TV #7 of 2017: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, season 1 A very smart, very funny adaptation of the beginning of this book series. (This first season covers the first four novels, out of a total of 13. The movie adaptation only spanned the first three.) Neil Patrick Harris and Patrick Warburton are …
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Book #24 of 2017: 1984 by George Orwell 1984’s vision of a dystopian future has only grown more eerily prescient since I first read it back in high school, foretelling a rise in the surveillance state and government efforts to repress reality through propaganda. The storyline and the characters are honestly not so great, but …
Book #23 of 2017: A Cold Legacy by Megan Shepherd (The Madman’s Daughter #3) This final book in the Madman’s Daughter trilogy is a welcome return to form after a disappointing middle volume. Restricting the action to an isolated estate in the Scottish highlands helps bring back the tight focus of the first book, and …
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Book #22 of 2017: Inkspell by Cornelia Funke (Inkworld #2) I have mixed feelings on this one. Exploring the “Inkworld” that the characters in the previous story came from is a smart move on writer Cornelia Funke’s part, and I like that Meggie has grown as a character from the plucky kid in Inkheart to …
Book #21 of 2017: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North I’m a big fan of time loop stories, but even in the context of that particular genre, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is remarkable. (I’d personally put it second only to Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay, which is one of …
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Book #20 of 2017: The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker #2) A definite improvement over the first book, although at the cost of a few narrative threads and characters that are unceremoniously dropped in the transition. And I still don’t understand how Asher earns the love and devotion of so many other characters …
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Book #19 of 2017: The Victim by Saul Bellow When an antisemitic acquaintance accuses Asa Leventhal of ruining his life, the New York City Jew brushes off the accusation to focus on a recent family tragedy. But the gentiles in his life are quick to take his accuser’s side, to the point where Leventhal begins …
Book #18 of 2017: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher’s account of her time filming the first Star Wars movie, along with some reflections on what the franchise’s fame has meant for her over the years. It’s a deeply personal memoir, constantly foregrounding the fact that the actress was …
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The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time #1) For the most part this first book in Robert Jordan’s massive Wheel of Time saga feels like a paint-by-numbers retelling of the Star Wars / Lord of the Rings monomyth. There’s some occasional flashes of originality, but it’s mostly just the same …
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Book #16 of 2017: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy As many others have noted, the title Anna Karenina is somewhat misleading, as the novel devotes more space to the story of Anna’s brother-in-law and author stand-in Konstantin Levin than it does to Anna herself. (“Brother-in-law” is a simplification, and suggests a closeness between Anna and …
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