TV #23 of 2023: Six Feet Under, season 5 This final season perpetuates a lot of my existing frustrations with Six Feet Under, and as I watched, I expected that I’d probably give it the same two-star rating that I handed the previous year. The characters are all melodramatic and self-sabotaging far more often than …
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Book Review: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
Book #70 of 2023: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin The concept of an afterlife where everyone ages in reverse (until becoming a baby again and getting sent off to earth to be reborn as someone else) is neat, but I’m less sold on the rather generic plot that this novel provides as our lens into that …
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Book Review: My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron
Book #69 of 2023: My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron This YA novel reimagines Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with both Henry Jekyll and the narrator Gabriel Utterson cast as queer Black teens, whilst retaining the Victorian London setting of the gothic original. …
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TV Review: Star Wars: Visions, season 2
TV #22 of 2023: Star Wars: Visions, season 2 I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I like this second year of the experimental Star Wars anthology, given how lukewarm I felt towards the first season. As before, these episodes are short anime films, each from a different production studio, handed free reign to remix and …
Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
Movie #4 of 2023: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) Another rollicking cosmic thrill ride, and one that doubles as an apparent farewell to this creative corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Never say never where comic book characters are concerned, but with visionary director James Gunn now working for the DC competition, this …
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Book Review: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
Book #68 of 2023: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1) [Updated version of my review from 4/23/2020] I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the …
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Book Review: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix
Book #67 of 2023: Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories by Garth Nix Overall I would say that this book of short fiction — most but not all of it situated in either fantasy or an adjacent genre — is a success. The strongest piece is probably the novella that …
TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 4
TV #21 of 2023: Gilmore Girls, season 4 I think this is where Gilmore Girls turns a corner for me in terms of my appreciation versus enjoyment of the characters and the ongoing slice-of-life narrative around them. It remains a strong series, and this year in particular does a fine job of navigating two big …
TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 6
TV #20 of 2023: Classic Doctor Who, season 6 The end of an era for the show, in several different ways. This 1968-1969 run is the final year to be aired in black-and-white, and from a modern perspective, it contains the last episodes that are missing from the BBC archives, with only the audio recordings …
Book Review: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
Book #66 of 2023: The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie Early on, this novel carries some of the wistfully philosophical vibes of author Agatha Christie’s pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, and although that tone is dropped as the story goes along, I think it still might have worked better if it had been published under a …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 