Book #63 of 2022: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd A fun but very trope-heavy research adventure, sort of like The Historian meets The Shadow of the Wind by way of Secret History. The heroine’s estranged father dies suddenly, and she finds an old highway map among his possessions that seems worthless yet for some reason …
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Book #62 of 2022: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis Charmingly strange and surprisingly modern for a novel first published in 1881 Brazil, this story details the life of a fictional dead man from his own perspective, written “with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy” as he lies …
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TV #16 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 3 This animated family sitcom has been getting better year over year, and this third season produces what I’d call its first all-time classic episode, Mother Daughter Laser Razor. No other half-hour in this run quite matches that one’s fantastic blend of action, comedy, and character growth, but …
Book #61 of 2022: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen #1) This 1999 debut is an incredibly dense high fantasy adventure that I can’t honestly say I’ve enjoyed too much. Author Steven Erikson clearly has an epic scope in mind for this saga, but this first thick tome — …
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Movie #8 of 2022: Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils (2022) I’ve been treating standalone TV events like this as movies in my reviews, but that does feel a little silly for a title that, at just 48 minutes long, is the shortest special of modern Doctor Who thus far. I liked it a …
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Book #60 of 2022: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel This sci-fi novel starts off pretty disjointedly, repeatedly jumping ahead by literal centuries (1912, 2020, 2203) to no immediately discernible purpose or connection between successive protagonists. If not for the overall shortness of the volume and for my abiding affection towards author Emily …
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Book #59 of 2022: Crooked House by Agatha Christie This 1949 standalone novel is one of the more excellent Agatha Christie mysteries, with a tight plot, a plethora of solid suspects, and a fiendishly distinctive — though totally fair — ultimate solution to its puzzle. I think it helps that the protagonist is not one …
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Book #58 of 2022: The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #2) Here is the nicest thing I can say about this second Animorphs choose-your-own-adventure title: it is better than the first one. (It’s not a sequel, though: the “you” before was another kid who was wandering through the abandoned construction site of …
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TV #15 of 2022: Scandal, season 6 This penultimate outing starts with a bang, and winds up structuring its entire year a bit like a whodunnit mystery. For a while, the show is almost hypnotically-recursive, returning Rashomon-like to Election Night again and again, each time filling in yet another person’s perspective along with some additional …
Book #57 of 2022: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon As a satire, this 1966 novel about an apparent conspiracy surrounding an illegal alternate postal system is sporadically effective, with a handful of amusing developments and witty turns-of-phrase. As pretty much anything else, it’s not really what I’m looking for in a story. …
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