The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Book #72 of 2022:

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

This novel is told from the first-person plural perspective of a 1989 high school girls field hockey team, sometimes narrowing in on one specific member or another but generally seeming to come from the generalized collective, a la “we shivered at the prospects of this, some of us shivering with excitement and most of us shivering with dread.” That’s a striking stylistic choice that well fits the tale of these Salem teens taking oaths and making sacrifices to bind themselves to dark forces in order to gain confidence and win more of their games. The book also keeps somewhat coy about whether those rituals are ultimately real or not, caring more about how the would-be coven experiences them than if any demonic influence actually exists.

I’m on board with nearly all of that, and I think this story is a great illustration of just how weird and wild teenagers can be when investing totems with in-group meaning. It’s a good representation of queerness without the constriction of labels, too. At the same time, however, I can’t help complaining as a reader that there’s basically no plot here: no stakes, no dangers, no particular objectives, no narrative structure, and no character growth. Should we be worried about these kids and the powers they might be unleashing? The text doesn’t suggest that outright. Instead we simply hear matter-of-fact reporting of one thing they do and then the next, again and again and again.

Not all of the experimental elements work for me either, like one player’s fringe of hair being anthropomorphized throughout with a personality and a name. And I never quite feel as though author Quan Barry reconciles the supposed legacy of local witchcraft with the acknowledged truth that those people executed in the seventeenth-century were innocent of the wicked charges laid against them — far more innocent than the writer’s protagonists, in fact.

I do like the prose and the basic idea behind this title, but it just seems like there are some significant pieces missing from it as a finished product.

[Content warning for gaslighting, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie

Book #71 of 2022:

A Murder Is Announced by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #4)

As far as mystery hooks go, it’s hard to beat an ad being placed in a sleepy village newspaper, politely informing its readers of the place and time of an upcoming murder — where sure enough, someone winds up killed and someone else injured, surrounded by the curious residents who have assembled thinking it’s a joke or a game and the homeowner who professes ignorance of the whole affair. But this is one of those Agatha Christie stories where I seem to have run ahead of the investigator(s), noticing claims that are taken at face value by everyone rather than independently verified, which quickly narrows me in on the correct culprit and soon after, much of the motive behind their actions.

I can never decide whether it’s fair to give a lower rating to a novel like this just because its puzzle couldn’t stump me, but I will say, this is another Miss Marple vehicle that sidelines her for far too long, and the other characters don’t make much of an impression on me in her absence. The amount of falling action at the end, after the main secret has been revealed, also seems a bit excessive. One element I genuinely enjoy is how — spoiler alert — the emphasized fact that person X can’t recognize person Y on sight is a red herring to obscure the more meaningful corollary, which is that person Y obviously can’t identify person X, either. But overall, this hasn’t been one of my favorites despite the exciting initial premise.

As a side note, I’m willing to entertain the idea that some of my difficulty in engaging with the text is due to audiobook narrator Joan Hickson, who does little to distinguish the tone or voices of her reading. I don’t think I’d have loved this particular volume anyway, but I’m definitely going to try to avoid her in the future.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Journey by K. A. Applegate

Book #70 of 2022:

The Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #42)

In another riff on a classic sci-fi premise, this Animorphs novel by ghostwriter Emily Costello — fresh off her dubious success with Alternamorphs #2 — finds the team shrinking down to microscopic size, in order to chase a squad of Helmacrons who have stormed into Marco’s body for… unclear reasons. (They’re in Cassie’s barn to get the blue box again, and when Rachel trips and accidentally knocks him out, they dart up his nostril to hold him hostage from the inside, rather than continue their efforts to simply seize the thing outright.) Honestly, the whole plot is pretty clumsy, and a thin justification for author K. A. Applegate plainly just wanting to utilize the Fantastic Voyage trope of traveling into a human body. That original 1966 movie even gets name-checked here, as does the Magic School Bus cartoon where I probably first encountered the idea.

So the heroes follow the megalomaniacal bad guys up their friend’s nasal cavity and beyond, delivering lots of gross-out humor at the mucus and other bodily fluids they encounter along the way. It all feels rather silly, such that even when our main narrator Rachel is experiencing her skin burning off from stomach acid or temporarily thinks Marco is either dead or about to be trapped in cockroach morph, there’s an unavoidable impression of a throwaway romp to all this. In a departure from how these books normally go, Marco himself even narrates a few chapters, although his section of the story isn’t much better. Someone snapped a photo of the group demorphing before the tiny aliens showed up, and while his insides are under siege, Marco gets bored and decides to break into their apartment and steal the disposable camera. It’s an astonishingly bad move from the supposed coldblooded strategist, and it results in him being bit by a rabid guard dog.

