The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don’t) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford

Book #130 of 2021:

How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don’t) Say About Human Difference by Adam Rutherford

This 2020 title is somewhat misleading, since author Adam Rutherford is not an expert on antiracist engagement, and even he admits that most people who espouse open bigotry do not appear receptive to evidence-based rebuttals. However, as a leading geneticist, the writer is able to lay out the known facts (and outstanding questions) about human genetic diversity and its intersection with the perceived category of race. The result is a gem of science communication, simultaneously thorough and easy for a layperson to follow.

I thought I already had a basic grounding in this subject from my college anthropology days — race is more a social construct than a biological trait, and so on — but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much remains to be said on the matter, and how exactly we can determine that apparent racial traits are due to cultural upbringing and self-identified membership over strict inheritability, from athletic prowess to performance on IQ tests. Simply put, those popular ideas about some particular group having a natural talent for some particular skill or occupation are faulty, and the author skillfully illustrates how these stereotypes bear no actual connection to anything passed along at birth.

Rutherford has a gift for explaining the weird and the counterintuitive about genetics too, like how children can end up with different-colored eyes, hair, or even skin tone than either parent, or how modern descendants from a common ancestor as recent as the eighteenth century can nevertheless be genetically unrelated to one another due to the necessary genomic loss in every successive generation. He also touches on how DNA testing services misrepresent their findings to consumers (no, you are not X% of a specific nationality!), and how anyone’s extended family background should be diagrammed not as a tree so much as a closed loop, with certain individuals occupying multiple nodes (such as the same great-great-great-grandparent on various sides). And of course, he addresses how there has always been contact and sexual reproduction across supposed racial boundaries, giving all of us a more complex heritage than any eugenicist would want to admit.

In all likelihood, this book will not, in fact, equip you to successfully convince a racist that their beliefs are hokum, and I’m disappointed by the name to that effect, which I assume the publisher has given the work. But it is a fantastically accessible introduction to the best contemporary understanding on why race is not genetic and other issues of heritability, for any readers looking for such a primer.

[Content warning for racism and antisemitism.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

Book #129 of 2021:

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #12)

This 1935 story, also published as Death in the Air, is an entertaining, quasi-locked-room whodunnit: a murder that takes place on a passenger plane, although most of Poirot’s follow-up investigations and discoveries are conducted back on the ground. I especially like the mystery novelist character whom author Agatha Christie uses to poke fun at herself and her fellow practitioners of the genre, and the added dose of realism in how poor all the witness memories turn out to be. As usual, the detective’s focus on motive — or as he puts it, who benefits from the crime — helps guide the way to a solution, but there are ample red herrings of variable plausibility obscuring the clues along the way. It’s a fine caper overall, and would probably be a good introduction to the writer / series for anyone unfamiliar.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Shadow and Bone, season 1

TV #42 of 2021:

Shadow and Bone, season 1

It took me a couple episodes to get fully on-board with this YA literary adaptation, but I believe that’s largely down to the incorrect assumptions that I brought to the experience. All of the promotional materials that I had seen for the show seemed to be implying that this season would adapt the first volume of Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy alongside its spinoff sequel Six of Crows, and that’s… not entirely accurate. The backstory involving Nina and Matthias is taken straight from that latter title, but for the rest of the scoundrels in the heist gang, we’re instead given a brand-new plot that incorporates them into Alina’s narrative from the novel Shadow and Bone.

And that’s perfectly reasonable, and ends up working surprisingly well! But until I realized I was watching a prequel, I was feeling very frustrated at how the writers were seemingly changing all of the significant events of Six of Crows to shoehorn the two timelines together. Once I let go of that personal hangup, I was able to enjoy the Kaz, Jesper, and Inej thread as a fun prologue to their familiar adventures. I think the overall series should work fine for viewers who haven’t read any/all of the books too; there are few moments that strike me as under-explained or confusing throughout.

Anyway! The program itself is a thrilling fantasy saga set in a land inspired by czarist Russia, and except for the disappointing choice to use mostly British accents, I’d actually say it tells a more distinctive and entertaining story than the version on the page (even setting aside the Ketterdam crew who are, as I expected they’d be, my favorite element). An unnatural and monster-ridden stretch of darkness has split the country in two, and a young woman discovers she possesses a rare magical gift that could drive it away but that also puts a target on her back from several directions.

