Book #119 of 2016: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness A moving YA novel that brought to mind both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the Buffy episode “The Zeppo.” Like those stories, The Rest of Us Just Live Here focuses on the people who are background characters in large epic …
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Book #118 of 2016: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #3) One thing I really appreciate about this book series, beyond its great character work and fairly original spin on werewolves, is how much the status quo changes from novel to novel. Structurally speaking, Forever is largely an inverse of the first …
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Book #117 of 2016: Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins #1) I haven’t seen the Disney movie of Mary Poppins since I was a very small child, so I can’t say how the film version compares to this novel. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Mary Poppins of the original …
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Book #116 of 2016: The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1) I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up …
Book #115 of 2016: Desperation by Stephen King Desperation is a decent Stephen King story, flavored with hints of Dark Tower connections but never really connecting with that other mythos. This novel features King at his scariest, but only for its first hundred pages or so, when it appears to be just about a deranged …
Book #114 of 2017: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman #1) Apocalyptic fiction and detective stories are two genres that I particularly enjoy, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen them blended. The result is The Last Policeman, a novel about a detective trying to solve the …
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Book #113 of 2016: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz #2) Another fun YA novel from Brandon Sanderson, who blends his usual high fantasy style with something closer to Harry Potter and then adds a snarky narrator offering meta-commentary on the nature of stories throughout. Book 2 in this series fleshes out …
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Book #112 of 2016: A Whole New World by Liz Braswell (Twisted Tales #1) This novel offers a “what-if” spin on Disney’s animated Aladdin movie: what if the evil Jafar made wishes with the genie’s lamp before the hero got the chance? The result has some interesting moments, especially with Aladdin and Princess Jasmine leading …
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Book #111 of 2016: The Runaway King by Jennifer A. Nielsen (The Ascendance Trilogy #2) This book is the Catching Fire to its predecessor’s Hunger Games – a sequel that faces the tricky task of recapturing what readers loved about the very particular scenario of the first book. The plot mechanics that get the orphan-turned-king …
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Movie #21 of 2016: Hamilton’s America (2016) This documentary is a fun look at the Broadway musical sensation as well the real-life history of US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. It’s informative enough on that last count that I could see schoolteachers getting away with playing it to their classes, and it’s charmingly bipartisan in having …
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