Book #153 of 2022: Black Bird, Blue Road by Sofiya Pasternack Another outstanding middle-grade Jewish fantasy novel from #ownvoices author Sofiya Pasternack, who had previously dazzled me with her Anya and the Dragon debut. I love this one even more, from all the subtle authentic touches of lived-in Judaism and lesser-known mythological nods to the …
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Book #152 of 2022: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw With one bizarre caveat that I’ll get to below, this 2022 sequel novel to the 1993 stop-motion classic is a worthy follow-up and a great adventure in its own right. It’s certainly far better than I expected …
Movie #17 of 2022: Werewolf by Night (2022) This is a weird one! Marvel Studios dropped the hour-long “special presentation” on Disney+ today with very little fanfare, but it is apparently an official Marvel Cinematic Universe release. I say apparently because, like the Moon Knight miniseries earlier this year, there are exactly zero explicit canonical …
Book #151 of 2022: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #3) I am starting to feel about this no-longer-a-trilogy the way I do towards HBO’s Westworld program, where I continue to enjoy the premise and the general vibe — in this case, snarky queer interstellar necromancers — but am often too frustrated …
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Book #150 of 2022: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy A powerful and soul-baring memoir that completely earns its provocative title. I’m not familiar with Jennette McCurdy as an actress — her Nickelodeon hit iCarly launched when I was already a sophomore in college — but as a writer, she is immensely talented …
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Book #149 of 2022: The Night Fire by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #2) Another solid but unspectacular detective thriller, as so many volumes in this franchise have turned out to be. (At this point, I am almost reading less for the actual mysteries and more for the minor updates on Harry Bosch’s personal life, …
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TV #47 of 2022: The Shield, season 3 On some level, this season feels like it’s walking back many of the show’s recent plot developments, which is never a welcome sign. Aceveda has decided he’s not stepping down as precinct captain yet after all, Danny gets rehired and repartnered with Julien, Tavon is incapacitated and …
Movie #16 of 2022: What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2018) An interesting but somewhat scattered retrospective of Star Trek’s DS9 series, almost two decades after it went off the air. The actors are older (and for some, out of their familiar alien makeup), but they and the writers …
Book #148 of 2022: The Beginning by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #54) Well… Here we are. Sixteen months later, I have finally finished my full reread of the complete Animorphs saga, and am ready to review its final volume. Spoilers ahead, obviously. Thematically as a series, Animorphs has always been focused on the deep trauma …
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Book #147 of 2022: Babel: an Arcane History by R. F. Kuang An exquisitely slow-burning fuse of a novel, presenting the 1830s education of a young Chinese-born translator and eventual radical at the fictional Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford University. In the alternate fantasy universe of this setting, cognate pairs across languages have magical …
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