The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #256 of 2021:

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

As in the detectives’ respective novels, the five stories in this collection about Hercule Poirot are of variable quality, the one about Miss Marple is a touch stronger, and the two about Parker Pyne are a bit worse. (The latter’s whole schtick is that he can effortlessly read people via sexist and racist stereotypes and sets up confidence schemes to trick his clients into fixing their own problems. When he does solve a mystery, it’s typically via key evidence that he knows and we don’t, which doesn’t yield the most satisfying reading experience.) There’s also a ninth unrelated entry, mostly interesting for the anonymous narrator and the supernatural element that author Agatha Christie generally eschews.

On average these items are on the weaker side, and the book suffers further for the disjointed feeling of the assortment overall. Were these just the latest works that the writer hadn’t already published elsewhere in 1939? They don’t appear to have any special commonalities suggesting a shared group identity, particularly given the three different series that they draw upon. Ultimately I would say that the title can safely be skipped.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and suicide.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

Book #255 of 2021:

The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

So far Cribsheet is still my favorite data-driven parenting title by economist Emily Oster, but this latest one is a solid self-help book for household organizing and thorny decision-making about raising kids particularly in the five-to-twelve-year-old range. As always, the author offers valuable scientific findings on the arena of dilemmas facing modern parents, from nutrition to screentime to homework to extracurricular activities. The good news is that these studies can be reassuring; the bad news is that they are often inconclusive, with Oster quick to point out that correlation doesn’t imply causation. (Are children who sit down for family dinners each night healthier on average because of that communal experience, or because families who are able to reliably make the joint evening meal happen tend to differ in other ways from those who can’t?)

There’s a lot of such vacillating in these pages, along with an unfortunate reliance on problematic rough measures like IQ, BMI, and standardized test scores without necessarily unpacking their known limitations. The occasional insights are legitimately great, though, and I especially like the idea of pre-planning with your partner — if you have one — to discuss priorities and maybe even craft a business-like mission statement for the house in advance of working through a problem together. Figuring out the big picture ahead of time so that smaller choices in the moment become easier if not essentially automatic strikes me as a really smart framework to adopt. But overall, this text probably could have been a lot shorter, as I’m not sure we need to be told on topic after topic that the experts simply don’t know the best approach.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2

TV #71 of 2021:

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2

Just like its initial run, a lot of the bits in this season of the sketch comedy show take weird and unpredictable turns by the end — which sometimes yields absolute hilarity, but more often produces a skit I only partially enjoy. There also continues to be a lot of angry shouting and awkward / cringe humor, which isn’t always my speed. Still, the series is definitely funny (and short) enough to keep watching, and I think the first episode of this year is probably the single best one yet for “Corncob TV” alone. Elsewhere, “Tammy Craps” is another highlight, and “Diner Wink” is an inspired use of a Bob Odenkirk cameo. Overall the program is a mixed bag, but gems like that make the weaker efforts worth it.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Book #254 of 2021:

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

This provocative title relates the current scientific consensus that most weight-loss programs of diet and/or exercise simply don’t produce long-term stable results for most users, explores the systemic way that our culture is organized around the assumption of smaller body sizes or access thereto, and shares some of the awful fatphobia regularly directed at author Aubrey Gordon as a fat woman herself. We pathologize people with figures like hers, assuming a moral failing, and legally discriminate against them in domains as varied as employment, healthcare, and housing. When they’re included as characters in popular fiction, it’s almost inevitably as sidekicks and comic relief dreamed up by skinnier writers.

On a personal level, Gordon describes how she gets subjected to street harassment (which she deems “fatcalling”) from random passersby who ridicule, curse, and threaten her, take pictures without her consent, and offer unsolicited advice on what they imagine to be her lifestyle. She’s even had strangers remove groceries from her shopping cart out of a misguided sense of patronizing benevolence. Worse yet, any later complaint about this behavior to well-meaning friends typically provokes defenses of the other party’s intentions and claims that she must have misunderstood the interaction.

