The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

Book #63 of 2022:

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

A fun but very trope-heavy research adventure, sort of like The Historian meets The Shadow of the Wind by way of Secret History. The heroine’s estranged father dies suddenly, and she finds an old highway map among his possessions that seems worthless yet for some reason has people willing to pay a fortune and/or kill to get their hands on it. Hints of magic abound as she follows a trail of clues and learns more about the mysterious history of her parents and their old grad school friends, with explicit confirmation halfway through: there’s a town on the map that doesn’t actually exist — it was added as a copyright trap for rival publishers trying to steal the work — but which anyone holding the thing can nevertheless reach.

I love this as a Stephen King-esque fantasy concept, but in my opinion it is both properly introduced too late in the narrative and not developed rigorously enough by author Peng Shepherd. There are all sorts of open questions / plot holes around how the enchantment functions, of the kind that really damage the story the longer you dwell on them (or wonder why the characters aren’t). The few twists are predictable well in advance too, and multiple folks decide that the best way to protect their loved ones is to break off contact with them for literal decades, a tiresome idea that’s disappointingly just accepted on its face without challenge.

Despite these flaws, this is generally a fast-paced and engaging title that draws a reader onward to uncover its dusty secrets. But there’s a lot of potential here for an even stronger version of the project that’s ultimately squandered at every turn.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

Book #62 of 2022:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

Charmingly strange and surprisingly modern for a novel first published in 1881 Brazil, this story details the life of a fictional dead man from his own perspective, written “with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy” as he lies in his grave with nothing better to do than entertain the worms. Subverting the usual order of memoir, he begins with an account of his funeral and the visitors at his deathbed instead of his childhood, explaining, “I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author,” and that pretty much sets the stage for the quirky, hilarious, and thoroughly original tale that follows.

When we do see his early days, our protagonist is (or rather, was) a wastrel son of a noble family, squandering his inheritance in advance and doing his best to avoid any serious responsibilities as he falls in and out of love and tries to hide his main affair with a married woman. Plotwise, this is all sort of thin, but the narrator has such a delightfully peculiar viewpoint that it’s easy to simply relax and enjoy his declaiming in all its experimental oddities. The chapters are short and staccato in form, and they regularly indulge in metafictional consideration of composition rather than actually continuing on from the previous thought. One page consists of a dialogue mostly in question marks. Another section encourages us to remove and insert it somewhere else in the book instead. And a favorite of mine dolefully lists the elements found at a typical graveyard service, from priest to coffin to sobbing mourners, only to suddenly swerve and conclude, “These are the notes that I took for a sad and commonplace chapter which I shall not write.”

It’s madcap and surely frustrating to any expectations of straightforward narrative, but it just about works despite the distance now in time, space, and language from the initial context for a contemporary reader. I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that have escaped me in this translation, much as the constant philosophizing sometimes seems to get in the way of Brás Cubas deploying his caustically self-deprecating wit. But overall, this weird title is right up my alley.

[Content warning for racism, slavery, corporal punishment, and miscarriage.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 3

TV #16 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 3

This animated family sitcom has been getting better year over year, and this third season produces what I’d call its first all-time classic episode, Mother Daughter Laser Razor. No other half-hour in this run quite matches that one’s fantastic blend of action, comedy, and character growth, but several do come close. Plus at this stage the writers have a firm enough handle on the core cast and their extended world of recurring weirdo acquaintances that the jokes are categorically well-grounded in personality, which helps smooth over the weaker stories. And while this will never be a particularly plot-heavy show, there’s sporadic signs of serialization and personal arcs throughout, mostly concerning Tina’s love life.

It’s still a mixed bag, though, and those clunkers like Mutiny on the Windbreaker have to be factored against the stronger moments. I think on balance the series remains ever so slightly more good than great overall, but at least it feels like we might finally be reaching a tipping point there.

[Content warning for fatphobia, ableism, and drug and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

Book #61 of 2022:

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen #1)

This 1999 debut is an incredibly dense high fantasy adventure that I can’t honestly say I’ve enjoyed too much. Author Steven Erikson clearly has an epic scope in mind for this saga, but this first thick tome — of ten, plus several companion volumes and adjacent series — seems driven primarily by birds-eye plotting, rather than insights into the hearts of its characters. The writing is competent enough that I wouldn’t say these protagonists don’t have respective goals they’re working toward, but the motivations explaining why they each want to achieve their particular aims are somewhat elusive. As a result those figures often read like interchangeable automatons moving around a game board — a fitting summary for a project that apparently began as an idea for a tabletop RPG setting and only later had a sample campaign devised for publication.

