Movie #10 of 2023: Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road (2023) Disney+ has decided to label this festive Doctor Who outing as Special 4, which suggests a certain close continuity with the recent David Tennant / Catherine Tate trilogy that doesn’t really pan out in the episode itself. Instead, as expected, the script is …
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Book #135 of 2023: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #3) Romantasy is the buzzy new publishing genre these days, but for me personally, the fantasy elements always take priority over the romance ones in such a blended work. For that reason, I’ve grown less enamored of this particular trilogy as it’s …
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TV #61 of 2023: Animorphs, season 1 I’ll admit, I went into this 90s Nickelodeon adaptation rather skeptically. I’m a big fan of the original book series about kids turning into animals to fight an alien invasion, which I felt held up pretty well on a recent adult reread, whereas I remember giving up on …
TV #60 of 2023: Star Trek: Discovery, season 3 Discovery’s messy second season ended with the ship jumping far away from the familiar, and this next year quickly confirms that the crew have arrived in the distant future, 900 years after their original era directly preceding TOS. That’s a smart writing choice on a couple …
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Book #134 of 2023: Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan In 1990, reporter Ellen McGarrahan witnessed the state of Florida’s botched execution of death-row inmate Jesse Tafero. (The electric chair sparked and caught fire, ultimately taking seven minutes and three separate jolts to …
Book #133 of 2023: Third Girl by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #40) A fine mid-1960s title from author Agatha Christie, although at this point she’s clearly struggling to understand the contemporary counterculture youth movement. So there’s some silly depictions of nihilistic young people and their supposed drug habits throughout, and the mystery itself hinges on …
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Book #132 of 2023: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings A breezy survey of different ideas about the hereafter: both those of various world religions and the ones dreamed up for particular works of fiction, from Riverworld to Dead Like Me to San Junipero to …
Book #131 of 2023: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just …
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Movie #9 of 2023: Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023) In hindsight, I probably should have approached these three David Tennant/Catherine Tate Doctor Who specials as a single season of television, miniature though it’d be, rather than a trilogy of discrete movie equivalents. More even than the previous round of Tennant specials that followed series 4 …
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Book #130 of 2023: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh This sci-fi novel starts and ends pretty well, but it loses its way rather dramatically for a large section in-between. The early worldbuilding presents us with something like Ender’s Game (or perhaps Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse) by way of The Giver — a dystopian militarized society …
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