Book #72 of 2023: Swamp Story by Dave Barry This comic novel fits squarely in the ‘zany Florida’ genre popularized by writers like Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, or indeed, author Dave Barry himself. If you like such stories of madcap plots colliding against a backdrop of alligators, rednecks, treasure hunters, corrupt politicians, and other Sunshine …
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TV Review: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5
TV #27 of 2023: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5 I’m not a big fan of the decision to pepper this final season with flash-forward scenes to decades in the future, where we learn that the titular comedienne — and her manager! — will eventually achieve their dream of striking it big in showbusiness. For …
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TV Review: The Shield, season 6
TV #26 of 2023: The Shield, season 6 This season of The Shield is a bit scattered compared to the ones before it. It’s initially exciting to see that Forest Whitaker is sticking around past his initial one-year-arc, given how thrilling the Kavanaugh investigation of Mackey has been, but then after a couple episodes, he’s …
Book Review: Marley by Jon Clinch
Book #71 of 2023: Marley by Jon Clinch Jacob Marley is a bit of a blank slate in the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol — which is not a fault; he serves his purpose in the narrative there most admirably — and so he represents a logical candidate for this sort of treatment by …
TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 48
TV #25 of 2023: Saturday Night Live, season 48 I’m a little behind on this review, since I only belatedly found out that the venerable sketch-comedy series had officially canceled its remaining episodes of this production batch due to the ongoing writers’ strike, rather than postponing them indefinitely. Strictly speaking, then, this was the 16th …
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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 13
TV #24 of 2023: Bob’s Burgers, season 13 As usual, this family cartoon is again riding the bubble between a three- and a four-star program for me. I’ll round up on this occasion, because even though I don’t have much new critical insight to offer, enough of these individual episodes seem to stand out as …
TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 5
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 …
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 …
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