The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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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Book Review: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Book #121 of 2021:

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #6)

It’s always a joy to spend time with Murderbot, the increasingly-poorly-named security cyborg who has reluctantly come to care for the humans of its new home, even if it still mostly wishes they would leave it alone or at least not look it in the eyes so much. This novella, which technically takes place before the fifth volume of the series but can basically be picked up in either order, offers less of an existential threat to the protagonist than normal, and instead presents more of a conventional murder mystery for it to investigate. There’s been an element of noir-ish detective work to these stories all along, so the shift in that direction isn’t particularly jarring, and the result is a fun blend of sardonic misanthropy and futuristic police procedural, culminating in a fairly clever reveal at the end. I wouldn’t say it’s an essential outing in terms of any larger plot or character arc, but it’s another great read from this familiar and endearingly distinctive viewpoint.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson

Book #120 of 2021:

Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson

Short even for a novella and with somewhat generic characters and plot, this piece reads more like a proof-of-concept for its setting than a full story, especially by the standards of author Brandon Sanderson’s usual stellar output. The basic idea is a neat spin on the Star Trek holodeck — wherein police use futuristic technology to recreate an entire day in their city and enter it to gather evidence that they couldn’t at the time — and horrific in its abuses, like the cop heroes killing or romancing someone under the reasoning that the person is only a fake copy whose real counterpart will never know. (There’s thankfully no mention of rape, but it’s all too easy to imagine that level of monstrosity as well, given the literal murders we see nonchalantly carried out against the manufactured duplicates who believe they actually exist.)

Still, the action itself is a bit rote and I don’t find the final twist(s) to be particularly effective, so in general it feels as though the core premise could have been better served. If nothing else, the venture seems missing a crucial step of the protagonists or anyone else realizing just how invasive the whole setup is. It’s not a bad work overall for its length, with the writer’s talents papering over some of the weaker elements, and I think I might be more charitable if I had encountered the title as part of a larger collection. But as a self-contained hardcover release, it’s sadly a little flat.

[Content warning for ableism. And disclaimer: I’m Facebook friends with this author.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

Book #119 of 2021:

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy (Danielle Cain #1)

The setting to this supernatural horror novella is a lot of fun, offering a sort of queer punk commune made up of squatters and/or idealistic radical leftists who are noticeably less common in fiction than in real life. I also really enjoy how the story’s themes reinforce that atmosphere, meditating on the abuse of power and potential for accountability and redress in a would-be utopian anarchist society. One of my favorite modes for engaging with fantasy as a genre is to read its external signs of magic as a reflection or expression of character, so the idea of an undead animal spirit guarding the lawless settlement and mindlessly executing anyone it deems a threat strikes me as an apt way to explore the tensions inherent in that kind of flat social hierarchy. The demonic presence merely embodies the underlying problem of how to protect a community without undue imposition on the freedoms of its members.

Or if you’d like, this is the tale of a drifter looking into her friend’s suicide, who winds up uncovering some spooky business at his old stomping grounds and has to decide whether it’s worth sticking around to help set things right. I’m not sure where the series will take this protagonist next, and as with many works of this length, I think this particular adventure might have been stronger as a full-fledged novel. But it’s a neat ride with a diverse cast and an overall ethos that I’ve found quite appealing.

[Content warning for police violence, gore, panic attacks, and mention of rape and domestic abuse.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

Book #118 of 2021:

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this volume, especially after not really caring for author Daniel Defoe’s more famous Robinson Crusoe. This later book also lacks a lot of the fundamentals that I typically look for in a novel, like a plot or consistent characters, and it’s not even clear whether it was intended or initially understood to be fiction. (The nameless narrator talks of witnessing the outbreak of 1665 as an adult firsthand, when the writer would have been a child then, but there’s some indication that he was merely editing the journals of his uncle and other contemporary observers.)

