Book #38 of 2026: Mars by Ben Bova This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it …
Tag Archives: fiction
Book Review: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick
Book #37 of 2026: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick (Virgin New Adventures #12) This Doctor Who novel is so bad that it had me looking back over previous stories I’ve rated as three-out-of-five stars, wondering if I’d been too harsh on them. It’s both overstuffed and incredibly disjointed, offering not so much a …
Continue reading “Book Review: Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick”
Book Review: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire
Book #36 of 2026: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #11) At this point, the Wayward Children fantasy series has established a clear alternating pattern: the even-numbered novellas contain prequel stories about troubled young characters stumbling into other worlds that offer a respite from their ordinary lives alongside unexpected new …
Continue reading “Book Review: Through Gates of Garnet and Gold by Seanan McGuire”
Book Review: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth
Book #35 of 2026: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth I like the glimpses we get throughout this novel of its story-within-a-story, a fantasy series called The Fallen Children that’s supposedly bigger than Harry Potter. (Perhaps, like Simon Snow, it will someday be spun off on its own.) The further wrinkle that its pseudonymous …
Continue reading “Book Review: Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth”
Book Review: UnWorld by Jayson Greene
Book #34 of 2026: UnWorld by Jayson Greene In the not-too-distant future of this novella, people can create digital copies of themselves to serve as a backstop for their fallible physical memories. Generally the uploaded consciousness stays close to the human original, but Ana’s has asked to be set free following the death by apparent …
Book Review: Behooved by M. Stevenson
Book #33 of 2026: Behooved by M. Stevenson The punny premise that lends this romantasy novel its title doesn’t technically spring until almost a quarter of the way through the text, which is late enough that I normally wouldn’t mention it in a review. But since the publisher’s description gives it away anyway, and it …
Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen
Book #32 of 2026: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7) I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. …
Continue reading “Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen”
Book Review: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon
Book #31 of 2026: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science #1) This 2024 title unfortunately hasn’t hit the mark for me, much as I love author Kate McKinnon’s work on Saturday Night Live. The …
Book Review: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine
Book #30 of 2026: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine An entertaining blend of Taylor Jenkins Reid with Ruth Ware, in which a down-on-her-luck publishing editor, expecting to soon be fired, is instead tasked with handling the upcoming tell-all memoir from a beloved but secretive celebrity chef. In this novel Maria Capello is a …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine”
Book Review: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik
Book #29 of 2026: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and …
Continue reading “Book Review: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 