Book #89 of 2024: The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown I love the initial premise of this novel, and I still feel like many of its subsequent elements have some potential charm to them. But the execution is beyond abysmal, beginning with the heroine with a severe case of written-by-a-man-itis: “She caught her reflection …
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Book #76 of 2024: Book of Games by John Peel (Diadem #12) This novel is one of two that author John Peel self-published (in a single bound volume) to close out his long-running Diadem fantasy saga, but I really wish he hadn’t bothered. It’s an embarrassingly poor effort, riddled with typos, repetitive wording, and rather …
Book #37 of 2024: West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman I always feel a little bad about giving a book my lowest rating, but this pretentious postmodern whodunnit irked me for most of the way through and then ended even worse than it began. The basic premise is pretty standard for the genre: a detective …
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Book #125 of 2023: Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first credited author of this book.] This audiobook production is set within Brandon Sanderson’s existing Stephen Leeds / Legion trilogy, and an afterword makes it clear that he really …
TV #27 of 2022: Killing Eve, season 4 I gave the first year of this show four-out-of-five stars, even while worrying how the writing “seems to revel in ambiguity, throwing out potential explanations and character motivations at times but seldom following through to confirm or reject exactly why anything is happening. As a result, much …
Book #349 of 2021: The First Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #1) I went into my adult reread of this choose-your-own-adventure Animorphs title with pretty low expectations, and yet it somehow still managed to disappoint. Who exactly is the audience here? The tone is more juvenile than the main novels, with lots of …
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Book #336 of 2021: The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer Let me start with what I like about this title, as that will be a shorter list. It is #ownvoices for both Judaism and chronic fatigue, and while I can’t speak to the authentic portrayal of the latter, seeing the former means an awful lot …
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Book #321 of 2021: The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #4) This 1980 sci-fi finale is honestly worse than the miserable third volume, although it picks up slightly for its closing stretch, in which the tower at the headwaters of the river is finally reached and breached. Not that that goal has ever …
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Book #243 of 2021: Zero K by Don DeLillo Theoretically, this is the story of a man saying goodbye to his ailing stepmother before she undergoes assisted suicide and cryogenic freezing (in the hope of being reawakened and cured at some unknown future date), and then later to his father when he follows in her …
Book #96 of 2021: The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams This story starts off on the wrong foot — taking the first 4% to wax rhapsodic about the soul of dictionaries before we even meet a single character — and somehow grows worse from there. It’s a split timeline, with one lexicographer protagonist in Victorian …
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