The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Book #56 of 2022:

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

A deeply-moving account of author Clint Smith’s visits to sites across the country (and one abroad, in Senegal) that have links to slavery, from former plantations like Angola Prison and Jefferson’s Monticello estate to a Confederate cemetery and Wall Street. There’s a lot of information on the ‘peculiar institution’ in this book — often rendered in visceral, unflinching detail that centers the human cost of its ongoing atrocities — but the writer is a sociologist rather than a historian, and so his primary focus is less on the facts and more on how contemporary people grapple with them. To that end, he interviews tour guides and his fellow guests, seeking to draw out their understandings of the subject, and how that fits with their sense of American history more broadly.

Understandably, he encounters a lot of ignorance among the white folks that he talks to, and although he pushes back against that in-person and is even clearer in his text where they’re wrong, it’s disquieting to see the extent of the stubborn conviction behind such long-disproven claims (like the idea that the Civil War was fought over the noble ideal of states’ rights in the abstract or that the majority of enslaved persons were not treated cruelly by the class who bought, sold, whipped, raped, and orphaned them). Smith is remarkably empathetic with his interlocutors and notes for us how centuries of propaganda have shaped and cemented these narratives, but in reading over their insistent misconceptions, it is hard to imagine how we will ever get to a point of universal education and acknowledgement of such matters, let alone begin to seriously redress them.

If I have one complaint regarding this project, it’s that it feels designed to say big, important things about our society, and yet the author seems to place a great deal of emphasis on what a few particular presenters have had to say on the occasion of his appearance before them, reifying and enshrining their attitudes into more than perhaps they ought to be taken as. In my opinion, that sort of individualized and diary-like approach can sensationalize either a good or a bad experience when a more holistic representation might have proved more neutral. Still, this is altogether a strong and recommended read on race and racism in America.

[Content warning for racial slurs, lynching, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Luca (2021)

Movie #7 of 2022:

Luca (2021)

This Disney-Pixar adventure about an underwater creature who appears human when dry is probably unlikely to go down as an all-time classic, but it’s still charmingly fun. The coming-of-age storyline involves the hero first hiding and then embracing his true self alongside an older boy who shares his identity and outsider status in the face of family worries and a world prepared to hate them for it — which has strong queer undertones to me, though I understand the studio has officially denied that that was their intended reading. But even on a basic level of generic pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, it’s a good message for kids in the main audience to take in (along with the normalized appearance of a supporting character with just one arm, whose disability is never coded as villainy). I like how the two species respectively call one another sea monsters and land monsters, too, subtly emphasizing the ways language can frame Otherness as a threat.

The mid-century Italian setting adds some further distinctiveness to the affair, offering a locale that’s quaint, endearing, and hopefully only mildly offensive in its pasta-guzzling stereotypes. The low-stakes plot revolves around a bike race to show up a town bully, which is one of the reasons I wouldn’t say this is a must-see if you don’t have young children in your household yourself. But it’s a significant cut above the likes of Onward or The Good Dinosaur or the umpteenth Cars title, at least.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Book #55 of 2022:

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Author Claire North has written some of my very favorite novels, but this is one of her efforts that doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. The premise of the setting is sound: a post-apocalyptic future where holy priests try to recover digital records of the past, both to unlock the secrets of our lost technology and to learn more about who we were as a people before climate disasters wiped out our civilization. That has major A Canticle for Leibowitz vibes, which I love. Yet the slow-moving plot of a recruit for a criminal organization looking to foment revolution and the subsequent cat-and-mouse spy game / war story leaves me cold, in part because I never really feel like I understand what either the protagonist or any of the other characters are specifically aiming to achieve. He gets captured and released several times as the conflict lumbers along, but his motivation beyond his immediate survival is rather unclear, which makes it hard for me to remain invested as a reader. I appreciate the nonbinary representation, though!