Updating the heroine to be of mixed-race heritage is a smart production decision that adds greater nuance to her character, although it’s a bit weakened by then never showing any other people who are Shu (Chinese, roughly). I hope that’s fixed in the following year, which Netflix hasn’t officially announced but will presumably cover everything from Siege and Storm in addition to the remainder of Six of Crows. The casting is basically perfect — though I wish it had included an early appearance of Sturmhond as well — so it would be a real shame if we don’t get to see these actors tackle the stronger material ahead. But this is a really great start to launch the affair.

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

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant

Book #128 of 2021:

Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant (Rolling in the Deep #1)

A short but effective creature feature, following a deep-sea expedition looking to capture or manufacture footage of mermaids for a schlocky TV production. The last thing they expect is to find the real animals who inspired the myths, nor less that they’d turn out to be dangerous predators that swiftly cut through the crew, leaving no one alive. (That’s not a spoiler; it’s one of the first things we learn in the book.) Author Mira Grant includes some welcome disability representation, and she taps into the creepiness of what might be lurking unknown in ocean depths, but the characters are too many and too unremarkable to keep straight, especially in audiobook format. I’m able to generate little attachment to any of them, which makes watching their slaughter a more dispassionate affair than it could have been.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #127 of 2021:

The One Tree by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2)

A thoroughly excellent nautical fantasy, fleshing out the wider landscape of this setting, adding fascinating new wrinkles to the series lore, and finally introducing readers to beings like the sandgorgons and Elohim who had been briefly mentioned in earlier volumes. Like in similarly seabound titles — both The Odyssey and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader come to mind — the action can be somewhat episodic as the ship travels from crisis to crisis and port to port, but the mission of the quest forms a strong enough throughline to link everything together.

As usual for author Stephen R. Donaldson, the work is a success on — at least — two different levels. First, it’s simply a great plain adventure, a swashbuckling and magical tale in a vividly wondrous world. One of this writer’s gifts is in finding strategies for his creations to reason their way out of predicaments, turning apparent liabilities into assets and playing opposing forces off one another when all else fails. It’s a thrilling device to pit the protagonists against awesomely daunting foes without them ever growing too overpowered (although they continue to get more capable in general, to delightful effect). In the context of this novel, that allows for some truly momentous climaxes which register among the best in the overall Thomas Covenant saga.

Simultaneously, however, Donaldson is exploring the rich interior psychology of his (anti-)heroes, resulting in a much better showcase for Linden Avery and justification for her presence in the Land than her premiere in the previous book. Haunted by guilt over the traumatic deaths of her parents, the doctor is obsessed with the question of how to wield power responsibly without giving in to her inner darkness or violating anyone else’s personal autonomy. That tension is more straightforward than her companion’s old unbelief, but it’s just as compelling and just as distinctive within this sort of story. Hardly any voices in genre fiction are delving into these philosophical issues of free will, nonviolence, and consent yet today, let alone among this author’s original contemporaries.

Also striking is — 40-year-old spoiler alert — the downbeat ending to this piece, a somber affair that threatens to render the whole venture pointless were it not for the character growth and lessons learned along the way. The journey culminates in failure and significant loss, undercutting our expectations and casting genuine uncertainty across the larger plot of the Sunbane era. It’s a bold gambit that succeeds for me, and sets up the highest stakes for the conclusion of the trilogy to come.

[Content warning for ableism, depression, euthanasia, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang

Book #126 of 2021:

The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang (Tensorate #1)

Some fantasy stories invent cool worldbuilding but then neglect to tell a compelling narrative within that space; others do the opposite and offer a rousing plot amid a generic landscape of medieval castles and kings. This novella, I am happy to report, is one of those rare titles to excel on both fronts. Set in a land inspired by imperial China that’s suffused with a connective magic sort of like Star Wars’s the Force, the tale is most striking for its treatment of gender. All children are raised as the neutral ‘they,’ declaring themselves to be either male or female if/when they feel it’s right, with court wizards on hand to make any physical changes as desired. The queerness in the text extends further as well, with individuals we’d classify in our world as gay and transgender, although comparable labels (and bigotry towards them) do not appear to exist in this realm.

