*looks up review, winces slightly*

Have you read Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint? It's tonally very different, much darker and Jacobean, but it and its sequel Privilege of the Sword were similarly groundbreaking at least for the types of characters you'd see in fantasy. They might reboot you. Privilege of the Sword can also be read as a standalone…

The recent biography of hers gives you a lot of samples of her reviews and a lot more of her personality on and off the page, if you like that sort of thing. It was great to see some of the reviews that were too controversial to have been collected.

Bring up the Bodies is on my I-need-to-read-this-it's-getting-embarrassing list, given how long ago I read Wolf Hall and how much I liked it, so it's good this showed up to give me a push. I adored Five Came Back and went through all the directors' filmographies afterwards adding things to my must-watch list. Harris…

I've been having a great reading month, in part because all the snow shut down my workplace for a week. Thanks, snow! I finally read Octavia Butler's Kindred, which was as spare and devastating an account of slavery and its myriad injustices as I've ever encountered (with bonus time travel). Plus James M. Cain's The…

SPOILERS FOR DEATH COMES AS THE END

Thirteen at Dinner/Lord Edgware Dies is one my favorites, and it single-handedly taught me a valuable lesson for mystery writing: if you make an assumption powerful enough, your reader will forget to try and think around it. It's so clever I still look back on it with admiration.

If that is my legacy, I am honored.

Did anyone else find the revelation that Shane pocketed the grenade before Aceveda's lie a little bit of a fumble? I can certainly see Shane stealing a grenade out of sheer magpie-like bloodymindedness, but he seemed pretty desperate to have an excuse to not kill Lem in the fifth season finale, and so I'm not sure I…

This is amazing, and I'm especially in the mood to praise you for your analysis of the Shane/Mara dynamic, since the review itself had me frothing at the mouth. That openness is crucial to their relationship, and it's the honesty—and, here, the visible evidence of Shane's own grief over Lem's murder—that Mara needs,…

I have been blanking on possible comments for the last few weeks, but this review just had me going, "…That can't possibly be the actual interpretation he's going with, right?"

Oh, I forgot about Claudette's ending speech to Vic. "This is what the hero left on his way out the door" is just a perfect dismantling of him.

1. The entirety of Vic's interrogation. Obviously and especially "I've done worse," but also how slowly he starts, like he has to unlock each word from behind a separate door, and how that tone gradually shifts as it becomes easier (and more enjoyable) for him to confess and even flaunt.

Liked for any mention of the Drive-By Truckers. I feel like someone mentioned Vic in the context of "The Righteous Path" in some long-ago thread, too.

I gave you a like for liking someone for making a dig at Aaron Sorkin.

SPOILERS FOR H: LOTS

As much as I do still want to see that alternate version monster truck rally—seriously, let's get them all back together and do a deleted scene!—I've noticed that as we go forward, particularly through season five and onwards, there are fewer and fewer lacunae in which those kinds of moments could exist. The show's…

I have a soft spot for him laughing at the chi-chi story, criticizing it, and then guessing that it's a white thing. (And from the same scene, although not the same actor, Ronnie and Lem giving Shane what-the-hell looks as he enthusiastically details the tortures of chi-chi.)

Count me in as someone else who likes Tina and thinks she has skills and resourcefulness. And she's saddled with an unfortunate mentor in Julien, who is a good cop but mostly seems supremely disinterested in teaching her anything. It makes her attraction to Dutch make even more sense, since he actually encourages…

I remember hearing something in the commentaries about how the cast was a revolving door on pronouncing "Mara," too, and hilariously insistent that they themselves only pronounced it the one way! But it would change between speakers within the course of a conversation.