The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

Book #83 of 2021:

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

This 2007 title is a genre throwback in all the worst ways. It’s more interested in the scientific mechanics of time travel than in its flat characters, the women seem only there as objects of sexual wish-fulfilment, and the accumulated plot holes are pretty egregious by the story’s end. I’m troubled by the treatment of the protagonist’s Judaism as well; although I believe author Joe Haldeman is also Jewish, his hero’s disinterest in the news that a future theocratic America has no Jews at all (or in the unmentioned possibility of preventing the Holocaust when he finds himself stuck in the early 20th century) doesn’t sit right with me. If the surrounding narrative were stronger we could closely examine that element for nuance and subtext, yet since it’s instead just another flaw in a work full of them, I can’t say that it’s worth the effort.

Two stars for the entertainment factor of the first half of the book, but overall this is a novel that goes off the rails before it can find its center and never really recovers after that.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 2

TV #30 of 2021:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, season 2

I’m somewhat less impressed by this second outing of Deep Space Nine than I was by its debut year. The elements are all there for this show to tell a deeper, more serialized narrative than any previous Star Trek iteration — which jetsetted around instead of staying enmeshed in one system with all its local difficulties — but after a promising start, a lot of that potential is stalling out on the plot and character front so far. And although episodic fiction can still be worthwhile, it’s not what first excited me about this title, and here it’s generally not producing the franchise’s best individual hours either. (One of my major television pet peeves is when a main cast member somehow falls in love with a guest star over the course of their single appearance, and that happens on three or four separate occasions this season.)

It’s not all bad, and a few installments such as “Necessary Evil” and “The Wire” really showcase the program’s strengths along with its differences from The Original Series and The Next Generation. But this feels like an overall story that could be so much richer than anything I’ve seen yet, and I’m getting a little impatient for everything to click into place.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Killing Eve, season 2

TV #29 of 2021:

Killing Eve, season 2

Although the effect isn’t felt right away, this season ends up representing a major step down from the show’s electrifying debut. As often happens in such cases, a change in showrunners is likely to blame — and I wonder if the outgoing Phoebe Waller-Bridge had already begun work on the first few scripts for the year, given how they are noticeably stronger than what follows. Eventually, however, the plot becomes a complete mess, as do the basic character motivations propping it up.

I’m reminded of late-stage Orphan Black, another BBC America production which would similarly stick people in a scene together simply because they’d been a fun pairing in the past, without necessarily thinking through the implications of their respective histories or articulating a good understanding of what each might reasonably be trying to accomplish now. When you lose sense of your protagonists like that, it’s so much harder for an audience member to stay invested, or to forgive any overly-contrived story developments. (The last few rounds of Dexter come to mind as well, and not only from some hokey serial killer shenanigans.)

I’m not ready to quit this series just yet, in part because the performances are largely still entertaining, and in part because it apparently swaps head writers again after this stretch, switching from Emerald Fennell to Suzanne Heathcote next and then to Laura Neal in the forthcoming final run. It’s rare to get that sort of anthology approach to a serialized narrative — and cool that a woman is in charge every time — but I hope it also means this sophomore effort is a clumsy aberration and not a sign that the program has irreparably lost its way.

[Content warning for gore and homophobia.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

Book #82 of 2021:

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

An interesting account of a 21st-century expedition to a pre-Columbian ruin, although the whole venture is pretty thoroughly drenched in colonialism and an outdated Indiana Jones style of archaeology, in which westerners brave the ‘unexplored’ ‘wilderness’ in search of ‘forgotten’ civilizations with little input from either indigenous populations or actual scientific experts. The really frustrating thing about the book is that author Douglas Preston goes out of his way to emphasize that he’s aware of this line of critique; he simply dismisses it out of hand and then continues to regale us with his adventures through the Honduran rainforest.

But it’s an educational read for what it is, and the closing sections on historical and future pandemic outbreaks have certainly proven apt, even though our current COVID-19 health crisis is unrelated to the Leishmaniasis bug which struck the writer and his team. I wish there were more careful research and less macho survivalism and exoticizing of the subject, but as a work of popular nonfiction, it gets its general points across.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Faye, Faraway by Helen Fisher

Book #81 of 2021:

Faye, Faraway by Helen Fisher

For the most part, this novel (published in certain countries under the alternate title Space Hopper) is simply a lovely story about a woman time-traveling back to visit with the mother who passed away when she was a young girl. I appreciate how the narrative doesn’t try to play coy and maintain the possibility that everything happening is only a dream, and although there’s minimal plot here, I actually prefer the slower portions where the characters can just talk and enjoy one another’s company to the showier moments of drama that sporadically pop up. The method of transportation to the past is neat too — almost like something out of The Twilight Zone, where an inexplicable artifact generates wonders but is in perpetual danger of being destroyed and ending the miracle.

I do have a few issues with this text, from a stray racial slur to the red flags of jealousy and borderline-abusive behavior in the heroine’s husband which go largely unaddressed. I wondered at one point if debut author Helen Fisher were aiming to problematize the idea of her protagonist’s happy home life as even worth returning to, but that thread never really gets pulled to my satisfaction. He’s just a jerk whom Faye loves and gaslights herself over, accepting his criticisms as though they’re remotely valid when she could rightly be standing up for herself and what’s important to her instead. That’s frustrating in an audience identification figure, but it’s thankfully a minor aspect of the book. Overwhelmingly, the focus is on this strange connection between two women decades apart, and I’ve got a feeling it’s those quiet scenes I’ll remember more than the selfish oaf.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Community, season 5

TV #28 of 2021:

Community, season 5

This is a year for the sitcom that’s clearly in transition, with the return of showrunner/creator Dan Harmon after a season off, the departure of two original cast members, and a few necessary tweaks to the general premise. The solution to the question of how one still tells a story about community college beyond graduation is to bring one character back as a teacher (a strong writing choice), make the rest re-enroll as students (a weaker one), and reconfigure the erstwhile study group into the Save Greendale Committee (somewhere in between, and definitely metatextual given the constant threat of cancellation hanging over this series).

