TV #22 of 2017: iZombie, season 3 I really love the way iZombie’s seasons are self-contained storylines – creator Rob Thomas has likened them to books in a series – that inevitably blow up their premise in the finale to set up a brand-new status quo for the next season to dig into. The fallout …
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Book Review: Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis
Book #136 of 2017: Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (The Space Trilogy #1) While not as instantly endearing as his Narnia books, there’s still a lot to enjoy in this first volume of C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy, which could have easily been titled A Linguist of Mars. For although Lewis …
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Book Review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
Book #135 of 2017: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence This book was way more graphic than I expected or wanted, so I’m not surprised it produced such outrage when it was first published in 1928. There’s a bit of a plot regarding female empowerment happening in and around the sex, but the novel …
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Book Review: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow
Book #134 of 2017: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow I liked Cory Doctorow’s earlier novel Little Brother, about teens using technology to nonviolently resist an overreaching surveillance state, but I couldn’t stand this one about illegal downloading and copyright violation. The characters are like those in an Ayn Rand novel, existing merely as cardboard mouthpieces …
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Book Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Book #133 of 2017: The Sellout by Paul Beatty I’m ultimately left scratching my head over this one. It’s a satire on contemporary American race relations, featuring a black man reintroducing segregation into his all-minority hometown (because just the idea of a neighboring whites-only school makes the local schoolchildren work harder, and so on). It’s …
Book Review: Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Book #132 of 2017: Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb (Farseer #1) This fantasy novel was a staple of my high school shelves, the start of a favorite series that I would read over and over again. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t live up to my memories when I revisited it now, but …
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Book Review: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
Book #131 of 2017: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson I’ve never read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the story that so directly inspired this one, but I’ve read enough of his other works to have a sense of the racism and violent misogyny that pervade the man’s writing. Those facets …
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Movie Review: Moana (2016)
Movie #9 of 2017: Moana (2016) This movie was so flipping cute I am beside myself. Honestly, there are no faults here. Moana’s a great hero, the songs are fantastic, Maui in particular is hilarious, every human character is a POC, there’s no awkwardly shoehorned-in love story, it repeatedly passes the Bechdel test… This was …
Book Review: Mister Monday by Garth Nix
Book #130 of 2017: Mister Monday by Garth Nix (The Keys to the Kingdom #1) This somewhat generic tween fantasy adventure is sort of like a cross between Neverwhere and So You Want to Be a Wizard, featuring a young boy who learns he’s heir to a magical power and must travel through a twisted …
Book Review: The Dark Man by Stephen King
Book #129 of 2017: The Dark Man by Stephen King This illustrated poem is more atmospheric than substantive, an early character sketch of the figure who would eventually grow to be Stephen King’s recurring villain Randall Flagg. King wrote the poem when he was in college – well before Flagg would first pop up in …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 