Book #12 of 2016: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin This was really great classic sci-fi: exploring outlandish dilemmas that nevertheless resonate with their philosophical implications. The main character in this book has dreams that can reshape reality according to his subconscious desires, so he’s desperate to make them stop. (In the …
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Movie #4 of 2016: Deadpool (2016) Overall I think this was about what I was expecting. Not that that’s a bad thing! Deadpool is very funny, very violent, and very meta – an excellent adaptation of the comic character, as far as I can tell. I particularly liked the ways in which the movie skewed …
TV #9 of 2016: Veep, season 1 Veep is another political sitcom from the same creator as The Thick of It, and the insults are nearly as inventive, but it just isn’t clicking the same way for me. I think part of the problem is that this American version of the program doesn’t really have …
Book #11 of 2016: The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events #7) A Series of Unfortunate Events… continues. This book was pretty similar to the ones that came before it in the series, with little forward plot movement. They’re each entertaining enough on their own, but they don’t leave me excited …
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TV #8 of 2016: Bosch, season 1 This is an Amazon original series that I had never heard of before my dad recommended it to me. (It’s based on one of his favorite book series.) I’m glad he did, though. It’s a pretty solid police procedural, with a single storyline spanning the season rather than …
Book #10 of 2016: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn #6) The fight scenes in this novel are top-notch, and it’s great to see new applications of the basic magic principles Sanderson introduced in the first Mistborn books, but the plot here is pretty thin. I love The Alloy of Law (Mistborn #4, …
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TV #7 of 2016: The Good Wife, season 6 Okay, there’s no getting around the fact that this season of The Good Wife was a major step down from season 5. Then again, practically anything would be – I’ve heard people call TGW season 5 one of the all-time great seasons of any television show, …
Book #9 of 2016: The Elfstones of Shannara by Terry Brooks (Shannara #2) I originally read the first dozen or so Shannara books back in middle and high school, before finally getting tired of the series. I don’t remember any of them particularly well, but I did have this vague memory that Elfstones (the second …
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Book #8 of 2016: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Todd Family #1) I normally love the premise of characters reliving moments from their lives over and over again, but this novel was just so frustrating. To start with, the rules for how each go-through differs are never made clear. Sometimes it seems like the …
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Book #7 of 2016: The Shade of the Moon by Susan Beth Pfeffer (Last Survivors #4) This is the fourth (and last?) book in Pfeffer’s teens-making-poor-life-decisions-in-the-apocalypse series, and it is definitely the wildest one yet. The earlier books were tightly focused on individual families struggling to survive in a time of cataclysm; this one verges …
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