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Book #54 of 2022:

The Black Box by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #16)

Another solid detective story — author Michael Connelly’s 25th book overall, released on the 20th anniversary of his original Bosch vehicle The Black Echo. Befittingly, this volume involves a cold case from two decades prior, of a foreign journalist found murdered in a Los Angeles alleyway during the Rodney King riots, when department resources were stretched thin. The investigation takes some unexpected turns, but it never quite kicks into higher gear as this series can do at its best. The copaganda elements are also a bit blatant this time around, with the protagonist unlawfully detaining a suspect, faking a search warrant, and laughing at a colleague for issuing bogus parking tickets to civilians who annoy him. I don’t need fictional officers to always follow proper procedure on everything, but it muddles Harry’s passion for justice to show him so blatantly abusing the power of his position this way at the expense of people’s rights. What’s the takeaway supposed to be here, especially in a novel that consciously evokes a notorious protest against police brutality?

But that’s a minor issue, and the plot for the most part is fine, keeping me in suspense as to how exactly the mystery would be solved after so long without any major breaks. This is far from the writer’s worst showing; I just know he can do better than this, on pretty much all fronts.

[Content warning for racism, rape, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

Book #53 of 2022:

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

This 2015 title offers a decent crash-course on the history of the region that became today’s country of Ukraine, although author Serhii Plokhy spends a bit too much time on the events of early eras, which in addition to their overall turbulence can sometimes seem more like legend and speculation than verified fact. Luckily it’s smoother sailing once we reach the seventeenth century about a third of the way through the text, and from there on the book presents an informative account of how the territory bounced between Russian/Soviet and Polish control before ultimately asserting its own independence in 1991.

I’m sure this narrative has been simplified and carries its share of biases that I’m ill-equipped to register, but it seems like a solid primer for understanding the forces behind the current (2022) conflict, from the extraordinary degree of antisemitism among the population to the ethnonationalist push for recognition and protection of Ukrainian sovereign identity on the world stage to the mutual grievances between this nation and Putin’s Russia. I certainly don’t feel like an expert on the local geopolitics now, but at least I’ve got more of a background for following the news, not to mention greater context for my Jewish family who emigrated to America in 1909 when my great-grandmother was 2. Learning about this area I’m distantly connected to has been long overdue on my part, and this was as good a place as any to begin.

[Content warning for antisemitic violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Back to Before by K. A. Applegate

Book #52 of 2022:

Back to Before by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #4)

The fourth and final Megamorphs volume opens in media res, with the bloody aftermath of a recent Animorph skirmish against the Yeerks. By this point in the wider franchise, we don’t need any specifics about that particular mission; we can simply see that it’s been a rough one. Jake in tiger morph is pinned beneath a Hork-Bajir corpse, staring at one of his own severed legs across the room. Tobias is lying stunned and crumpled, likewise buried amid the carnage. Marco has just recently demorphed from an almost-fatal neck slash. And a dying human Controller keeps repeating, “Help me. I’m so cold,” as the kids wearily pick themselves up and flee for home.

It’s a quick scene, but it really sets the stage for how brutal and bleak this adventure will be. That night, Crayak’s agent the Drode visits Jake and tempts him as the boy tosses and turns, unable to put the battle behind him and sleep. The offer is simple: grant those forces of destruction permission to rewrite reality so that Jake and the others never cut through the abandoned construction site and found a wounded Andalite prince who told them about the invasion and gave them the power to morph. Put this whole endless war out of mind and let it be someone else’s responsibility. In a moment of weakness, the team leader agrees.

Immediately, we return to the day of Animorphs #1 and watch that alternate timeline play out. It’s a fascinating what-if, drawing powerfully on our long familiarity with the characters and how they’ve developed under the stress of their grim resistance campaign. These versions of the teens are so young and carefree by contrast, but we can still recognize the kernel of strength and capability to them, particularly as they get caught up in the conflict regardless.

Well… not Tobias, I guess. Sadly, without circumstances leading him to become an Animorph and then a nothlit, he drifts away from his new friendship with Jake. Bullied in school and neglected by his family, he is an easy mark for the Sharing, the front organization for recruiting Yeerk host bodies. This is our most in-depth look at their cultish methods, and it’s eerie to see how effectively the program works on a loner like Tobias. He’s drawn in by the promise of community and joining something bigger than himself, and infested despite getting cold feet at the last minute. There’s no happy ending for him in this universe, and readers expecting a rescue will be in for an unpleasant surprise.

