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 …
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Book Review: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson
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 Review: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard
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 Review: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia
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 Review: The Acolyte, season 1
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 Review: Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber
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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Book Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
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 …
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Book Review: Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook
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 …
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Book Review: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie
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 …
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Book Review: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Book #96 of 2024: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley The publisher’s description of this novel calls it “a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all.” I would contend that it is none of …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 