Book #83 of 2023: Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory by Jenna Katerin Moran I had complicated feelings about the intense weirdness of author Jenna Katerin Moran’s novels Fable of the Swan and The Night-Bird’s Feather, but in each case, I gradually came around to the volume’s charms and felt like it …
Tag Archives: books written in 2015
Book Review: Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard
Book #29 of 2023: Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard (Carter & Lovecraft #1) The vibes of this fantasy noir, in which a private investigator learns that H. P. Lovecraft actually experienced some of the cosmic horrors he wrote about and gets caught up in a plot with the writer’s descendant, are top-notch. As …
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Book Review: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
Book #171 of 2022: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #2 / Mistborn #5) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] As I mentioned in my review of that previous title, this era of the Mistborn series grew out of a writing exercise that author Brandon Sanderson liked enough to expand …
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Book Review: The Crossing by Michael Connelly
Book #89 of 2022: The Crossing by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #18) This is one of the better Harry Bosch titles I’ve read, which makes me particularly excited that it’s reportedly going to be the broad basis for the upcoming second season of Bosch: Legacy, despite how the TV canon has diverged from the novels. …
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Book Review: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
Book #53 of 2022: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy This 2015 title offers a decent crash-course on the history of the region that became today’s country of Ukraine, although author Serhii Plokhy spends a bit too much time on the events of early eras, which in addition to their …
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Book Review: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black
Book #257 of 2021: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black This standalone YA fantasy novel hasn’t completely won me over, but I like it a lot more than author Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince, which has a somewhat similar premise of fairyland intrigue. (The central romance here, for instance, strikes me as …
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Book Review: Jews Versus Zombies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene
Book #216 of 2021: Jews Versus Zombies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene I like this short story collection marginally better than its sister volume on extraterrestrials — my individual ratings average to 3.25 out of five stars this time, an improvement on my previous 2.5 — but it’s still a decidedly mixed bag …
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Book Review: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman
Book #135 of 2021: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman This novella is a sorrowful look at an elderly man gradually losing his memories to dementia, but it’s a bit too short and disjointed to be entirely effective. The whole idea is that he’s slipping between past and …
Book Review: Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
Book #128 of 2021: Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant (Rolling in the Deep #1) A short but effective creature feature, following a deep-sea expedition looking to capture or manufacture footage of mermaids for a schlocky TV production. The last thing they expect is to find the real animals who inspired the myths, nor …
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Book Review: Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell
Book #113 of 2021: Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell A quintessential deep dive into a narrow topic, this 2015 book on Abraham Lincoln’s relationships with various Jewish Americans contains a lot of interesting information not often included in accounts of his life, but also a fair bit …
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