As for the other heroes, they — especially Cassie — are seeing occasional flashes of their former world, like her conviction that a hawk should be sitting in the rafters at her parents’ barn. But the major development comes when Ax, who in lieu of his recruitment in Animorphs #4 has freed himself from his sunken ship and journeyed up to the surface alone, appears in a local television studio to broadcast a warning about the alien oppressors to any humans willing to listen. That sets off alarms at the Sharing, and Jake, already suspicious of his brother Tom, follows him to the site only to observe him pull out a futuristic ‘ray gun’ and start blasting witnesses. (Earlier, Marco and Rachel see similar weapons after another time eddy briefly causes Visser One to appear before them. They’re shot at by her bodyguards as they pursue, in a fun instance of the blond mallrat realizing how much she enjoys the thrill of the chase and the life-or-death stakes. However, I personally appreciate that chapter more for the fact that Marco asks her out and she seems to accept, a vindication for every shipper who’s felt the possibility of romance in their regular prickly-yet-understanding dynamic.)

The butterfly effect of the new chain of events is interesting, with the Yeerks resorting to open warfare on humanity in a way they haven’t so far in the plot of the main novels. Lacking their morphing or their hard-won experience, our protagonists are even more outmatched than usual, and not all of them survive through the end of the title. Yet ultimately, they come close to dealing a huge blow against the invaders, by capturing the Blade ship with Ax and preparing to fire on the orbiting craft containing the majority of Yeerk reinforcements waiting in their pool. At that point the Drode huffily freezes time and ends the experiment, not because the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants would be an obvious atrocity — our babies’ first / latest war crime — but because he and his master have decided the odds are actually better for them back in the original reality.

It’s a bit of a narrative cheat, but only barely. This ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ gimmick was obviously never going to be a permanent shift even before folks started dying, and in my opinion, the trickster discovering that his gambit made things worse for his side is a fine way to end it. The detail that that victory and its steep cost were possible merely because Cassie is an anomaly whose sensitivity to the changing timeline helped disrupt the scheme is a clever wrinkle too — though maybe difficult to reconcile with stories such as Animorphs #11 or Megamorphs #3 — and I like the further reveal that Crayak’s adversary the Ellimist has understood that about the girl and foreseen everything playing out this way all along.

I don’t love how no one will clearly remember any of this happening, although that’s probably for the best for Jake and Tobias alike, but at least we the audience have gotten to see the characters prove their mettle all over again in a most unusual situation. It’s a strong what-if, one that demonstrates not just how everyone’s core self would remain the same absent the crucible of trauma they’ve endured, but also that even the worst of those experiences have saved lives and brought about possibilities that aren’t worth undoing. That’s a great note to end the multi-perspective blockbuster Megamorphs on, as the larger series itself winds down.

This volume: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 4 > 2 > 3 > 1

Book Review: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine

Book #51 of 2022:

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine

This volume is an expansion of the original New York Times Magazine article that was published to honor the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia, highlighting American history through a lens of anti-Black racism. It’s an important corrective to traditional texts, emphasizing the hostility and institutional roadblocks that African-Americans have continued to face from the white majority long after the era of outright slavery. Author Nikole Hannah-Jones and her collaborators do a great job of drawing concrete connections over time, explaining issues of racial inequality that persist today as the latest reflections of prejudices that literally predate our nation.

The project has ruffled conservative feathers, both for explicitly critiquing contemporary expressions of bigotry and for daring to impugn the character of figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln who are generally lionized in most historical accounts. In each case, however, the evidence of a particular person’s statements and actions is not really in question. The fundamental dispute seems to be whether it’s fair to emphasize negative elements that had previously been overlooked / dismissed in crafting the popular narratives of history, or whether that sort of approach is inherently divisive and dishonest. But as Howard Zinn would tell us, there is no such thing as a truly neutral historian. Everyone necessarily chooses which details of the past to include and reify, and the result here isn’t revisionist — it’s just an alternate perspective.

Overall, the book is solid and well-researched. I wouldn’t quite put it on the level with Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in terms of elaborating deep theoretical insights, and I personally haven’t gotten much out of the poetry and short fiction interludes that bracket the various chapters. But it’s a fine read with a message more people need to hear, and I would especially recommend it as a textbook for younger readers.

