Book #69 of 2024: The Bronzed Beasts by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #3) This is the seventh book I’ve read from YA author Roshani Chokshi, and while I’m glad I finally got around to finishing this particular trilogy, I think this is where I part ways with the writer for good, as her style …
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TV #16 of 2024: American Gods, season 2 I’m finally circling back around to this show almost six years after I saw season one, so my memory of it isn’t necessarily the clearest. (Luckily, I reread the original Neil Gaiman novel so many times as a theology-obsessed teenager that it’s burned pretty strongly into my …
TV #15 of 2024: Seinfeld, season 6 I don’t know if this qualifies as a hot take nearly three decades after the fact, but I personally think that Seinfeld is a stronger, funnier, and more distinctive sitcom when it leans away from its instincts for wacky zaniness and into the pedantically mundane (the opposing Kramer …
Book #68 of 2024: The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama As a follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 title Becoming, this 2022 release from former First Lady Michelle Obama isn’t nearly so noteworthy. Whereas that debut work was a powerful but straightforward memoir, this one blends the autobiographical genre with self-help, …
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Book #67 of 2024: When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown by Kenan Thompson An entertaining if disjointed memoir from the lifelong sketch comic, currently enjoying an unprecedented third decade at Saturday Night Live. I’ll repeat that: at 21 seasons on the show and counting, …
TV #14 of 2024: Shōgun, season 1 An exquisitely-rendered adaptation of the classic historical fiction novel about simmering political tensions and warfare in 17th-century feudal Japan. I can’t compare it to the 1980 NBC miniseries, which I haven’t seen, but I’m impressed with how closely this one hews to the original book in its plot …
Book #66 of 2024: Olivetti by Allie Millington I understand that when the premise of a book includes half of its chapters being narrated by a sentient typewriter, you kind of have to suspend a lot of your disbelief going into the thing. All the more so for the twelve-year-old other narrator and the overall …
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Book #65 of 2024: Dream Girl by Laura Lippman This 2021 thriller feels like a take on Stephen King’s Misery for the #metoo era, in which a bedridden white male writer is held accountable and ultimately held captive by an overbearing nurse figure for the sins of his past, oblivious to most of them though …
Book #64 of 2024: Book of Doom by John Peel (Diadem: Worlds of Magic #10) This is the last of the second wave of author John Peel’s Diadem novels, the four published from 2005 to 2006 under Llewellyn (following the original six volumes put out by Scholastic from 1997 to 1998). It also functions as …
Book #63 of 2024: Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #42) This is the last Hercule Poirot novel that Agatha Christie wrote, although it would be followed in publication by Curtain, which she’d completed decades earlier and kept locked away in a vault. It’s an odd story, with a rather obvious twist and …
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