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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TV #46 of 2022: Star Trek: Voyager, season 5 Another solid serving of 90s science-fiction, still satisfyingly tighter all around than this show’s early years. I’d call it a minor step down from the season before, however, which felt more ambitious with its introduction of Seven of Nine and her personal arc of reintegrating into …
Book #146 of 2022: Bastille vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians #6) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.] Middle-grade book series are odd, in that their release schedule often outpaces the age of their target audience. That’s particularly the case for the Alcatraz …
Book #145 of 2022: A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith This 1984 bestseller about a fictional family’s frontier history is required reading in many Florida schools, which is where I first encountered and absolutely loathed the title. But it has plenty of accolades and its fair share of adherents, and so I’ve always wanted …
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TV #45 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 8 I seem to have liked this season better when I watched it upon airing in 2018, given my review back then: “I don’t have much to say about this season of Bob’s Burgers that doesn’t apply to the show at large, but it remains impressively strong this …
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