[Content warning for racial slurs, rape, and lynching.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko

Book #50 of 2022:

Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko (Raybearer #2)

2020’s Raybearer remains a strong debut, rich in #ownvoices West African-inspired worldbuilding that still feels distinctively a creation all of author Jordan Ifueko’s own, with flourishes of mild-melding polyamorous coteries a la Sense8 or Octavia Butler’s Patternists. But I actually think this sequel closing out the fantasy duology is even better than the premiere, following the heroine’s ascension to empress with the reasonable question: now what? As we quickly discover, she is horrified and haunted — quite literally — by the victims of her society’s success, and must navigate how to steer the nation in a more gentle direction opposed by the powerful forces who profit off the cruelty of the status quo. That’s a political intrigue that I’ve personally found more engaging than the parental issues dominating the previous volume, and it forms a solid backbone to the remainder of the series plot, culminating in a literal descent into the setting’s underworld to forge a more egalitarian future.

The diversity is also appreciated throughout; in addition to a cast with a variety of brown skin tones, there are multiple queer and disabled characters and frank conversations on consent, asexuality, and the right to have different needs met by different partners without feelings of hurt or shame. These topics are increasingly commonplace in the YA genre, but they’re always worth celebrating and seem particularly well-integrated into the storyline here. If the first book was all about navigating a traumatic childhood, this one thematically explores strategies of entering adulthood with healthier behaviors in place, even when that means setting aside an accustomed privilege or a comfortable lie. I’ve loved accompanying the protagonist on that difficult journey, and I look forward to seeing what her writer dreams up next.

[Content warning for classism, ableism, gore, and murder of children.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

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Book Review: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Book #49 of 2022:

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

There are fleeting moments in this contemporary novel that work for me, generally involving author Louise Erdrich’s #ownvoices observations of microaggressions towards Native Americans like herself. As a whole, though, it’s a very disjointed effort, especially after the coronavirus pandemic arrives halfway through the volume, followed by the George Floyd protest riots against police brutality. (I wouldn’t say it’s still too early to produce great fiction set in Covid times, but it’s definitely hard to grapple with those real traumas effectively when they’re situated as minor elements within a narrative. Such topics demand treatment at greater length for how they must necessarily derail the shape of any plot they’re otherwise interrupting.)

To the extent there’s a main story here, it concerns a bookstore employee convinced she’s being haunted by the ghost of a dead customer and the title she worries might have killed her. The tone is more magical realism than horror, however — a couple characters may or may not be immortal werewolves — and its interpretation is complicated by the protagonist’s history of hallucinations, although that’s never really addressed in the text. I’ve found her to be a frustrating character altogether aside from the reliable narrator question, from her odd insistence that she doesn’t know her own full name (despite using it on legal forms like her marriage license) to her incessant namedropping of books she’s read and liked, which plays as a weird and unmotivated brag, even for a reader who recognizes most of the references.

I felt similarly lukewarm about this writer’s earlier Future Home of the Living God, so while I understand that her Pulitzer Prize indicates some degree of talent that people are responding to, at this point I think I have to conclude that her style is just not a good match for what I’m looking for in my literature.

[Content warning for desecration of human remains.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott

Book #48 of 2022:

The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott

In this pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel, the author takes careful aim at classism and upward mobility, each of which was in a state of flux following the upheaval of the second World War. Writing in 1948, she paints a tragedy of a man whose self-sabotaging nature won’t let him improve his station, despite a few lucky breaks and his more sober efforts in that direction. Her version of the political thriller as he runs for a seat in Parliament is a British Gatsby in a way, a thematically pointed argument that people’s essence is defined by their birth and they are ultimately powerless to leave their assigned place in society — and doomed to misery if they try.

I don’t agree at all with that thesis, but it’s powerfully explored here, aided by a prickly bunch of characters and numerous allusions to classic works like Othello. The narrator is an interesting creation too; although he primarily exists in the narrative to describe his friend’s folly, his status as a wheelchair-bound invalid stockpiling pain pills for a perpetually-unrealized suicide adds a fascinating further lens of hopeless impotence to the affair. The ‘Mary Westmacott’ stories are rather obscure today compared to the mysteries released under her own name, but this is another indication of how some of the writer’s best work can be found there.

(I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen her mention someone being Jewish without detecting any antisemitism, too!)

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism, sexism, ableism, gun violence, and arranged marriage between cousins.]

★★★★☆

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