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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Book #21 of 2023: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean This is certainly a distinctive fantasy novel, but it’s not one that entirely works for me in execution. Part of the problem is the split timeline, alternating between the heroine’s experiences leading up to her separation from her family and her subsequent life on the …
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Book #20 of 2023: How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This is far from my favorite Grady Hendrix novel, but I do think it’s closer in quality to his typical output than to Horrorstör, the only title I’ve previously rated lower than four stars. A lot of this …
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Book #19 of 2023: Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke An interesting little popular science book, but not nearly as funny as I was expecting it to be from the title. This is a cultural history of the human backside, focusing specifically on our conceptions of the female form and how they’ve generally been racialized …
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Book #18 of 2023: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #2) Overall a three-star read for me, and a marked step down from its predecessor. I actually do like the middle of this book — the slowest part of many novels — when, as promised by the title, the protagonist and her companions invoke …
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