Book #79 of 2022: Archer’s Goon by Diana Wynne Jones This 1984 sci-fi / fantasy novel, which I read and reread countless times as a child and is apparently one of Neil Gaiman’s favorites as well, opens with an irresistible premise: a hulking enforcer camps out in the thirteen-year-old hero’s kitchen, saying his mysterious employer …
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Book #78 of 2022: The Humans by Matt Haig This 2013 novel is one part a Douglas Adams-esque assortment of absurdist reflections on humanity, and one part a K-PAX plot of someone who looks like a regular human claiming to actually be an alien, to everyone’s reasonable disbelief. Yet whereas that latter title — which …
Book #77 of 2022: The Burning Room by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #17) Another perfectly competent police procedural with detective Harry Bosch, looking into a pair of cold cases from decades back: a shooting recently upgraded to a homicide after the victim finally succumbed to his injuries and the bullet could be extracted from his …
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TV #19 of 2022: Saturday Night Live, season 47 This is the fifth season of SNL in a row that I’ve watched straight through as it aired, so at this point I feel pretty confident in my ability to rate a given span against the program’s typical output. So, what was different for the long-running …
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Book #76 of 2022: The Test by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #43) This Animorphs novel is a direct sequel to ghostwriter Ellen Geroux’s earlier story #33 The Illusion, in which Tobias gets tortured by the unhinged sub-visser “Taylor.” The same antagonist is back for this tale, quickly recapturing the hawk boy after he makes the …
Book #75 of 2022: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #3) I’m still enjoying this alternate-history sci-fi series about the ramifications of a natural disaster accelerating the space program as humanity in the mid-twentieth century seeks a way to get most of the population off-planet, but I consider this third volume to …
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Book #74 of 2022: Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves by Meg Long The protagonist of this YA novel reminds me strongly of Katniss Everdeen: a teen girl, cold and toughened beyond her years, forced to enter into a deadly spectacle where she puts her wilderness survival skills to good use and gradually comes to …
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Book #73 of 2022: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross (The Laundry Files #1) This 2004 publication — which in my edition includes the novel The Atrocity Archive followed by a sequel novella “The Concrete Jungle” — introduces the Laundry, a secret British intelligence division dealing with magic and related otherworldly threats. It’s urban fantasy, …
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Book #72 of 2022: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of …
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Book #71 of 2022: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #4) As far as mystery hooks go, it’s hard to beat an ad being placed in a sleepy village newspaper, politely informing its readers of the place and time of an upcoming murder — where sure enough, someone winds up killed and …
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