There are frankly also just too bloody many of them to easily keep track of, particularly in audiobook format and with a narrative style that frequently switches perspectives mid-chapter without notice. In total in this one novel, there are 33 different point-of-view characters alone. That’s a heavy mental burden for a reader/listener to follow, and I now realize why I’ve seen fans of this series earnestly recommend taking notes along the way. (For comparison to other massive genre introductions: Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings has 17 distinct POVs. George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones has 9.) With fewer heroes and/or better-drawn ones, I might feel more invested in this elaborate history that Erikson has concocted. But there’s simply no ready point of entry here, even before we get to all the secret identities, name changes, and possessions by elder gods.

I do understand why the franchise has its devotees, and I would imagine it’s rewarding for a close-reading of its lore, even though the worldbuilding so far strikes me as fairly generic, offering breadth over depth as it traffics in various standard archetypes and monocultural flavor. But there are fun scenes and surprising twist reveals, generally involving some all-powerful warrior coming out of the shadows to clobber another, and if this sort of thing is your cup of tea, I wish you the best of it. Personally, however, I’m more bemused than entertained overall, and I don’t expect I’ll be continuing on to any of the sequels. While the strengths of this title probably merit a rating no lower than three-out-of-five stars, I really don’t believe I’m the ideal reader for it.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils (2022)

Movie #8 of 2022:

Doctor Who: Legend of the Sea Devils (2022)

I’ve been treating standalone TV events like this as movies in my reviews, but that does feel a little silly for a title that, at just 48 minutes long, is the shortest special of modern Doctor Who thus far. I liked it a lot! It’s without question among the stronger entries of its kind, and a major step up from the franchise’s only previous Easter outing, 2009’s Planet of the Dead. But I find that I don’t often have much to say about individual episodes, and that’s true even when they’re not especially situated in the middle of a longer storytelling arc. This is a fun showcase that I’d argue deserves four-out-of-five stars for the sheer entertainment factor alone, but there’s not much thematic meat on its bones to pick over critically.

Still, this nautical story that centers an obscure species from the classic run — previously seen only in 1972’s The Sea Devils and 1984’s Warriors of the Deep, though their land-dwelling cousins the Silurians have continued to recur since then — is altogether a delightful romp. The cleverness and humor in the writing feels a cut above normal, with plenty of killer lines that would merit a rewatch to catch them all. The visuals are gorgeous too, from the historical Chinese costuming to a lovely scene of the TARDIS doors opening up on a technobabble-protected underwater vista. (And the script doesn’t embarrass itself in the treatment of a foreign culture, as I’m always half-afraid this series will. Some reductionism is unavoidable given the runtime and the sci-fi elements, but real-life pirate captain Madame Ching is fantastic and nothing in the setting strikes me as particularly exoticized, though I’d welcome any dissent from someone of that background / heritage.)

The plot’s a bit simplistic, although not egregiously so, but mostly this exercise is serving two functions in the broader canon. First, it picks up the thread from the preceding Eve of the Daleks, wherein — spoiler alert — the Thirteenth Doctor’s companion Yasmin Khan was revealed to have developed romantic feelings for her. Here, that inchoate queer relationship is pushed slightly further, presented as something that the two heroines talk obliquely and awkwardly around before finally addressing head-on in a frank and insightful moment of characterization (as haywire technology blows up in their faces, of course — this is still Doctor Who).

The second important link in this tale points forward not back, and it exists primarily in subtext that most viewers will bring to the experience. That’s the fact that this is the penultimate chapter in Thirteen’s journey, the adventure immediately prior to her regeneration into an as-yet-uncast successor this autumn. She’s getting reflective and sorrowful in her quieter moments, as incarnations of the Doctor generally do at this stage, but this unfortunately cuts against the effectiveness of the love angle with Yaz. That is, I’d be more convinced that that dynamic would ultimately be handled well if it had been introduced at least a year earlier with ample room to be explored. As is, what should be a groundbreaking concept for this long-running saga seems like it’s instead going to be rushed into part of the protagonist’s latest tragic end. That context is hard to set aside as a fan, even though I like all the ‘Thasmin’ content here just fine on its own terms.

