Book #169 of 2019: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #1) This middle-grade fantasy debut is a fun ride with an engaging young character voice at its center. The plot can be a bit episodic, and the worldbuilding doesn’t go much deeper than bringing traditional Greek myths into the modern …
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Book #122 of 2019: Elantris by Brandon Sanderson Brandon Sanderson’s debut novel is full of the rich worldbuilding, intricate magical systems, and ballroom intrigue that have now made him a household name within the fantasy genre. Although there are some cracks that show on a reread and mark this as a first book — like …
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Book #251 of 2018: Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Princess Academy #1) Situated right on the boundary between middle-grade and young adult fiction, this little book is pretty delightful. It’s more grounded — and more feminist — than the fairy tale it at first resembles, and is filled with strong female friendships and the struggles …
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Book #236 of 2018: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #6) I love plenty of individual moments in this penultimate Harry Potter book, but if I’m being truly objective, its flashback-heavy narrative arc is a bit of a step down for the series. As usual author J. K. Rowling …
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Book #219 of 2018: Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs #3) There’s great potential in the idea of downloading human consciousness into different bodies, but none of the books in this loose trilogy have really lived up to it. This last novel feels especially disappointing, with its vengeance-obsessed protagonist coming across more like …
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Book #164 of 2018: 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill Joe Hill’s novels have been hit-or-miss for me, and it turns out that his short stories are much the same. There are some great pieces in this collection: the opening “Best New Horror” manages to be heartfelt, creepy, and darkly comic all at once, and …
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Book #130 of 2018: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Grief memoirs are tricky; they’re obviously cathartic to write, but can easily turn into a wallowing in loss that shuts out their readers. Author Joan Didion largely avoids that trap by focusing on the more mundane aspects of her husband’s death, centering this …
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Book #57 of 2018: Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother by Sonia Nazario This true-life illegal immigration story is initially quite powerful, but it loses a lot of focus once its subject has successfully crossed the southern border into the United States. Before that, it’s a heartbreaking …
Book #204 of 2017: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood This book was good, but I don’t think it quite lived up to its full potential as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey, especially given author Margaret Atwood’s bonafides. Presenting Odysseus’s bloody homecoming from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her murdered serving girls is …
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Book #120 of 2017: Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Mixed feelings on this one. I appreciate the overall message that economic principles can be applied to subjects far afield from the traditional bounds of the discipline, but the examples included in this …
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