Book #94 of 2026: As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel This title offers an exquisite toxic lesbian horror-fantasy romance that is easily my top new read of 2026 so far. It’s everything that I wanted and didn’t quite get from last year’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, whose angsty vampires never …
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Movie #28 of 2026: Dogma (1999) This was the first movie that I ever saw in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse series, and together with the novel Good Omens, it represented a fairly seminal text for an agnostic humanist kid from a Jewish-Unitarian household in my heavily Christian town — a way of grappling with the …
Movie #17 of 2026: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) It’s rare for a sequel to so thoroughly surpass its predecessor, especially when the original piece is already as terrific as The Terminator (1984). This movie makes it all look easy, however. It nimbly channels the sci-fi action thrills of the first film, while effortlessly expanding …
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Book #52 of 2026: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1) This is my very favorite book, which I’ve now read four times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual rereading tradition, but I’m not exactly ruling it out, either.) That’s once in my …
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Movie #16 of 2026: The Terminator (1984) This action thriller launched a franchise and helped make household names out of star Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron, and even on an umpteenth rewatch, it’s very easy to see why. It’s a lean and propulsive feature, wrapping a great sci-fi exterior around a classic horror structure …
Book #40 of 2026: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a …
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Movie #6 of 2026: Rocky II (1979) Rocky (1976) was a genuine cultural sensation that deservedly launched its writer and lead actor Sylvester Stallone into Hollywood stardom. Expectations would thus have been pretty high for this sequel, in which he returns to those roles while also picking up directing duties, but in my opinion, it …
Movie #1 of 2026: The Matrix (1999) This sci-fi parable of an artificial reality that surrounds us all is just a stone-cold classic, instantly iconic in its confident vision and worldbuilding. The Matrix really was like no other movie to come before it, or even any that followed, including its own sequels. The script is …
Movie #20 of 2025: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Neither Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) nor Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) ever mentioned that the titular archaeologist’s father was a fellow antiquities scholar, but he fits seamlessly into the plot of this third film in a way that, for …
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Movie #17 of 2025: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) There are some movies that I think, if you see them when you’re young enough, you can never hope to be truly objective about their qualities. Such is the case with Raiders of the Lost Ark (retroactively retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the …
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