Not nearly as many leftovers as in the last few months, mostly because of the Ted Williams biography, also because of other stuff going on. Plus, I’m writing longer posts for books I would have otherwise dispensed with sooner because of CBR 14 Bingo.
Batman ’89***
Been waiting for this for so long, especially after the love Batman 66got, but the results were mixed. Loved what they did with Robin. Didn’t like what they did with Harvey Dent/Two-Face. It felt like Christopher Nolan and not Joel Schumacher was making a movie in the Burtonverse: competent but unoriginal. It was a well-intentioned idea to plumb the racial issues surrounding Gotham and Batman but I would’ve preferred a classic Burton Batman story of him taking on villains and barely being able to live with himself.
The Boys Club****
Maybe one of the best books I read this year…but also became far too unfocused near the end. And yet, I liked the epilogue almost enough to make that point moot. So.
I don’t know.
I’ll lift up: this reminded me of why I appreciated “The Handmaids Tale”: the horror of navigating patriarchal systems is usually a more compelling read than focusing on the system itself (something the show doesn’t seem to understand). Yeah, our protagonist goes over-the-top to “fit in” and some of her decisions made me roll my eyes. But “Erica Katz” really does give the reader a full and complete picture of how subtly (at least until near the end) men dominate the world, here seen through the lens of a prestigious law firm.
I’ll be thinking about it for a while. For now, this review will have to suffice.
The Banker’s Wife****
This one is tough to rate because it has so much of what I like (corporate evil, politics, Hitchcockian thrills) and yet the characters were so thin that I wound up not caring, especially about the ending, which I found flat. I burned through the first 200 pages but when I came back to it, I was asking myself “So…it doesn’t really matter what happens, right?” And yeah, that’s how it turned out. 4-stars for tickling my fetishes but this should’ve been better.
