Book 208 of 2017: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann A creepy true-crime account of the serial murders that plagued the Osage Indian Nation in the early 20th century, as outsiders sought to gain access to the tribe’s lucrative oil business. The investigation into …
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Book Review: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Book #207 of 2017: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #1) Taken in its own right, this is a charming little collection of cozy mysteries, packaged as a novel but really more like a succession of independent cases with a little bit of a character …
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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
Movie #16 of 2017: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) This series has always been goofy, but this movie felt particularly lazy in justifying its various set pieces. Most of it also didn’t seem all that impossible? Like, it was still a solid enough action movie, but most of the scenes could have been lifted …
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Book Review: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King
Book #206 of 2017: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, …
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Book Review: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor
Book #205 of 2017: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1) My feelings about this book are all over the place! I ended up really liking it, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy, but it was sort of a rough journey to get …
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Book Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Book #204 of 2017: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood This book was good, but I don’t think it quite lived up to its full potential as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey, especially given author Margaret Atwood’s bonafides. Presenting Odysseus’s bloody homecoming from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her murdered serving girls is …
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Book Review: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs
Book #203 of 2017: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #2) I don’t know if Hollow City is any worse than Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but it certainly doesn’t improve on that first book’s problems. There are the same under-developed characters, the same sketchy romance between a sixteen-year-old and his …
Book Review: The Odyssey by Homer
Book #202 of 2017: The Odyssey by Homer I liked this story a lot better than The Iliad, in part because it maintained a tight focus on a small number of characters rather than bouncing around among a sprawling Greek host. I also preferred the larger-than-life nature of Odysseus’s adventures to the endless battle scenes …
TV Review: Game of Thrones, season 4
TV #42 of 2017: Game of Thrones, season 4 I try to keep these reviews fairly spoiler-free, even this long after the fact, so let me just say vaguely that after three years of Game of Thrones airing shocking plot twists at the end of each season, it’s nice to have the major moment in …
Book Review: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Book #201 of 2017: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson This is a creepy atmospheric story of people staying in a haunted house, although it’s never completely clear whether we’re witnessing actual spirits or just troubled human minds. It’s a solid story and probably the definitive take on this sort of plot, and …
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