TV #49 of 2024: Babylon 5, season 2 This science-fiction series has been steadily improving and growing darker in tone, but I’m still not ready in this second season to bump my critical rating up out of the midrange three-star tier. At its best, I’m really interested in the larger serialized story that the show …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Book Review: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
Book #176 of 2024: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #5) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] Another 1300-page epic fantasy tome that very nearly justifies its massive length. (I listened to the audiobook on 2.5x speed, which still took literally 24 hours to complete.) The extended climax of this …
Continue reading “Book Review: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson”
TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 3
TV #48 of 2024: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 3 Somewhere between three and four stars for me as a viewer, but I’ll round up due to my enjoying this TV outing more than the novel it’s based on, Michael Connelly’s fifth Lincoln Lawyer story The Gods of Guilt. (That means the Netflix series has now …
Book Review: Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase
Book #175 of 2024: Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase In my opinion this is the best of the three original Fifteenth Doctor novels released this year (i.e. not counting the episode novelizations), for the simple reason that author Abi Falase does a better job than the other writers at capturing the distinctive happy-go-lucky …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Eden Rebellion by Abi Falase”
Book Review: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron
Book #174 of 2024: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Arcana Imperii #1) This 2021 space opera debut exhibits one of my favorite sort of plot structures, which is to drill down into the minutiae of daily life in a strange environment while major storylines play out slowly in the background, surfacing occasionally but only really …
Continue reading “Book Review: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron”
Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Book #173 of 2024: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. I feel as though this 2014 volume has given me immense insight into the people I know (or even suspect) have suffered traumatic experiences as either children or adults, as well …
TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 3
TV #47 of 2024: The Umbrella Academy, season 3 As a series, The Umbrella Academy has benefited from the time it’s had to develop its main characters, who are interestingly dysfunctional and comfortably grown into their respective superpowers at this point. But the plot around them is a mess, simultaneously dragging on and seeming to …
Continue reading “TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 3”
Book Review: Meltdown by Chris Archer
Book #172 of 2024: Meltdown by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #10) A weird end to a chaotic series, and probably the first one that really earns the “Mindwarp” title. These books have always been like a middle-grade sci-fi sampler project, and so it’s only fitting that the final volume introduces its younger readers to another few …
Book Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers
Book #171 of 2024: The Overstory by Richard Powers The language in this 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner is undeniably lovely at times, but as a whole, I’m afraid it’s rather bounced off of me. The structure and length is one issue: this is a very long book, and it spends almost its entire first third …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers”
TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 15
TV #46 of 2024: Classic Doctor Who, season 15 This is the halfway mark of Tom Baker’s record seven seasons as the Fourth Doctor, and despite his ongoing popularity in that role, it’s also unfortunately where the shine starts to come off. Behind the scenes, Graham Williams replaced Philip Hinchcliffe as producer, and the series …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 