(What did that stranger think they were photographing? What were they going to do with the picture? Why were they just casually keeping a dog with rabies around their home? The text doesn’t have time for these mundanities.)

It’s not the worst Animorphs out there, and there are enough interesting wrinkles around the edges to make up for the lesser elements somewhat. If you’re a Rachel/Marco shipper, this two-hander shows them squabbling to hide their plain worry about one another, while in their private chapters he references a dream about marrying her and she has an idle thought comparing him to an underwear model. In the opening battle before things turn south, the teens are raiding a Yeerk factory where mass production on portable Kandronas is underway, which would have dire implications for the resistance war by removing the Yeerk pool as an enemy weakness. And we learn that morphing an animal and back can heal a person more than previously imagined — like treating their rabies, for instance — which will likewise prove important down the road.

Overall, though, I can’t say that this is one of the highlights or necessary touchstones of the series.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Moon Knight, season 1

TV #18 of 2022:

Moon Knight, season 1

I’ve enjoyed the first half of this six-episode miniseries as a character study of a meek man coming to realize his blackouts and sleepwalking are the result of undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder — and that his opposite persona is a confident ex-mercenary who’s also the superpowered avatar of an Egyptian god, sworn to deliver divine justice upon sinners. The heady concept is anchored by lead actor Oscar Isaac, turning in a fine performance in both roles and easily distinguishing them via his physicality. There are great moments of action-comedy as his hapless museum shop clerk finds himself suddenly waking up in the middle of the other guy’s daring adventures, without a clue as to what’s going on. (And in case it’s not clear: this is an adaptation of the comic book series, technically part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe even though I haven’t noticed any actual ties to that broader continuity and the casual revelation that Egyptian mythology and its afterlife are real should surely have repercussions elsewhere.)

The end of the season kind of loses me, however, with its dull save-the-world-from-a-personality-free-bad-guy quest and its refocusing the plot away from Steven Grant, our former main perspective. A lot of these narrative beats feel like they’re repeating the last time the franchise did a DID arc too — Mary Walker on Marvel’s Iron Fist — right down to the unsurprising reveal of a violent hidden third alter ego. It’s so much less interesting and compelling than the confusion driving the first few hours, and generally feels like an overlong origin story.

I’m similarly underwhelmed by the representation of Moon Knight’s Judaism, which could have been an important milestone given that the only previous confirmed on-screen Jew in the entire MCU was Ana Jarvis, a minor figure from Marvel’s Agent Carter back in 2016. Despite his being the first Jewish superhero in this massive serialized movie and TV engine, that element of the protagonist’s identity is relegated to a few quick scenes of backstory in the penultimate episode that leave too much unspoken.

(What does Marc Spector’s Jewishness mean to him? When he rips his kippah from his head and then seems to rethink and clutches it to his chest, are we meant to read into that or just see it as a generic expression of grief? How does he understand his faith heritage in light of his role serving an Egyptian deity? Has he been to a seder since aligning himself with Khonshu, where he’d recount the freedom of his people from bondage in Egypt? Is Judaism part of what Marc abandons to become Steven, or a meaningful touchstone they share? These are the sort of questions that could have deepened the text considerably if properly explored, but instead we’re given bare tokenism and the Jewish equivalent of Easter eggs — afikoman? — as easy to miss and as inconsequential to the storyline as Loki’s line on his show establishing his bisexuality.)

Will we see Isaac’s Moon Knight again, in either a second journey through his particular weird corner of the canon or a crossover into someone else’s range? I’m not sure. All I can say is that there’s a lot of potential that’s gone ultimately unrealized in this debut.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, death of a child, post-traumatic stress disorder, and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

Book #69 of 2022:

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

This book is primarily a biography of Smedley Darlington Butler, a now-obscure figure from the late nineteenth / early twentieth century who was once a household name as a military leader-turned-reformist. In fact, author Jonathan M. Katz opens his narrative with a tantalizing hook: after retirement, the former major general alleged that he had been approached by a secretive group of wealthy businessmen who wanted him to be the face of their fascist coup to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a never-proven conspiracy subsequently known as the Business Plot). Writing in the aftermath of the Jan. 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Katz is quick to note the similarities between these efforts to overturn election results by force, including the sentiment of white resentment against perceived minority advancements that was calculatedly stoked in each case.