The action follows a pair of twins, the youngest scions of the empress, as they come of age, seek different paths, yet realize they must each in their own way take a stand against their mother’s cruelty. It’s a work overflowing with ideas — which I look forward to pursuing into the sequels — yet it never feels difficult to understand or truncated by its shorter length. I’ve had a blast reading this debut from #ownvoices nonbinary author Neon Yang, by far my favorite of the four entries bound together in Tor.com’s “In Our Own Worlds” LGBTQ+ collection.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois

Book #125 of 2021:

The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois

I have a lingering childhood fondness for this funny little title, which taps into a Roald Dahl type of whimsical inventiveness in showing off its various ideas. (My favorite: the bed of ‘continuous sheets’ that cranks a conveyor belt to wash and dry last night’s section while rolling in a clean segment to replace it.) As a novel, though, it’s a bit lacking in plot or interesting characters, being generally more interested in explaining the details of its island utopia than in actually developing a solid storyline around them; the protagonist is present just long enough to be told about everything before disaster strikes. There’s also a distinct male and colonialist bias to its viewpoint, reflecting both the 1883 setting and the 1947 publication date.

It’s a fun book if you can set all that aside — as younger readers likely can — and its premise of the wealth and technological wonders hidden on Krakatoa prior to its famous eruption is a delightful bit of old-timey pastiche, sort of like The Swiss Family Robinson crossed with Disney-Pixar’s Up. I don’t know that I can honestly call it great today, but it holds up pretty well for what it’s aiming to do.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Book #124 of 2021:

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

An interesting bildungsroman of a fictional heroine, told in the context of the real history of the compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first edition around the turn of the twentieth century. Author Pip Williams begins from the observation that neither the female staff who worked on that lexicography project nor the sort of words that were favored by women have been as present in mainstream accounts as their male counterparts, and so she strives to provide / imagine a voice for them herein.

That’s a great aim, and I like the middle of this book just fine, but the start and end of the tale are somewhat iffy. The protagonist’s early interest in assembling the entries excluded by her father’s editing team strikes me as writerly artifice rather than something a child would actually do, and when the plot later intersects with the British suffragette movement and World War I, it feels like a series of tropes I’ve seen too many times elsewhere, with not enough of an original spin to justify the inclusion. The overall effort never quite gets tedious, but it certainly trends in that direction via a few overwrought feints at pathos.

Williams has clearly done her research on the period, but at the end of the day, I think I would have preferred a nonfiction summary of her findings, slim though it might be in parts, to the narrative framework she’s grafted upon it for this novel.

[Content warning for sexism, racial slurs, corporal punishment, postpartum depression, death of a parent, and death of a spouse.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

Book #123 of 2021:

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

There’s a lot to enjoy in this detail-heavy novella of queer life (and particularly its romance of two women) in 1940 San Francisco, but I wish it would provide greater connective tissue between its chapters — and that the minor fantasy element at the start and end of the text had been better incorporated throughout. Such issues keep me at a distance from the story, as do the many bald explanations from characters to describe their society. The whole venture ends up feeling more didactic than immersive, and with author Ellen Klages not shying away from the brutality of the time, the ratio of pain to payoff is not quite to my liking. I could easily imagine other readers loving this title, but it just never gets there for me.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, domestic abuse, sexual assault, police violence, and a variety of slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

Book #122 of 2021:

Amelia Unabridged by Ashley Schumacher

Early on in this book, there’s the death of a friend who’s like a sister to the protagonist, and it’s to author Ashley Schumacher’s credit that she’s able to make readers feel that loss so sharply when we haven’t known either character for long. Unfortunately, however, the story that unfolds after that point really tries my patience and credulity, as the heroine meets and falls instantly in love with her favorite author. (He’s a teen just one year older than herself, so there’s not a weird age difference, but it still seems as though the power differentials and tensions inherent to that collision of fandom with a budding relationship are left totally unexamined, to my intense discomfort.) Simply put, I’ve had a hard time investing in this romance, especially given the writer’s tendency to hit the same metaphors over and over again, like the feeling of a line drawing the two souls together or the imagined vision of whales swimming through the sky during moments of surging emotion.

I remain struck by the novel’s treatment of grief, and I think there’s a version of the overall plot buried somewhere in here that I could have enjoyed, but I regret to say that I’ve been largely unmoved by the majority of the actual text.

★★☆☆☆

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