Book #67 of 2026: The Elsewhere Express by Samantha Sotto Yambao In the abstract, this magical realist novel seems like it should have been right up my alley. Its premise of a wondrous train built on daydreams that whisks away people feeling hopeless in life isn’t so radically different from stories I’ve enjoyed like The …
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Book #66 of 2026: Nonesuch by Francis Spufford I really like the first half of this historical fantasy novel, in which an enterprising young British woman stumbles into some occult secrets in the early days of World War II. Despite the plot shenanigans, it’s a very character-driven piece, and our heroine is an interesting figure …
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Book #65 of 2026: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow This 2025 title is an expansion of several essays that activist-journalist Cory Doctorow had previously published on the subject, including the one where he originally coined the word “enshittification.” Although many people have since adopted that …
Movie #20 of 2026: Terminator Genisys (2015) [Note: this is an updated version of my review from 2016.] The fifth Terminator movie is a fun but deeply incoherent action spectacle, enjoyable only to the extent you can turn off the parts of your brain that obsess over plot holes or try to keep track of …
Book #64 of 2026: The Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang This fantasy novel starts out strong, gets legitimately great around midway through, but then unfortunately peters out in the end, without really resolving some of the larger plot threads that it introduces (which might be excusable for the launch of a series, but …
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Book #63 of 2026: In Lonely Lands by Victoria Goddard This is the sort of title that I almost hate to see released as a standalone item, because it’s too insubstantial to bear much scrutiny but could be perfectly situated as a part of a larger story collection. In this case, it’s a ‘tale of …
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Book #62 of 2026: 84K by Claire North This novel has an interesting dystopian setting, which reads sort of like Gattaca meets V for Vendetta meets some of the depressing ultra-capitalist futures from Black Mirror. The justice system has shifted all crimes to be punished with indemnity charges rather than jail time, meaning that even …
TV #19 of 2026: Matlock, season 2 The modern gender-swapped Matlock is a CBS legal procedural that loves to over-explain things to its audience, but I still rated the debut season at four-out-of-five stars for how propulsively fun the core premise can be at its best: an elderly lawyer infiltrating a law firm under an …
Movie #19 of 2026: Terminator Salvation (2009) A competent action spectacle that finally shows us John Connor in his element as a resistance soldier (though not yet a leader) in the post-apocalyptic future that the franchise had repeatedly warned us was looming. That’s a reasonable premise to explore and one that never plays like much …
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Book #61 of 2026: The Red Box by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #4) These 1930s mysteries remain solid enough as a sort of American pastiche of Agatha Christie, but so far they’ve failed to hit the heights that she could periodically achieve for me. The premise to this novel, for example, is initially interesting — …
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