Book #85 of 2024: A Door in the Dark by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #1) This YA fantasy novel grows on me as it goes along, but the first quarter or so of the text could really have been tightened up. That’s how long it takes for the story to spring its basic premise, introduced in …
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Book #84 of 2024: Happy Place by Emily Henry I don’t read a ton of romance novels, but author Emily Henry’s Book Lovers was such a pleasant surprise for me that I decided to check out this next title of hers as well. Unfortunately, I haven’t liked it nearly as much in either its premise …
Book #83 of 2024: The Day Tripper by James Goodhand An interesting time-travel premise bogged down by an unlikable protagonist and a few unresolved logistical issues. Following a traumatic head injury, our hero begins bouncing around his personal timeline, waking up each morning at some new point in his future — never earlier than when …
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Book #82 of 2024: Jhereg by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #1) Pretty decent for an authorial debut, though it’s heavier on infodumping exposition than it needs to be, especially with the protagonist repeatedly learning something that he probably should have already known as a denizen of this particular fantasy world. (On the other hand, the …
Movie #14 of 2024: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Prequels are tricky creatures, by design working towards an ending that the audience already knows. The ones that work best tend to focus not on lining up the logistics of the original piece, but rather a) telling compelling new stories that happen to occur earlier …
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TV #25 of 2024: Star Trek: Discovery, season 5 In theory, the impulse to revisit the ancient race of alien progenitors from a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a fine one for the modern franchise to explore (if sort of an odd fit for Discovery, which began as a direct TOS …
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Book #81 of 2024: Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose In an afterword to this novel, author Jeneva Rose discusses how she set the action in her own small hometown, even revisiting her old childhood house for research, since she was using it as the home for the story’s fictional family as …
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Movie #13 of 2024: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) This remains the very best action movie I’ve ever seen, although one that’s remarkable for plenty of other reasons besides. It would be reductive to describe the film as one long car chase, since part of its strength rests in how the script elegantly factors in …
Book #80 of 2024: Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #1) Two-out-of-five stars, which is the lowest I’ve rated any of the dozen or so books that I’ve read by author Victoria Goddard thus far. I’m heartened that this 2016 novel is one of her earlier works, because it means I know firsthand …
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Book #79 of 2024: You Like It Darker by Stephen King A new collection of short fiction from horror master Stephen King, five entries of which are brand-new for this volume and seven of which have previously appeared elsewhere. (Personally, for instance, I’d already read “The Turbulence Expert” in the King-edited anthology Flight or Fright …
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