Spy School Goes Wild Stuart Gibbs As  I wrote previously , this is the  Spy School  formula Spy School novels  have a formula. We have Ben Ripley, a gifted kid who achieves excellent results by not being stupid, Ben's friends who are well-intentioned and sometimes competent, and the ever-expanding dysfunctional Hale family made up of the World's worst spies, who believe themselves to be the World's best spies, including toothsome teen sisters Erica and Trixie Hale.  Gibbs  picks a setting (frequently this is the site of a vacation or a sight-seeing visit he made), then makes up a silly James Bond-esque plot to play out there, with jokes! The main questions one asks on picking up a new Spy School book are "Where will it happen?" and "How will character relationships change?" In the previous novel,  Spy School Goes North , we picked up a new team member, Svetlana Shumovsky, whom  Gibbs  describes as "the Russian version of Erica", meaning that sh

Iron Fist Scott Buck, Netflix, Marvel Iron Fist is the last and unquestionably least of the four Marvel Netflix TV series featuring various sub-Avenger-level New York heroes: Daredevil , Luke Cage ,  Jessica Jones , and  Iron Fist . It consists of 23 episodes, a first season of 13, like all the other Marvel Netflix series, and a mercifully truncated second series of 10 episodes. Danny Rand/Iron Fist has an origin story so stupid that my IQ drops 20 points when I think about it, so I'm not going to explain him. Danny is always going on about his chi (気) and making mystical hand gestures. He has all the authenticity of a seven-dollar bill. But that's not Danny's biggest problem. Danny's biggest problem is that he is stupid. Now, Matt and Jessica and Luke occasionally do stupid things because of lack of information, or because they're carried away by emotion. Danny needs no excuse. Danny does stupid things because he is a stupid person. He has the strategic intelligen

Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Ralph Ellison 's  Invisible Man  is widely considered to be one of the greatest works of twentieth century American Literature. I, an American, lived 68 years without reading it. But recently I watched a TV show whose hero carries  Invisible Man  around with him (it was  Luke Cage ) and I decided the time had come to tackle it at last. I have read good books for much worse reasons than this. I am not going to say a lot about it, because so many people who know much more have already written so much. I will say, however, that although it is Great Literature, it is, as a novel, not good. The plot is more a series of events than a story. And there is only one real character -- the unnamed narrator. We get a very good sense of who he is and what he's like, but all the other characters are mere cardboard cutouts serving as background to the narrator's story. Indeed, they are, as the narrator eventually realizes himself to be, invisible. It's a goo

Constituent Service: A Third District Story John Scalzi Constituent Service: A Third District Story  by  John Scalzi  is a bit of fluff. It is not Serious Literature and doesn't pretend to be. It's just a bit of fun to keep you company on your next long drive or constitutional. It's an audible.com original. At the time of writing it was available only in audiobook format, free with audible.com membership, and it's only two and a half hours long, and  Scalzi  is a known quantity, so really, this was a no-brainer for me. And it was Good! Ashley is fresh out of school and takes a job as Community Liaison for The Third District, the City's only majority nonhuman district. The City, never named, is an Earth City, and the story takes place in some future time when, apparently, interstellar commerce is a thing and many aliens live on Earth. The world-building is sketchy, and that's OK, because it's not really the point. It is just an excuse to dream up office colle

The City in Glass Nghi Vo Nghi Vo 's  The City in Glass , which she describes as "my pandemic book, the thing I wrote while cooped up in my apartment with only my cat for company, and ... just about the hardest thing I’ve ever written." is the story of an angel, a demon, and a city. The demon is Vitrine and the city, Azril, is her city, the city she made. We never learn the angel's name. Vo  is a writer whose work I love, almost despite myself. She is very self-aware as a writer. Gotta tell the truth -- usually that annoys me. Writers who seem consciously to be trying to produce capital-L Literature strike me as pretentious. But I can't argue with  Vo 's results. She is the most versatile producer of varied and creatively told stories I can think of. And her language! Vitrine ... heard the sound of crying below. It wasn’t such an uncommon thing for someone to cry through Summersend, but giving the cat one last scratch, Vitrine wound her way like smoke into the

From the Wizarding Archive: Curated Writing from the World of Harry Potter J.K. Rowling, Evanna Lynch (Narrator), Hugh Quarshie (Narrator), Finlay Robertson (Narrator), Lara Sawalha (Narrator) Elizabeth Bennett's favorite color was yellow. This fact appears nowhere in  Pride and Prejudice . We know it because  Jane Austen  mentioned it to her friends and family. That Lizzie's favorite color is yellow is not in itself important -- but it *is* important that she had a favorite color. I suspect that most great fiction writers do this: they imagine their characters more deeply than is strictly necessary for the story. And you can feel it when you read; you feel these characters as more real because there is more of them than appears on the page.  J.K. Rowling  did this. She wrote pages and pages and pages of notes of background on the wizarding world and the characters of the  Harry Potter  books.  From the Wizarding Archive (Volume 1): Curated Writing from the World of Harry Potte

Luke Cage Cheo Hodari Coker, Marvel, Netflix The character Luke Cage first appeared on the small screen (as far as I know) in the series Jessica Jones . In the original plans for the Marvel Netflix series of serieses, Luke Cage was to be the fourth to get his own series, after Daredevil ,  Jessica Jones , and Iron Fist , in that order. However, the reaction to his appearance in  Jessica Jones  was so positive that he was bumped up to third place, ahead of  Iron Fist . This altered continuity has effects on the story. For instance, there are frequent references to "Danny" in the dialog. Danny is Danny Rand, AKA  Iron Fist . Indeed, Danny himself is a main character in one episode of  Luke Cage , and Colleen Wing, another of the main characters of  Iron Fist , shows up in another episode.  Unlike  Daredevil  and  Jessica Jones , which take place in Hell's Kitchen (I haven't yet watched  Iron Fist , so I don't know about that),  Luke Cage  takes place mostly in Harle