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 #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 #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 #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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Book #142 of 2017: Marian by Ella Lyons I’m of two minds about this book. On the one hand, I love the idea of a lesbian retelling of Robin Hood, and this is a cute story of two girls falling in love in quasi-medieval England. On the other hand, it bears almost no resemblance to …
Book #141 of 2017: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly Although the fact is not widely known, the government agency that preceded NASA began hiring black female mathematicians to work as human ‘computers’ during World War II, …
TV #26 of 2017: Elementary, season 5 Okay, I’m done with this show. It hasn’t been great TV for a while now, but I’ve still kept watching on the strength of the cast and the hope that the writers will rediscover the magic of that first season. And every once in a while there are …
TV #25 of 2017: The West Wing, season 5 This show never quite gets bad during its run, but this season is probably the closest it gets (which makes it all the more surprising that 5×17 The Supremes is one of the show’s all-time best episodes). Josh’s annoying intern is a big part of the …
Book #140 of 2017: Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (Maisie Dobbs #1) I mostly liked this novel, but it has a decidedly odd structure: the first third of the book introduces readers to private investigator Maisie Dobbs as she’s solving a case, the middle third shows an extended flashback of Maisie’s childhood as a maid …
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Book #139 of 2017: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (Winternight Trilogy #1) There’s a beautiful atmosphere to this book that really makes you feel like you’re caught up in a snowy Russian fairy tale. I found I cared more about that sense of rich Slavic folklore than I did about the characters …
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