That’s a fascinating subject, but as it turns out, not one we return to until around the last 5% of the text. Instead, we mostly follow Butler’s career through the Marine Corps, a somewhat tedious affair that serves largely to illustrate how the U.S. armed forces of this time were deployed to further the interests of American capital and corporations, as he actually recognized and repudiated later in life, declaring in a famous speech, “War is a racket… [and] I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” This element, too, is a more interesting topic than the man himself, effectively producing the very empire-building that contemporary politicians and diplomats claimed to abhor in our enemy nations like the Soviet Union. Via Butler, the writer highlights how America used its foreign wars to continually extend its frontier, always finding new marginalized peoples to exploit, and how when the troops were finally pulled back, that energy turned inward to target domestic populations and institutions the same way. On several occasions, he quotes French thinker Frantz Fanon, who asks, “What is fascism but colonialism in the heart of a traditionally colonialist country?”

It’s a solid read overall, but I can’t shake the feeling that I would have been more engaged if there were less Butler in it — and less Katz, as he’s the kind of historian who regularly includes details of his own research visits to the relevant sites, which does not produce my favorite sort of nonfiction. There are glimmers here of the account I want this to be, but you unfortunately do need to dig for them.

[Content warning for torture, rape, post-traumatic stress disorder, and racism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Outside by Ada Hoffmann

Book #68 of 2022:

The Outside by Ada Hoffmann (The Outside #1)

A brilliant extension of Lovecraftian cosmic horror into hard sci-fi, in which certain equations and lines of scientific inquiry can rupture the laws of physics and open a window into the unknowable, madness-inducing chaos writhing outside reality. My strong suspicion is that we’re meant to understand the universe of this setting as an advanced simulation, especially since its gods are acknowledged as transcended A.I.s, but on the page, no character ever suggests as much (even at the end, where such twist reveals are often inserted in this sort of narrative). Instead, we are grounded in the local perspective on these unfathomable developments — and specifically in that of our heroine, an explicitly autistic queer scientist commanded by cyborg angels to track down her mentor, the heretic using forbidden research to launch terrorist attacks and spread her conviction that traditional perceptions of sense, space, time, and the self are all lies.

It’s a wild premise, and although the story seems at times a bit perfunctory, moving in a brisk linear fashion from point A to point B, its worldbuilding and cast make up for the lack. The protagonist isn’t even the only autistic person in the novel, and some of my favorite moments come when she’s contrasting her experiences and preferences with those of another, drawing from #ownvoices author Ada Hoffmann’s insights to render all parties rich and believable individuals rather than easy cliches. We also have casual inclusion of same-sex relationships and polyamory, plus beings who can change their entire appearance including gender presentation on a whim, sometimes resulting in their pronouns changing multiple times over the course of a single scene. It is really just a ton of fun to watch play out.

I can’t say that I’m particularly hooked on any larger mystery or plot here, so I don’t know that I’ll be coming back for volume two or any subsequent sequels. But the representation and the big ideas in this debut are terrific.

[Content warning for torture, self-harm, genocide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: O Beautiful by Jung Yun

Book #67 of 2022:

O Beautiful by Jung Yun

This novel is a real powerhouse, as scathing as it is insightful about white and male entitlement in small-town America. (The protagonist is sexually assaulted by her airplane seatmate in the opening chapter, and things don’t get any better from there.) She’s a fledgling reporter on her way to North Dakota to cover the region’s oil boom, where rural vistas are facing an influx of workers many times the size of their original population. The newcomers are poorer folks desperate for jobs, crammed into cots in overcrowded hotel rooms or even sleeping in their cars, and they’re more diverse than the locals, resulting in a clear racial element to the resentment against them, wrapped up in people’s feelings about immigration and a changing country. The heroine, whose parents were white and Korean, is primed by her own experiences to register this dynamic, and author Jung Yun expresses it cogently in some frankly shattering and revelatory passages.

It’s an immersive read that really situates the reader inside the character’s skin — she’s also dealing with an estranged sister and a mentor / ex-boyfriend being outed as a serial harasser — and I was imagining I would rate the book as five stars, right up until the abrupt ending that leaves the majority of its plot threads forever dangling unresolved. Some stories earn that kind of closing ambiguity, but I’m not sure this one gets there for me, despite its many other strengths.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 6

TV #17 of 2022:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 6

Overall I would call this the strongest run yet of DS9 — and the Star Trek saga at large, for that matter — although that designation does come with a few glaring exceptions. First is the episode “Profit and Lace,” a thankfully standalone / throwaway piece that is at once transphobic, sexist, rapey, and all-around inane. I haven’t minded the individual Ferengi or the storylines involving them until now, but this one in which Quark impersonates a woman and then has to physically fend off a lecherous admirer for audience laughs is the lowest of the low. The writing this season also repeatedly frames female cast members Kira and Jadzia as romantic targets for the men, spending time on how their prospective and rejected suitors feel about them but largely ignoring their own wants and needs. While they are still active protagonists for the most part, this treatment reduces the women to objects and sources of manpain, particularly in an otherwise-great finale.

