TV #29 of 2017: Game of Thrones, season 2 As mentioned before, we are watching this show for my wife’s first time and my first time since catching it live as it first aired. It’s fun to rediscover the beginnings of everyone’s stories, especially the ones that have changed the most over the years. On …
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Book Review: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
Book #169 of 2017: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal #1) Johannes Cabal isn’t a very compelling Faustian figure. He’s trying to win back his soul from the devil (by tricking 100 other people out of theirs), but he’s not particularly clever, or funny, or decent, or righteous as he goes …
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Book Review: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
Book #168 of 2017: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud This 1966 Pulitzer-winning novel tells the story of a nonpracticing Jew in late Tsarist Russia who is arrested and falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy for ritualistic purposes. It’s a fictionalized version of the case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, and author Bernard Malamud nails the …
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Book Review: Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming
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 Review: House Rules by Jodi Picoult
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 Review: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
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 Review: Pyramid Schemes by Peter David
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 Review: The Dark Tower (2017)
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 Review: The Gunslinger by Stephen King
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 Review: Party Down, season 1
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 …
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