We already have a wider focus than the classroom with Jonathan Banks joining as a disgruntled professor and John Oliver reprising his similar old role from the first two years, and although neither of them ultimately reappears for the show’s final stretch on Yahoo! Screen, for now they change up the usual meeting rhythms nicely. I almost wish the committee could have been composed entirely of faculty and alumni, since there’s not a lot of payoff to the flimsy idea of immediately restarting one’s post-secondary education, but as a bridge from the title’s roots to what it would need to become going forward, this all just about works. While it falters a little in the long view due to the network swap remixing things yet again, in a universe where this was followed by a few more shakes at NBC, I think Community’s later success would largely have season 5 to thank.

Unfortunately, that service to a potential future hinders the immediate narrative, and overall, this run is simply trying to do too much in too tight a space. It’s a notable improvement over the previous installment — which never quite earned the meanspirited “gas leak” comments that Harmon writes in here, but did struggle to consistently channel his vision into productive new outlets — yet is not as brilliant as the early stuff either. I’d hesitate to label any of the 13 episodes herein as all-time classics, and even the typically lovely high-concept experimentation in format and genre-hopping seems to repeat a lot of the program’s proven tricks, rather than attempt anything truly distinctive. It remains a fun comedy with a lot of built-in viewer fondness at this point, but it’s hardly as searingly exciting to watch as it once was.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

Book #80 of 2021:

The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

A fine but largely unremarkable collection of prequel tales to author Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (which I just realized I finished reading two years ago today). It’s an early look at a few familiar characters like Fflewddur or Dallben, coupled with some unrelated fables loosely based on Welsh mythology that further flesh out the legendary past of the series. It’s also very short — about half the length of one of the novels, which are not exactly epic tomes themselves. So it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but there’s also nothing here that I’d consider particularly essential to the saga. Check it out if you really love these books, I guess, but most readers can probably safely give the volume a pass.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry by Harry Kemelman

Book #79 of 2021:

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry by Harry Kemelman (The Rabbi Small Mysteries #2)

A disappointing follow-up to Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. It’s still neat to see a Jewish author incorporating authentic lived details into mainstream fiction — a rarity today, let alone back in 1966 — but whereas the first novel generally either leaves these things to be understood by context or spells them out for the benefit of the Christian characters, this sequel is packed full of people explaining fairly basic concepts to folks who would clearly already know that information. It also bears a lot more unfortunate hallmarks of its era, from a frankly racist skepticism towards the ongoing Civil Rights Movement to disparaging remarks about patrilineal Jews and those who convert into the faith. (The actual mystery element is a little dull too, although that wasn’t exactly a core strength of the series debut either.) The original volume was appealing enough that I might eventually return to give the next one a try, but I’m pretty thoroughly underwhelmed by this second attempt.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Justified, season 3

TV #27 of 2021:

Justified, season 3

Structurally, I can admire the way that this season brings its various story threads crashing together at the end, but I’m increasingly thinking that the larger series is just not a great fit for me. Even setting aside the copaganda aspects and the fact that the program continues to invite viewers to root for characters like Boyd and Dewey who are literal neo-Nazis (with the tattoos and backstory to show for it, even when the current writing seems to forget), I don’t feel as though I really understand anyone’s motivation at this point.

These criminal elements all theoretically hate and distrust one another, yet they repeatedly accept clear misinformation at face value and walk away from easy opportunities to kill their purported enemies. Our deputy marshal protagonist and his fellow law enforcement types get into such standoffs as well, which are tense in the moment but raise the obvious question of why hardly anyone is ever arrested even after pulling a gun on an officer or committing some other infraction in plain sight.

And I get it! There wouldn’t be much of a show — or the writers would have to work harder, at least — if those kinds of repercussions actually applied, and newcomer Neal McDonough wouldn’t have nearly the opportunity to chew the scenery that he’s given here. But the levels of plot armor are more than a little absurd, where no matter how delightful the flowery Kentucky threats grow, you know that practically everyone is leaving each scene alive. On a micro-level of character interactions I still tend to enjoy this title alright, but anytime I zoom out to consider the bigger picture, it all falls apart rather quickly.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, and racism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong

Book #78 of 2021:

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights #1)

This is a very loose retelling of Romeo and Juliet, pitching the star-crossed lovers as the respective heirs to two rival gang families in 1926 Shanghai. They’re also exes with complicated lingering feelings for one another rather than current sweethearts, with their secret relationship mostly confined to the novel’s backstory. Oh — and they’re brought back together again to investigate a mysterious plague that’s turning people across the city into monsters and causing them to rip their own throats out in a bloody public spectacle.

As one might imagine, the ensuing plot is pretty different from Shakespeare’s version of events, to the point where the similar character names can be more distracting than enriching to the reading experience, and I almost wish author Chloe Gong had veered even further away from those parallels. I also have a little difficulty in accepting or relating to teen characters who have each proudly and remorselessly executed traitors and opponents in the past, although I grant that that isn’t the most unrealistic element to this title.

Still, the overall concept has a certain delirious fun to it, and the book is packed with #ownvoices observations on racism and colonialism as well as some neat queer representation on the margins. It’s a great and promising start from a young debut writer, published as she finishes her senior year of college. I’m not sure that I necessarily need to return to this series for the announced sequel, but Gong is clearly a talent to watch going forward.

[Content warning for insects, body horror, and drug abuse.]

★★★★☆

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