But on to the good stuff, because generally speaking, this year is rather excellent! It’s heavily serialized, committing to the shakeup from the previous cliffhanger with the heroes off-station for longer than might be expected, and even after the status quo has been restored, there are exposed cracks that continue to cause tension across the hours ahead. We get a more focused look at the Bajoran religion and its demands on its Emissary, a franchise-best outing in the surprising take on mid-20th-century racism “Far Beyond the Stars,” unprepared children conscripted into battle, impossible choices between duty and honor, and a sinister undercutting of long-standing Federation principles with the reveal of the shadowy Section 31 police force operating with no oversight or official recognition. Sisko’s complicity in another underhanded move during “In the Pale Moonlight” is a similarly fine character moment, and a showcase for how this series blurs the lines of right and wrong in wartime.

There’s an atmosphere of palpable dread threaded throughout here, as casualty reports steadily arrive from the battlefront and the main characters display signs of stress affecting their various relationships. They openly acknowledge that they themselves aren’t safe either and that any meeting of friends could be the last, so even though the one significant death happens somewhat randomly, it almost feels like we’re mourning beforehand and the effect on the surviving crew is immediately clear. A far cry from when Tasha Yar was killed off in the early days of TNG!

If only the women were treated better and that disastrous “Profit and Lace” struck from the record entirely, I’d be tempted to give this my first five-star Trek rating. As is, it’s still remarkably close.

[Content warning for torture and gaslighting.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner

Book #66 of 2022:

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 by Harald Jähner

This historical account of Germany following World War II is detailed and well-researched, tracing how the country’s population began transitioning from perpetrators, victims, and complicit bystanders of the Holocaust into participants in modern western democracy once more. But it’s a bit dry and unfocused at times, drifting into discussions of topics like the contemporary abstract art movement that strike me as fairly irrelevant. In addition, author Harald Jähner makes several loaded claims that are just begging to be unpacked, explained, and defended at length, rather than mentioned off-hand as they are here — such as his assertion that a reliance on post-war food stamps “infantilised” the starving Germans, or that women during the war “had cut Hitler Youth squad leaders down to size and done their best to drive from their sons’ heads any fancy ideas they might have had of being members of a master race,” as though there were no female Nazis fervently supporting the Party line instead.

The most striking part of this text is its coverage of the earliest turbulence in this period, which included roving bands of lawless children, widespread incidents of rape, and reunited spouses no longer recognizing one another after their respective ordeals, none of which I can remember ever learning about before. The budding divisions between the eastern and western territories are interesting, too. But as far as understanding the common mindsets of the time, I think I’ve gotten more out of Milton Sanford Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45, a title looking back further yet written in the very era covered by this book.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

Book #65 of 2022:

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #5)

A solid legal thriller like most in its series, but one with some unfortunate pacing issues and a letdown of an ending, in my opinion. Nevertheless, this volume is interesting for showing a bit more serialization than the Harry Bosch-adjacent novels usually do; the case in question concerns the murder of a sex worker who gave evidence against a drug dealer back in the original Mickey Haller book The Lincoln Lawyer, revisiting and revealing another side of that arrangement. On the other hand, we skip over the hero’s run for District Attorney that was teased at the end of his previous installment The Fifth Witness, which feels like a real missed opportunity and gives rise to a measure of tedious catch-up exposition.

(There’s some further weirdness in the continuity too, as author Michael Connelly has decided to include the recent movie adaptation of The Lincoln Lawyer — published as nonfiction, in this universe — into the narrative here. But no one ever alludes to Mickey’s newfound celebrity or the fact that the dead woman was a character in the film, both of which seem like they’d have been raised at trial. The main impact seems to just be more lawyers practicing out of their cars, resulting in a repeated comedic beat of the protagonist not being sure which vehicle to get into when he exits the courthouse.)

Overall, this particular entry is thoroughly workmanlike, which sounds like faint praise but actually speaks to the writer’s continued technical proficiency at generating good and even periodically great stories. This one falls more into the former category for me, with only occasional flashes of brilliance, like a ploy to draw out corruption in the prosecution via a strategic inclusion in the defense’s potential witness list. But I’d say it’s still worth reading for fans of the genre.

Note: in some editions, this novel is accompanied by the Harry Bosch short story “Switchblade” which details a cold case the detective is investigating around this same time. Bosch and that defendant feature in The Gods of Guilt, but only in passing.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, gun violence, racism, and (in “Switchblade”) homophobic violence.]

★★★☆☆