The goal of this book is both to provide a window into such lived experiences and to advocate for ‘body justice’ — a step beyond the ‘body positivity’ movement, which is geared toward loving and accepting oneself and can still feel exclusionary to those at the upper end of the scale. The problem, Gordon notes, is not in her own physical form or her attitude regarding it, but rather in the structural ways she’s arbitrarily kept from full participation in society due to the values and assumptions of others. The resulting text is valuable for raising issues that many readers might not have realized, educating us on the fallacy of individual accountability for fatness, and bringing attention to our own unconscious biases.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Underground by K. A. Applegate

Book #253 of 2021:

The Underground by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #17)

On the one hand, raids on the Yeerk pool already seem like the most generic and frequent Animorphs plots by this point in the series. On the other hand, this is the novel that gives us a specific variety of oatmeal as a major weakness in the alien villains, a bizarre and unrepeated detail that I’m delighted has resurfaced as a bit of a meme among nostalgic readers today. The code phrase “I’d like a Happy Meal with extra happy” to access the new secret entrance to their base within a McDonald’s walk-in freezer is pretty great, too.

Yet despite the goofiness that that might imply, this is still a story that opens with a person’s suicide attempt, features the familiar dark scenes of body horror, claustrophobia, and near-drowning, and finds the child soldiers debating the morality of dumping an addictive and mind-altering substance into their opponents’ food supply. Our protagonists are tired and increasingly traumatized by their experiences, with Rachel feeling scared to rush in, Jake unsure of the best plan, and Cassie lacking an easy ethical answer. I also appreciate the sense of escalation here, as seen in the greater security measures that require more extreme actions and severe risks from the team to sneak back in and accomplish their mission.

(Plus the basic concept of the Kandrona feeding cycle, although not original to this book, remains an inspired choice by author K. A. Applegate, showing the Controller hosts regularly regaining their bodily autonomy only to beg and scream to no avail in the short window before being infested again by their revitalized captors. A typical body-snatching thriller would have the victims either subdued throughout or replaced entirely, but we’re never given that luxury of forgetting the innocent people underneath the enemy troops.)

Ultimately, three-out-of-five stars — “I liked it,” on the Goodreads scale — seems fair for this title, which is enjoyable enough but doesn’t really add anything to the larger mythos or serialized narrative or constitute much of a memorable stand-out adventure in its own right. It’s not bad, and is definitely worthwhile for the ensuing jokes online, but it’s hardly a classic of the franchise.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, ableism, and forced institutionalization.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Book #252 of 2021:

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Expanding on a viral New Yorker article, this short book from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares her experience with mourning her father, who passed away in June 2020. (He didn’t die of the coronavirus, but travel restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic kept her from flying home to Nigeria to be at her family’s side.) Despite the title, I think this volume works better as an ode to the man than an actual reflection on grief, and I particularly doubt it will become the definitive ‘death in the time of COVID’ memoir. Except for an early passage railing against the empty platitudes that people say to mourners, I’m not finding much insight into bereavement overall, just a portrait of a parent who was clearly deeply loved. Readers can draw their own links from that to the certain ache of his new absence, but the text rarely spells it out so explicitly.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker

Book #251 of 2021:

The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni #2)

This long-awaited sequel to 2013’s The Golem and the Jinni is another lovely piece of historical fantasy, following those two beings from Jewish and Arabian folklore as they navigate the next stages of their life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. This novel is even less plot-heavy than its predecessor, but the characters and their setting remain sharply drawn, and I trust author Helene Wecker a little more this time that the diverse narrative threads which initially seem unrelated will in fact weave together by the end. We return to the titular figures from the first book, but also Ahmad’s old flame (pun intended) Sophia, Chava’s former coworker Anna, and several new protagonists as well. Eventually the circle comes to include a female jinni / jinniyeh and a just-born male golem, whose experience proves radically different from that of the original pair.

It’s a tough story to summarize, unfolding over the decade and a half leading up to World War I, but the core of it involves a dawning realization of the cost of immortality, as these people’s human counterparts grow frailer and their own ageless features begin attracting suspicions around their respective ethnic communities. Mostly, though, such concerns are simply an excuse to revisit our familiar friends and fall deeply into this literary world of #ownvoices mythology once again.

[Content warning for gun violence, mention of sexual assault, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Narrows by Michael Connelly

Book #250 of 2021:

The Narrows by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #10)

This is one of the more serialized Harry Bosch adventures, at least of what I’ve read so far. Terry McCaleb, protagonist of Blood Work and the detective’s reluctant partner in A Darkness More Than Night, is dead. His widow suspects foul play, and asks Harry to look into it. That investigation soon intersects with Rachel Walling, one of the FBI agents from The Poet, whose titular serial killer foe has finally resurfaced. Bosch also has a curious exchange with a secretive woman named Jane, who seems likely to be the thief Cassie Black from Void Moon, even if he doesn’t realize it. These threads all link back to the disparate corners of this franchise, increasing the sense that they share a common continuity while making this novel accordingly less inviting for newcomers. I wouldn’t suggest anyone start the series here.

