Book #28 of 2023: The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, in recognition of the fact that I’m not in the target audience for this middle-grade horror/fantasy novel, despite how I often enjoy that genre regardless, or how much I love author Joseph Fink’s unrelated Welcome to Night Vale podcast and books. …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink”
TV #7 of 2023: Six Feet Under, season 1 So far, I’m pretty ambivalent about this early aughts HBO drama about a family who own and run an independent funeral home. A lot of the personal arcs and relationships are interesting, especially given how the show starts (fittingly enough) with a loss that reconfigures the …
Book #27 of 2023: Exiles by Jane Harper (Aaron Falk #3) This is the third and apparently final novel to feature Australian detective Aaron Falk, but oddly, I think I would have liked it better if it had been a standalone story about somebody else. By bringing back a police protagonist who’s already solved murders …
TV #6 of 2023: Gilmore Girls, season 2 Another strong outing of this multigenerational family drama, with more cracks evident between ‘best friends’ Lorelai and her daughter Rory as the latter navigates her junior year of high school. The storytelling all-around feels more competent than in the debut run, and I appreciate the early course-correction …
Book #26 of 2023: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks The modern ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre was already in full swing in 2006 when this book made its rather curious debut, with the associated tropes well-known enough to be mined for comedy in films like Shaun of the Dead …
Continue reading “Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks”
Book #25 of 2023: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (The Midsolar Murders #1) I really dig the initial premise of this story, which is that the heroine somehow has the bad luck to repeatedly find herself at the scene of one murder after another. (She’s not a killer, to be clear, even though law enforcement …
Continue reading “Book Review: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty”
Book #24 of 2023: The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder I remember checking out this book from the library on multiple occasions as a kid, but upon belatedly getting around to an adult reread, I’m disappointed to report that it seems an utterly unremarkable story. The setting is the most generic medieval fantasy land, with …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder”
Book #23 of 2023: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #6) This final Earthsea volume is fine, but it hasn’t grabbed me like the series can at its best. We again find author Ursula K. Le Guin in course-correction mode, and if books 4 and 5 were primarily intended to rectify and …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin”
Book #22 of 2023: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #8) A most delightful little mystery. I enjoy how author Agatha Christie plays with her usual formulae in this one, while still treating readers fairly with the facts and sticking firmly within the grand whodunnit tradition. As suggested by the novel’s rather exclamatory …
Continue reading “Book Review: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie”
Movie #2 of 2023: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) Perhaps inevitably, this sequel is not as strong as its rather extraordinary 2018 predecessor. But it nears that level of quality at times, and might well be the best possible follow-up given the awful loss of original star Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer in the intervening …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more