Spotify dominates the landscape, but nostalgia is strong — I started listening to music — really listening to it — in the middle of the 2000s. I got my first iPod during that era, happily downloading and ripping music to play on my device. It was a huge part of my life, and for years I considered the collection…

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel expertly spins a cohesive story out of many different threads — Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is a sequel of sorts to her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 novel, A Visit From the Good Squad. While the two books are linked by both storytelling style and inclusion of several common characters, Candy House operates exceptionally well as a standalone novel. I read Goon…

The Gaslight Anthem’s fourth album may not be their best-known, but its a classic in its own right — In 2018, the Gaslight Anthem announced a reunion tour in support of their second album, The 59 Sound. This wasn’t a full-on reunion for the band that had gone on hiatus after releasing 2014’s Get Hurt, but it was a nod to the fan support and adulation that surrounded their…

Despite its short page count, this book tells a deep, resounding story about time and reality — Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is a beautifully-written novel about the future and reality. It poses substantially more questions than it answers, is filled with interesting characters, and tells a wide-ranging story in a little over 220 pages. I waited for this book eagerly ever since I learned…

It’s an exciting opening to a new series by an experienced author — Brian Stavely is best known for his Unhewn Trilogy fantasy trilogy that concluded in 2016. It was an epic, lengthy work of high fantasy that I always felt was deserving of more attention than it received. His latest book, The Empire’s Ruin, is set in the same world with some…

Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel comes to a memorable close — A few years ago, I purchased Senlin Ascends on a whim as part of a Kindle sale. I had heard good things and was excited to dive in, but I had no idea what was waiting for me within the pages of this ebook. This series — The Books of…

Why three novels scheduled to release this month have me feeling less patient than usual I don’t usually wait for book releases with bated breath. The world of books is so large that — to me at least — buying a book right when it comes out seems like something…

Why Adrian Tchaikovsky’s space opera is a great read from every angle — Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth, which came out in 2021, is an excellent science fiction book. …

Guerrilla Games’s sequel starts slowly, but it’s a welcome return to the post-post-apocalypse nonetheless The first thing that once notices while playing Horizon Forbidden West is that the game is gorgeous. There’s an incredible amount of detail in the environments, the use of color is clever and substantial, and the…