Book #38 of 2025: Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #26) Circling back to one of the Discworld novels I’d never read before. I’ve been away from the series for a while, but this one strikes me as even more of a random mishmash than usual, with characters wandering in from other titles and …
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Book #37 of 2025: Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14) Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home …
TV #12 of 2025: Agatha All Along, season 1 I had initially brushed off this show — an unnecessary-seeming spinoff of Marvel’s WandaVision, with the villain now reframed as an antihero — only to belatedly circle back to it on the basis of a few rave reviews. Ultimately I think it was better than I …
Book #36 of 2025: Betrayal by John Peel (2099 #2) A propulsive sequel that picks up right where the first installment of this middle-grade sci-fi series left off, with a doomsday computer virus ravaging all of New York City. It’s actually impressive how well author John Peel, writing in the 1990s and imagining a century …
Book #35 of 2025: Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard (Terec of Lund #2) To recap: the imperial valet Conju, a minor character in author Victoria Goddard’s best-known work The Hands of the Emperor, recounts in that novel the unknown fate of his lost love Terec, who fled civilization as a young man with …
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Book #34 of 2025: This Book Kills by Ravena Guron I was expecting this novel — in which a student’s classmate is murdered in the same way as the victim in a story she wrote — to be a YA thriller, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it’s more of a traditional whodunnit …
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TV #11 of 2025: Babylon 5, season 3 Babylon 5 is so very nearly frustratingly close to being a good show. There are times when it manages to kick into that higher gear, such as this season when the rising authoritarianism on earth forces the station crew to openly break away from their homeworld and …
Book #33 of 2025: Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling Dr. Tamsin Rivers is losing her mind. She’s not sleeping well, she’s exhibiting odd memory lapses, and she’s going long periods without remembering to eat or leave the house. She’s also studying a strange House of Leaves phenomenon where her basement seems to …
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Book #32 of 2025: Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang This standalone fantasy novel is a total delight, and also probably represents the biggest improvement I’ve ever seen an author display from their debut, which for M. L. Wang was the somewhat forgettable YA title Theonite: Planet Adyn. Her talents have grown considerably …
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TV #10 of 2025: The Bear, season 1 I’ve never worked in a restaurant kitchen before, but the first year of this FX drama* is so evocative in conveying the chaos and stress of one that I can practically feel my body tightening up with every episode. (“But you’re enjoying it?” my wife asks in …
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