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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard”
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 …
Continue reading “Book Review: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia”
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 — …
Continue reading “Book Review: Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber”
Book #99 of 2024: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie Interesting yet somewhat rambling, though short enough overall that that discursiveness doesn’t bother me too much. I’ve never read any Salman Rushdie before, but I was attracted to this title by the story behind it, which I saw the author describe on …
Continue reading “Book Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie”
Book #98 of 2024: Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook A fine but ultimately forgettable Doctor Who adventure. I had high hopes for this project as the first novel to feature Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, but there really isn’t much here that feels distinctive to his particular incarnation of that regenerating alien hero (like …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook”
Book #97 of 2024: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #12) More or less the end of author Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, published posthumously in 1976 although written and set several decades beforehand. (It would be followed by one final short story anthology a few years later, collecting tales …
Continue reading “Book Review: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more