Book #107 of 2025: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on …
Tag Archives: two stars
Movie Review: Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (2002)
Movie #8 of 2025: Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers (2002) This TV movie aired four years after the end of Babylon 5, but I’ve chosen to watch it where it apparently falls in the continuity, sometime between the earlier film The River of Souls and the regular series finale. In truth, it could …
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Movie Review: Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998)
Movie #7 of 2025: Babylon 5: The River of Souls (1998) I’ve been watching my way through the last season of Babylon 5, and the viewing guide that I’m following situates this film (and the later one The Legend of the Rangers) just before the finale. Plotwise, that checks out, as the events here do …
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Book Review: A Burning in the Bones by Scott Reintgen
Book #98 of 2025: A Burning in the Bones by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #3) This loose fantasy trilogy has offered diminishing returns for me as a reader, and this final volume again fails to reach the propulsive heights of its survival horror debut. Instead we have more of the generic political intrigues from the second …
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Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt
Book #86 of 2025: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt (Virgin New Adventures #5) The first four books in this sequel series to Classic Doctor Who formed a loose quartet, and this next one purportedly starts a new trilogy. It’s pretty standalone, however, and ultimately one of those stories that I think …
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Book Review: The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson
Book #78 of 2025: The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson I’ll fully admit that I picked up this novel on the basis of its clever cover design resembling a Wikipedia article, and that site does in fact wind up impacting the plot, albeit not as much as I would have expected. But overall, …
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Book Review: Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister
Book #66 of 2025: Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister Two-out-of-five stars might seem a bit harsh for this novel, which is mostly more like a three-star read up until the end. Unfortunately, that closing section is saddled with a sequence of twists that are so inane, they wind up tanking the whole enterprise for …
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Book Review: Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown
Book #60 of 2025: Society of Lies by Lauren Ling Brown Overall a substandard academic thriller. The timeline unfolds across three different periods, but it’s only really interesting in the last one, in which a woman investigates the recent death of her sister. In alternating chapters, the other sections detail the dead girl’s activities as …
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Book Review: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Book #58 of 2025: The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir The main problem with this horror novel is that it’s simply far too short. The heroine’s escalating situation is relatively gripping, but the root cause is still pretty unexplained at the end and the conclusion is hugely underwhelming. While I’m sure there’s some cultural variation …
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Book Review: The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold
Book #54 of 2025: The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold The best part of this novel is the initial premise reflected in the title: after acid rain and other climate disasters have ravaged the planet and decimated the population, the teenage protagonist is the only person left working in her shop, which she …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 