I’ve probably now spent more time writing this than watching the thing, but like some of soon-to-be-outgoing showrunner Chris Chibnall’s other contributions, I think it’s as interesting for how it adds to the continuity as for its simple enjoyment as television. Since the latter is a swashbuckling good show and the former’s got some engaging wrinkles to it, four stars feels wholly appropriate.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Book #60 of 2022:

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

This sci-fi novel starts off pretty disjointedly, repeatedly jumping ahead by literal centuries (1912, 2020, 2203) to no immediately discernible purpose or connection between successive protagonists. If not for the overall shortness of the volume and for my abiding affection towards author Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic classic Station Eleven, I might have gotten cold feet and bailed before finishing. I’m quite glad I didn’t, however, as the structure of the project becomes clear around halfway through: this is a time-travel story, about an agent from the year 2401 investigating a series of anomalies across history, when moments of one era could suddenly be glimpsed in another. The scientists at his organization are worried these instances represent corrupted data that would prove all of reality is nothing but a complex digital simulation.

The action that ensues from that point is pleasantly mindbending, yet also satisfying on a character front as the cast respectively grapple with the issues facing them, which resonate thematically regardless of their isolation. One recurring preoccupation that links these souls is the question of how to endure and make sense of an ongoing global health crisis and its casualties, which of course has metafictional echoes of the writer’s own experience and the contemporary context in which she produced and we receive this title. (The heroine in the twenty-third century is literally an author whose pandemic novel is being adapted for film when a real outbreak arrives, much as how production on the Station Eleven miniseries was interrupted by the onset of COVID-19.)

For some readers, these details might seem too cutesy or navel-gazing — there are even alternate versions of people from Mandel’s otherwise unrelated work The Glass Hotel, just like how that one repurposed folks from Station Eleven for its own new narrative — but the eventual effect works for me despite my initial hesitation. I still don’t really love the beginning of this account even in hindsight, but it’s a plot that gets steadily better as it goes along and builds to a genuinely impressive ending. That’s worth the journey, in my opinion.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Crooked House by Agatha Christie

Book #59 of 2022:

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

This 1949 standalone novel is one of the more excellent Agatha Christie mysteries, with a tight plot, a plethora of solid suspects, and a fiendishly distinctive — though totally fair — ultimate solution to its puzzle. I think it helps that the protagonist is not one of the author’s usual investigators, or even a detective at all. He’s a soldier fresh from the second world war who’s arrived at the titular manor intending to propose to his friend who lives there, only to find her distraught at the recent poisoning of her grandfather and unwilling to marry until the murderer has been discovered and the fog of suspicion over the rest of the family lifted. Motives, conflicting wills, and red herrings abound, and the sudden conclusion seems guaranteed to linger in purposefully unresolved tension regardless of whether a reader sees the twist coming or not. I would rank this book alongside The Murder of Roger Ackroyd among the writer’s best, and definitely recommend it as one to pick up outside of her main Poirot and Marple series.

Fun bonus: Christie later named it as one of her favorites, too!

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate

Book #58 of 2022:

The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #2)

Here is the nicest thing I can say about this second Animorphs choose-your-own-adventure title: it is better than the first one. (It’s not a sequel, though: the “you” before was another kid who was wandering through the abandoned construction site of Animorphs #1 The Invasion at the same time as the regular group and also given morphing powers by Elfangor. The “you” here is a David analogue, experiencing the attack on his house from book #20 The Discovery.) Whereas the previous volume had only six actual decision points, each of which led to either immediate death or the tale’s intended continuation, this followup has nine, including a genuine fork with each branch continuing through additional nodes to a separate possible conclusion. As an activity, the structure / gameplay is thus notably more complex.

The plot is busier, too. The First Journey covered parts of Animorphs #1 and #11 The Forgotten, jumping over the events in-between, but The Next Passage handles #20, #26 The Attack, and Megamorphs #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs, under the premise that the Ellimist appears once you’ve joined the team to send you off on one of those last two paths. That’s not great writing — especially since the options are presented as simply “button A” and “button B” on an unlabeled remote control — but at least it feels like more thought went into the idea than anything in the lazy cash-grab of Alternamorphs #1. Maybe that’s why the first ghostwriter remains unknown, while this one has been openly identified as Emily Costello, who would return a few months later for #42 The Journey in the main series.

