Happy New Year's Eve! In honor of the coming new year, I'm going to- with no muss and no fuss (and no photos, too!)- give you fifteen short posts recommending fifteen things I enjoyed over the past year. And away we go! I've been enjoying the Bosch detective series on Amazon Prime these past years, so it was a treat to finally try out one of Michael Connelly's original Bosch novels, The Black Echo. I actually listened to the novel, which was a recently-produced special edition featuring Titus Welliver, who plays Harry Bosch in the series, narrating the book. It's the first novel in the series ..read more

Been doing some classic Ross MacDonald detective fiction lately, and though some are way too convoluted for my taste, if you just sit back and let them wash over you they aren't bad and you can see why they have a good reputation. All the ones I've read were part of MacDonald's Lew Archer series, including The Wycherley Woman, Sleeping Beauty, and The Blue Hammer (the last in the series). The first one I mentioned was actually quite clever, plot-wise (and I was able to follow it!), but generally all the Archers are worth your time ..read more

With a Mind To Kill, the latest James Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz, is set immediately after Ian Fleming's final Bond novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, and I liked it a lot. Bond is sent to Russia to confront the generals and doctors who had previously brainwashed him into almost killing his boss, M, in Golden Gun. It's a good spy story, with moody, effective descriptions of daily Soviet life in the 60's. I hope Horowitz will write a few more Bonds here and there ..read more

Courtesy of Audible (Amazon's audiobook service), I recently discovered Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, and they are nothing like the Dean Martin/swinging 60's movie series of years past. These are serious spy thrillers, with thoughtful characterizations, especially of the main character. Check out the first one, Death of a Citizen, and see if you agree. The Wrecking Crew was another good one. I'm looking forward to listening to a lot more entries of this long-running series in 2023 ..read more

I still read graphic novels and comics sometimes, and I recently caught up with a popular series of a couple of decades ago when I enjoyed a collection of the earliest issues of The Thunderbolts, a superhero series with a twist (and it's better if I don't say more) that debuted in the late 1990's and remains popular today. Check out any of the various trade paperbacks collecting the early issues of this mainstream but offbeat series and enjoy, then you can see what you'll think of the upcoming Marvel Studios television adaptation coming soon to Disney ..read more

I liked Tana French's The Searcher, so more recently I dived into her novel The Witch Elm. Various cousins hang out with their uncle at his welcoming home, and one day a body is found in his yard... and it's been hidden there a while, in the tree of the title, in fact. Is the body tied to something in the cousins' or uncle's past? The journey to find out is quite involving, but the destination and solution are good, too ..read more

As well as discovering The Thunderbolts (mentioned somewhere above), I also recently caught up with a another popular comic book series of a couple of decades ago when I enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, The Complete Collection, Volumes 1 to 3. A group of teens discovers that their parents are basically gangsters and super villains so they, well, run away from them. But then they confront them. It's good, mainstream comics with an edge and I hope my library soon gets volume 4 ..read more

The Banshees of Inisherin, now on HBO (or HBO Max, in my case) after a brief theatrical run, is well worth your time. But this tale of two friends who are having a bit of a crisis, is not the light, whimsical tale the trailers and ads promised. The movie, set in 1920's Ireland, is literate, allegorical, complex, violent, and frequently tragic. It's a good movie, though, and worth talking about. Just be aware of what you're getting if you tune in ..read more

Stephen King's Fairy Tale pushes 600 pages, and in a genre I don't read very often, but I tore through it pretty quickly.  I found the non-fairy tale part set in our world (encompassing about the first 200 pages) as good as the fantasy story that eventually kicks in. But I thought the whole thing, a story of a boy and his dog and how they try to save a dying kingdom, was pretty entertaining reading from beginning to end ..read more

While Star Wars often delivers excellent all-ages entertainment, the new series Andor (now streaming on Disney+) is unapologetically Star Wars for adults. The plots are complex so you need to pay attention, and we really see the brutality and moral compromises of war. Surprisingly, Star Wars has demonstrated that it is flexible enough to accommodate the more nuanced fare presented here ..read more