The overall accuracy of the piece is still a bit of an open question, but it’s a fascinatingly comprehensive view of the epidemic, with many items that ring with particular verisimilitude to a reader in 2021, a year into our own COVID-19 crisis. In London of that time, people were baking their own bread to avoid going into crowded markets, canceling public events like stageplays and bear-baitings, and even using contact-free delivery to receive goods at a distance. Gathering in taverns was discouraged, and certain industries were devastated by the inability to conduct normal business, with the poor requiring increased charity and government assistance to make up the deficit. Meanwhile some folks loudly protested that they didn’t need to take special precautions as they were perfectly healthy themselves, even though it was generally impossible to tell the ill from the well on sight.

The differences are striking, too. Lockdown orders were stricter than anything we’ve seen, with entire households forcibly barred and guarded to contain the sick inside — a contentious and oft-defied measure that the scribe worries may have done more harm than good. And of course, the populace as a whole experienced death and loss of loved ones on a scale that’s nearly unimaginable, and the scenes of mass burials and daily corpse collection offer a chilling reminder of how our present catastrophe could have been worse.

Defoe was writing in a less scientific age, but he pushed back against charlatans selling unproven cures and those who claimed that the bubonic plague was the spontaneous wrath of God upon an individual sinner rather than a natural ailment that spread (somehow) from person to person. He may not have known what we do today about viral contagions, but his outlook is pretty modern with a lot of key resonance over the centuries.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Blood Work by Michael Connelly

Book #117 of 2021:

Blood Work by Michael Connelly

This 1998 novel is one of those Michael Connelly crime thrillers that’s not technically a Harry Bosch story, but still takes place in that same L.A. setting with a few shared characters. It also introduces protagonist Terry McCaleb, a former FBI agent who later features in the detective’s adventures proper. Here he’s drawn back from medically-mandated retirement after a heart transplant to look into the murder of the woman whose organ he received, and to whom he thus literally owes his life. It’s a solid procedural mystery, especially following an interesting development in the second half of the text.

On the other hand, the hero makes a few frustrating decisions that guarantee his off-the-books investigation won’t be able to aid in an actual criminal prosecution, as well as a few leaps of intuition that feel less grounded in fact than his early work on the case. The limitations of his post-surgical care seem to vanish as the plot goes on too, and a would-be dramatic climax ultimately comes off as a bit rote. These issues don’t sink the book, which is largely fine overall, but they keep it from achieving the classic status it might appear headed for at one point.

[Content warning for gun violence, incest, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

Book #116 of 2021:

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

This latest novel from international bestseller Fredrik Backman has been getting his usual rave reviews, but it’s a bit of a misfire for me. Although the author often aims for profound observations on the human condition, too many of them here feel either overly broad or unduly negative towards the younger, more online generation (an issue shared with his recent parenting memoir). I also have difficulty connecting with the ensemble of bumbling characters, especially as their contrived chance relations to one another keep piling up.

The weird thing is, this should be the Backman book I like the best, since its twisty heist plot of a bank-robbery-turned-hostage situation-turned-case-of-the-vanished-suspect seems way more my cup of tea than, say, a lonely old bigot or the junior hockey league of Beartown. But the heart I’ve most enjoyed in his writing turns out to be in short supply, resulting in a technically-proficient but hollow read.

[Content warning for suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Broadchurch, season 1

TV #41 of 2021:

Broadchurch, season 1

Like any good mystery, this series derives its power not from the hook of its whodunnit alone — the case of a young boy found murdered on the shore of a quiet British beach town — and all the ensuing twists, but from the rich character histories that come out over the course of the investigation. With spirited performances from a talented cast (including plenty of familiar faces from Doctor Who and Game of Thrones), the season quickly gets us invested in this small community and its web of hidden connections, although some of the red herrings are a little silly and it’s frustrating how many residents lie to the detectives when they have no germane reason to do so.

Likewise, while I’m glad the killer is caught at the end of this debut year, the ultimate identity of the culprit feels very arbitrary to me, with not enough clues ahead of time even subtly pointing in that direction. The reveal itself is meaningful for the way it will reverberate throughout the ensemble going forward, but it’s less satisfying an answer to the core question than I would have expected from everything built up in the first seven episodes. I’m quite curious how the rest of the program will play out, now that the main business here has concluded.

[Content warning for statutory rape / mention of child molestation.]

★★★☆☆

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