Movie #39 of 2026: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) This was the only Pirates of the Caribbean title that I hadn’t seen before, and having finally now done so, I can understand why Disney has been struggling to figure out how to continue the franchise ever since. Folks, this just …
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Book #154 of 2025: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on …
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Book #121 of 2025: Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy The premise of a broke ex-con getting hired by an anonymous benefactor to become a hitman has distinct potential, but the story that follows is unfortunately pretty dreadful throughout. Part of the problem is the obnoxious protagonist, who has no clear redeeming features that I can identify. …
Book #149 of 2024: The Life Impossible by Matt Haig This is a novel that starts off on the wrong foot, bites off way more than it can chew, and ultimately fails to develop any of its ideas into anything distinctive for the genre. It’s by far the worst of the five titles I’ve now …
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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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