TV #32 of 2022: The Shield, season 2 The same bitterly funny anti-cop police drama, back for a follow-up round of continued corruption, complicity, and arrogant ignorance. I’d rate this season as a slight step down from the debut, but mainly only because as great as all that remains, the series has already staked out …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
TV Review: Stranger Things, season 4
TV #31 of 2022: Stranger Things, season 4 Late-stage Stranger Things has a character problem, in that there are simply too many of them at this point for the narrative to function remotely efficiently. Even with the cast (somewhat clumsily) split into four or five geographically separate storylines, this season often finds six or more …
TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 1
TV #30 of 2022: Abbott Elementary, season 1 A really strong and funny sitcom debut! I have a couple critiques that are holding me back from an utterly glowing five-star review, but this mockumentary series about teachers at an underfunded, majority-Black, inner-city Philadelphia school is generally sweet and hilarious alike. It also feels fresh in …
Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Book #104 of 2022: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica This Argentinian novel is a stomach-churning dark satire, presenting a dystopian future where all animals have caught a virus making them poisonous for human consumption and people have resorted to widespread cannibalism in order to satisfy their protein needs. Some individuals give up their …
Continue reading “Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica”
Book Review: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Book #103 of 2022: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami First published in 1999 (or 2003, for the English translation), this controversial thriller posits a dystopian Japan where school classes of fifteen-year-olds, selected by random lottery, are forced to fight one another to the death each year. The children are kidnapped, locked into metal collars lined …
Continue reading “Book Review: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami”
TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 5
TV #29 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 5 Another strong year of Bob’s Burgers, albeit maybe a slight step down from the one before, if only because I don’t know that I’d include any of these individual episodes on an all-time favorites list. But they generally remain funny and confident explorations of characters, with the …
Book Review: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke
Book #102 of 2022: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke Author Katherine Locke nails the tense and paranoid atmosphere in this fictionalized account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (a student-led uprising against Soviet control that ultimately failed, although the novel doesn’t track the conflict all the way to its bitter end). And as ever …
Continue reading “Book Review: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke”
Book Review: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
Book #101 of 2022: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #19) It was interesting to read this novel soon after watching the first season of Bosch: Legacy, which adapted both of its main plotlines: the quest to find a possible heir to dying billionaire Whitney Vance and the hunt for a …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly”
Book Review: The Resistance by K. A. Applegate
Book #100 of 2022: The Resistance by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #47) Although the Animorphs books are short, they tend to be rich in heavy and complicated thematic material, which is why my reviews discussing them often wind up quite extensive. But there’s honestly not much to say about this one. The plot is half …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Resistance by K. A. Applegate”
Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Movie #11 of 2022: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) This is generally another fun Marvel movie, but it’s one that feels frustratingly both overstuffed and understaffed. True to its title, there is a lot of universe-hopping, yet only to realities we’ve never seen before (after Spider-Man: No Way Home, for all its …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 