Book #114 of 2023: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid I suppose it says something about the overall quality of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s extended saga of fictional twentieth-century celebrities that this 2021 novel (the third of four so far, though they are so discrete that they can really be read in any order) is …
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Book #113 of 2023: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland I taught a few undergraduate sociolinguistics courses when I was in grad school, and if this book had been available back then, I could see myself including a few of its chapters as assigned reading. It’s an engaging …
Book #112 of 2023: The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland A fascinating work of historical fiction about the Richmond Theatre fire, a now-obscure tragedy that in 1811 became our young nation’s first national news story about an event of such mass casualties. 72 people died in the flames, including the sitting governor of …
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TV #51 of 2023: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2 The cast still does a fine job emoting with the material they’re given in this second season of Star Trek: Discovery, but there aren’t enough smaller personal moments to convincingly sell the relationships before they wind up in crisis. It also doesn’t help that I like …
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Movie #6 of 2023: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023) After ten smash albums over the past seventeen years — roughly half her life to date — the country-turned-pop artist Taylor Swift has amassed a body of work well worthy of retrospective. That’s the motivation behind her recent Eras tour, and so too this concert …
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Book #111 of 2023: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #10) I always find it somewhat absurd when one of author Agatha Christie’s detective characters simply happens to stumble over a murder, but this premise has to be in the running for among her most ludicrous. Whilst on vacation, Miss Marple talks to …
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Book #110 of 2023: Holly by Stephen King This is the sixth Stephen King story to feature private investigator Holly Gibney, following the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes; Finders Keepers; End of Watch), the novel The Outsider, and the novella If It Bleeds. The previous three entries all found that protagonist and her friends facing …
Book #109 of 2023: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the fourth and final ‘Secret Project’ release from author Brandon Sanderson, representing the novels he wrote in his spare time during the early COVID-19 pandemic and later dramatically unveiled via a record-setting Kickstarter for their …
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TV #50 of 2023: Ahsoka, season 1 This latest Star Wars property is solidly mid-tier for the franchise. I don’t want to downplay that: it’s still really cool that we’re getting big-budget live-action Star Wars shows at all, and this one is better than, say, the latest season of The Mandalorian in terms of providing …
Book #108 of 2023: Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel A short but scathing call-out of author David Baddiel’s fellow progressive-leaning individuals for too often ignoring the problem of antisemitism: either not noticing it at all or downplaying its impact and the importance of challenging it compared to other bigotries. If you are a non-Jewish …
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