I’m a big fan of reclaiming H. P. Lovecraft narratives from the old racist himself, but this novella doesn’t work nearly as well on that front as its fellow Hugo nominee The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe. Author Victor LaValle’s choice of a story …
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Book Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin
Book #143 of 2017: The Passage by Justin Cronin (The Passage #1) This post-apocalyptic vampire novel has a real early Stephen King feel to it. The most direct King parallel is probably The Stand, which similarly details the outbreak and aftermath of a deadly plague virus, but there are also classic King tropes like a …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 