Book #108 of 2024: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie This Agatha Christie collection, published posthumously in 1979, turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, as all nine of its assembled stories are ones that had been previously collected in decades past: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories …
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Book #107 of 2024: The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton This 2024 sci-fi novel develops into a cute queer hopepunk piece by the end, but it takes some time to get there and makes a lot of strange choices along the way. I’ve found it difficult to remember that the main characters are supposed …
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Book #106 of 2024: Second Sight by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #4) This fourth Mindwarp novel follows the same general structure as the first three: another kid in this fictional Wisconsin town turns thirteen, discovers they have special powers, and then quickly has to use them to avoid falling into the clutches of a shapeshifting alien …
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Book #105 of 2024: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin While not quite as strong as author Gabrielle Zevin’s recent bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this 2014 title is the first of the three books I’ve now read from her backlist that clearly demonstrates her creative talents growing in that …
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Book #104 of 2024: Teckla by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #3) Another crisis with antihero Vladimir Taltos, sorcerer-assassin and crime boss of his local fantasy city. This third adventure takes place soon after book one (the second volume being a prequel), and offers probably the most straightforward plot yet: the protagonist’s wife has gotten involved …
Book #103 of 2024: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is not The Way of Kings, the debut novel in the series The Stormlight Archive that author Brandon Sanderson published in 2010. It’s rather his initial attempt at telling a story …
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Book #102 of 2024: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #2) I’m still not loving the Greenwing & Dart sub-series nearly as much as the other books I’ve read in author Victoria Goddard’s broader Nine Worlds saga, but this second volume is a marked improvement over the first. Taking place only a …
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Book #101 of 2024: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia A quintessential mixed-bag anthology. There are some legitimately great short stories in here, and if I assigned a rating to each of the 33 entries and took their average, I suspect I would wind up at a mean value of three-out-of-five-stars or so. At their …
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TV #32 of 2024: The Acolyte, season 1 Despite a few unfortunate structural flaws, this is easily in the top tier of live-action Star Wars shows — which is to say, a step below Andor but about on par with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, while far more confident and engaging than The …
Book #100 of 2024: Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber I wouldn’t ordinarily rate and review a puzzle book like this, but this one is special enough that it seems worthwhile to highlight its unexpected strengths. It’s not just a collection of those logic puzzles that are solved with the conventional square grids — …
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