Book #124 of 2017: Feed by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #1) Once you set aside this book’s ludicrous premise – not the zombie uprising, but the idea that independent teen bloggers represent a trusted news source – it ends up being a lot of fun. The story is set several decades after the undead outbreak, and …
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Book Review: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
Book #123 of 2017: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy #1) This novel lost steam for me as it went along (especially once I realized that a promising new character was just Stephen King’s version of Lisbeth Salander), but for the most part King has delivered an exciting crime thriller about a retired …
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Book Review: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Book #122 of 2017: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Idiot — which might more fairly be called The Naïf — follows a wide-eyed innocent as he leaves his Swiss sanitarium for Russian high society and generally finds himself unprepared for its corruption and amorality. Some of these events are droll, but I felt there …
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Book Review: Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger
Book #121 of 2017: Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger (Finishing School #1) A lightweight little YA steampunk fantasy novel about a finishing school for teen girl spies. A good summer read, it was fun but not particularly deep. I believe it’s also in the same setting as some of author Gail Carriger’s other works, …
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TV Review: Arrow, season 5
TV #20 of 2017: Arrow, season 5 Arrow honestly had an amazing season this year. It’s kind of hard to believe after how weak the past two had been, especially when you consider that the main novelty this season was adding a new batch of lower-tier comics characters like Wild Dog for the Green Arrow …
TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 4
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 …
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 …
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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 …
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