Book #303 of 2020: Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #4) And so my 2020 comes to a close with another 1000+ page tome, the newest release in author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Stormlight Archive, which is increasingly inseparable from his even larger super-series linking together everything in the multiverse Cosmere setting. (Earlier …
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Book #301 of 2020: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro A fascinating deep dive into the decades-long career of the official who designed and built many of the parks and highways around New York City and state. Robert Moses was a visionary architect who revolutionized urban …
Book #300 of 2020: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue A heartbreakingly graphic depiction of an Irish plague ward during the 1918 influenza pandemic, told over a few days and mostly in one narrow chamber — a familiar constraint for Room author Emma Donoghue — for patients who are both infected and pregnant. …
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Book #299 of 2020: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #6) I’m not a big fan of the first half of this novel, in which the three protagonists — a returning Eustace, his classmate Jill, and a rather miserable creature named Puddleglum — are very nasty toward one another as …
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Book #298 of 2020: The Way Back by Gavriel Savit It’s probably not a good sign when a book that feels so tailor-made for me as a reader struggles to keep my attention throughout. I do love the first quarter or so of this story, which sees a pair of Jewish kids fleeing their nineteenth-century …
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Book #297 of 2020: The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White (Camelot Rising #2) I don’t have much to say about this sequel, other than that it’s the sort of middle volume that largely treads water for its trilogy en route to a hopefully stronger conclusion. The plot and character arcs don’t really progress any further …
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Book #296 of 2020: Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo Although I agree with nearly everything that author Ijeoma Oluo opines in these pages, I’ve found it somewhat lacking as a single cohesive argument. Her stated thesis, that white men are so privileged by American society that many of us …
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Book #295 of 2020: The Poet by Michael Connelly (Jack McAvoy #1) Author Michael Connelly’s fifth crime thriller, the first not to feature detective Harry Bosch, has been written to stand on its own, although it introduces concepts and characters that will later cross over with the main series. Our protagonist this time is investigative …
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Book #294 of 2020: Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack (Anya #2) Another fun middle-grade fantasy adventure, albeit somewhat messier in plot than the first novel with this Russian Jewish heroine. Still, the representation in this series remains charming and relatable, from the opening scene with Anya building a sukkah to her pride about …
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Book #293 of 2020: The Ever Cruel Kingdom by Rin Chupeco (The Never Tilting World #2) In the first volume of this YA fantasy duology, twin sisters raised on opposite sides of a stationary world each fall in love and get caught up in a propulsive plot that brings them and their partners hurtling together …
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