Book #77 of 2016: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber The obvious comparison here is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, another book about Christian missionaries preaching the gospel on an alien planet. And like that novel, this one uses their particular genre as an opportunity both to examine matters of faith and …
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Book #76 of 2016: The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate A short but charming novel for young readers, Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan is as much an educational piece about great apes and animal captivity as it is a story. Any primatologist will recognize the emotional and cognitive complexity in the …
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Book #75 of 2019: Uprooted by Naomi Novik Uprooted is a beautiful story set in a fantastic version of medieval Russia and Poland. I rolled my eyes at its initial premise, which involves a village sacrificing its young women to a “dragon” who is actually a powerful wizard living in a nearby tower, but the …
Book #74 of 2016: The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #8) I’m still reading A Series of Unfortunate Events for the first time, and I have to say, I’m getting a little frustrated at how slowly the overall plot details are getting revealed. I like that the series has diverged …
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Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (Leviathan #1) Leviathan builds up a neat alternate history of World War I, wherein Austria-Hungary and its allies wield massive steampunk war-mechs against the bioengineered Lovecraftian monstrosities of the UK, France, and Russia. The worldbuilding here was deeply cool, with the promise of even more to come in the sequels. On …
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TV #41 of 2016: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 2 The main accomplishment of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s second season is definitely delivering on the Jake-and-Amy romantic tension that developed over the course of season 1. But watching this season for the second time, I was also struck by how much the character of Madeline Wunch adds to the …
Book #72 of 2016: The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #2) This is not Agatha Christie at her best. Too much of the plot here relies on weirdly biased assumptions on the part of her detective Hercule Poirot: a certain open grave must have been dug by a man because no …
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Book #71 of 2016: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows #1) I still don’t quite understand the title, but Six of Crows was a really fun fantasy heist novel, featuring a gang of criminals breaking into (and back out of) a high-security prison to rescue a captured scientist with the chemical formula …
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Book #70 of 2016: Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley (The Checquy Files #2) Stiletto, the second book in Daniel O’Malley’s Checquy Files series, is that choicest of sequels that improves upon its predecessor in every way. That first novel, The Rook, had a lot to accomplish between the introduction of its unique setting and magical system …
Book #69 of 2016: The Dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan and Peter Sís I rather liked this novel for junior readers about the boy who would grow up to be Pablo Neruda. It’s below the level that I usually read, but the magical realism of the boy’s daydreams mixing with reality certainly made it memorable. …
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