As for the weaknesses…. It’s really not a very well-developed story, nor does it seem all that fun or compelling to play. The angst, wartime trauma, and nuanced coming-of-age themes of the franchise are in short supply, and the heroes regularly act out-of-character, as when they trap you as a fly nothlit in one ending, doomed to die within two weeks because you didn’t agree to stay out of their way during future fights. Good luck trying to determine where this alternate universe diverges from the real canon, too — the Animorphs mention having fought the Howlers on Iskoort already, but they give no indication that the morphing cube’s discovery or their prehistoric excursion has likewise happened, even though those adventures came earlier in the proper continuity. There’s no internal consistency or apparent point to the Ellimist’s challenge either, which altogether adds up for a frustrating and weightless read.

I would imagine the intended appeal of a project like this is to immerse the readers in a beloved media property, letting us literally see ourselves joining the action alongside the familiar characters. But even with a less simple narrative shape in place, that attempt can’t possibly succeed in a work that’s so hollow and patronizing about what we supposedly like in these books. A publisher’s impression of Animorphs may sound wacky, with its garish covers of teens turning into animals, but the novels are generally deadly earnest in a way these spinoffs have never managed. I just can’t suspend my disbelief far enough.

[Content warning for body horror, gun violence, and gore.]

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★☆☆☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

TV Review: Scandal, season 6

TV #15 of 2022:

Scandal, season 6

This penultimate outing starts with a bang, and winds up structuring its entire year a bit like a whodunnit mystery. For a while, the show is almost hypnotically-recursive, returning Rashomon-like to Election Night again and again, each time filling in yet another person’s perspective along with some additional context of what happened between the nominating conventions of the previous finale and now. Even after leaving that framework behind, the season hums with a tension that Scandal doesn’t often manage, perhaps helped by its airing during the early months of the Trump administration when our own America seemed likewise upside-down.

Of course, this series can only stray so far from its inherent soapiness, and so we still end up with new plot twists and secret character motivations that don’t hold up under the lightest scrutiny. We’re introduced to what I believe is our fourth all-powerful conspiracy in the heart of Washington — whose leaders brag that they cannot be stopped and can easily be replaced from their ranks despite the fact that it really seems like there’s just the two of them and a few flunkies — with Liv herself taking moves to form a fifth shadow organization in the final hour of this run.

It’s more ridiculous than scandalous, as ever. But the effect remains fun so long as you don’t let yourself think too hard about any of these developments or their implications, especially when punctuated with nice moments of personal growth for much of the main cast. And if the upcoming last eighteen episodes represent a showdown between a newly-ruthless Olivia and her former friends back at the old firm, as appears to be suggested? That might be the most satisfying ending that showrunner Shonda Rhimes could deliver at this point.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, suicide, sexual assault, claustrophobia, drowning, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Book #57 of 2022:

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

As a satire, this 1966 novel about an apparent conspiracy surrounding an illegal alternate postal system is sporadically effective, with a handful of amusing developments and witty turns-of-phrase. As pretty much anything else, it’s not really what I’m looking for in a story. The punnily-named characters (Genghis Cohen, Manny di Presso, Emory Bortz, Mucho Maas, etc.) aren’t particularly defined beyond interchangeable punchline machines, the teased mysteries remain unsolved, and the discursive plot never quite justifies the sinister atmosphere. I don’t necessarily need answers in my fiction — I love S. and The Starless Sea, and I’ve even come around to Lemony Snicket‘s brand of melancholic ambiguity — but hollow absurdism strictly for its own sake can often result in feelings of tedium and frustration, which has largely been my experience here.

I picked up this title as an introduction to author Thomas Pynchon, as it’s apparently shorter and more linear than his other works, and I can just about see the weird genius that has gained him a cult following. Yet I think at this point I can safely say that his talents are wasted — or should that be W.A.S.T.E.d — on me as a reader.

[Content warning for incest, rape, torture, gore, Nazi medical experimentation, desecration of human remains, drug abuse, homophobia including slurs, and racism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