TV #19 of 2017: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 4 B99 is getting a little long in the tooth, but it’s still regularly delivering a funny character-driven story with a diverse cast and a definite focus on inclusive feminist storytelling (with regular callouts of sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and more). The major end-of-season plot twists generally don’t …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Movie Review: Doctor Strange (2016)
Movie #7 of 2017: Doctor Strange (2016) I’m still happy with my decision to wait until Doctor Strange was on Netflix to watch it (so as to hurt box office returns in protest of the casting). But having now finally seen the thing, I will freely admit that it was a pretty good movie in …
Book Review: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Book #120 of 2017: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Mixed feelings on this one. I appreciate the overall message that economic principles can be applied to subjects far afield from the traditional bounds of the discipline, but the examples included in this …
Book Review: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
Book #119 of 2017: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson A sobering and deeply moving account from death row lawyer Bryan Stevenson on the injustices that pervade our justice system, particularly those concerning southern black defendants. This is not a book like The New Jim Crow that constructs elaborate academic …
Continue reading “Book Review: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson”
Book Review: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
Book #118 of 2017: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott A dry but interesting book from Yale professor James C. Scott, about how centralized power tends to simplify on-the-ground complexity, imposing cookie-cutter paradigms to ensure legibility by the state. These simplifications are often …
Book Review: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
Book #117 of 2017: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #15) This second Discworld City Watch novel is an improvement over the first, thanks mostly to some appreciated deepening of the characters of Carrot and Sam Vimes. But it’s still not great, and the satire on affirmative action involving the appointment of fantasy creatures …
Continue reading “Book Review: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett”
Book Review: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig
Book #116 of 2017: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig (The Girl from Everywhere #1) There were some interesting ideas in this story of a father and daughter who can navigate their pirate ship time machine to any harbor on a dated map, but ultimately none of it really hangs together. The protagonist and …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig”
Book Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Book #115 of 2017: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (Gemma Doyle #1) I liked this book, but I didn’t quite love it. Author Libba Bray is talented at writing realistically flawed teenagers, and the downside is that her heroine Gemma Doyle comes across as very selfish, impetuous, and otherwise immature. I also …
Continue reading “Book Review: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray”
Book Review: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
Book #114 of 2017: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #1) A gorgeously-written fantasy novel about a boy raised in a library, who spends his early life chasing down obscure references to the faraway city whose name was removed from the world by magic. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Kingkiller Chronicle, …
Continue reading “Book Review: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor”
Book Review: Star Wars: Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn
Book #113 of 2017: Star Wars: Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn It turns out that “Star Wars meets Ocean’s Eleven” is a better idea in concept than in execution. Or at least, this novel about Han Solo putting together a team for a heist soon after the destruction of the first Death Star — which has …
Continue reading “Book Review: Star Wars: Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 