It’s another fine caper, though, brought down only by the villain’s nonsensically intricate schemes and the investigators’ own periodic foolhardiness. On several occasions they rush into a scene before it’s secure, compromising potential leads when there’s not really any urgent reason to do so. This isn’t one of those stories built around genius deductive skills, flashes of insight, or plot twists either; we instead mostly just follow the procedural evidence that eventually brings the heroes to the target who’s been stalking them in return. It’s exciting as a thriller, but not a sign of author Michael Connelly at his best.

[Content warning for kidnapping, gun violence, drowning, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #249 of 2021:

The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Gap Cycle #3)

After a curious series debut and a more promising immediate sequel, this third Gap volume lands somewhere in between, delivering a decent yet slightly perfunctory follow-up. As is often the case for the middle story in a larger saga, there are elements that feel as though they’re moving pieces into place for the endgame at the expense of crafting the best possible present adventure, and in classic Stephen R. Donaldson fashion, a lot of that involves dialogue-heavy scenes of characters reasoning their way through an argument to certain unexpected implications. These conversations are interesting to a degree, but it’s hardly the most riveting read absent much accompanying action, and the first half of the novel in particular seems to drag as a result.

Part of the problem is that the last book built its heroine Morn Hyland into quite a capable and intriguing figure, only for this one to sideline her for nearly its duration. We instead spend practically all of our time with either criminals like Nick Succorso and Angus Thermopyle — each an unrepentant rapist and murderer — or various executives of the United Mining Companies, waging a somewhat abstract and bloodless campaign of boardroom intrigue against one another. I assume those in the latter group are meant to represent the Norse gods in this loose retelling of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but without an existing familiarity with that nineteenth-century opera work, I’m largely indifferent to all their moves and countermoves so far, which appear impossibly distant from anything happening in the main plot.

Back among the mortals, I’m invested enough in where the narrative is headed, but not necessarily in the current focal protagonists. Angus has been transformed from villain to victim by this point, restrained by neural implant and subjected to abusive acts of rape and torture, but I find him pitiable rather than compelling, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get over my horror at seeing him forced to put burning cigarettes on his tongue and then swallow them whole. Readers can debate whether he deserves a redemption arc, given his own long list of crimes, but no one should be treated the way he is here. In Game of Thrones terms, he’s a Theon, and while I want his anguish to end, I’m not really rooting for him in general. Nick, of course, is even worse, and one of the rare genuine thrills in this title sees members of his crew finally banding together to stand up to the petty tyrant.

On reflection, I suspect enjoyment of this text may hinge on one’s ability to care about such awful people doing awful things to each other, which might just be a bridge too far for me. I love a dark genre piece and a good conflicted and flawed antihero, including Donaldson’s famous Thomas Covenant invention or Morn herself when she’s actually around and involved. But the dueling space pirates are not my favorite, and for now they’re playing too central a role in these events.

[Content warning for sexism, ableism, transphobia, and slavery.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

Book #248 of 2021:

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The latest Greek myth to be retold as an extended novel, in the way that Madeline Miller famously did for Circe in 2018. This effort doesn’t soar quite as much as that one in either the quality of its prose or its basic character and plot work, but it’s an interesting synthesis of the Ariadne legend from a variety of ancient texts, particularly for a reader like me familiar only with her role in the Minotaur story, giving the sacrificial tribute Theseus a ball of thread to help guide him through her father’s labyrinth. It turns out she had further adventures beyond there (at least, in certain tellings), and debut author Jennifer Saint has presented an encompassing narrative of them here.

The project stumbles for me in the passivity of the protagonist, who is acted upon by others — or overcome by powerful emotion, including some eye-rolling love at first sight — far more than she proactively makes choices to shape her own destiny. Her sister Phaedra exhibits a similar issue, in addition to their relationship missing the early childhood details that it would need for later scenes between the two to carry significant weight.

To an extent this problem reflects both the constraints of keeping faithful to the source material and the writer’s exploration of how women in such tales are made to pay for the crimes of men, but realizing that doesn’t render the book any more exciting to read. The eventual ending technically offers a degree of resolution, yet this too feels as though the heroine is largely a bystander in someone else’s epic journey.

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

★★★☆☆

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