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 …
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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 …
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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 #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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Book #99 of 2022: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub This novel is pretty good, but it’s a little short and takes too much of its limited space to actually get to the point. It’s a time travel story about a forty-year-old woman who discovers a way to revisit her sixteenth birthday, but she doesn’t …
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TV #28 of 2022: Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1 In terms of the other live-action Star Wars shows, this new release is somewhat better than The Book of Boba Fett yet substantially worse than The Mandalorian. I’m glad that the miniseries doesn’t solely revolve around the title figure and a 10-year-old Luke Skywalker on Tatooine as …
Book #98 of 2022: Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change by Danica Roem Danica Roem makes it all look easy. As the first openly transgender person to be elected to a U.S. state legislature, the Virginia delegate has faced considerable transphobia (and misplaced homophobia) lobbed against her, …
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