The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make by Ron Lieber

Book #75 of 2021:

The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make by Ron Lieber

As the father to a toddler with a new sibling on the way, I picked up this 2021 title expecting simply a quick overview of the current options for various college saving plans. And it has that information, but so much more besides, from which factors affect “merit” scholarships to some of the reasons behind rising tuition costs (and the surprising fact that only a small percentage of families end up paying that full sticker amount) to the other aspects of a university like class size and mentorship opportunities that should be considered when deciding where to apply.

New York Times columnist Ron Lieber has spent decades researching and writing about financial matters, and I’ve found it particularly helpful to use his framework for thinking through what a student / household wants to get out of their choice for higher education. Do we place a greater value on the doors opened by the degree credential? On the actual course learning? On the residential experience and the bonds of kinship that it tends to form? Different people will weigh these elements differently, and as the author notes, the COVID-19 pandemic has scrambled the traditional calculus with the switch to online lessons and restrictions on social gatherings. Recognizing a moment like that may lead one towards certain schools and away from others, much as it may change how they market and price their offerings accordingly.

All in all, this has been an informative and thought-provoking read, and while I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to hold up until I’m navigating campus visits and application essays myself, I’d recommend it for any parents of prospective undergraduates today.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova

Book #74 of 2021:

Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova (Brooklyn Brujas #2)

Switching protagonists for a sequel is always a dicey maneuver, as it tends to lessen the audience’s investment and risk sidelining the very elements that may have drawn them back into the tale. In this case, for instance, one of my favorite things about the first Brooklyn Brujas novel is how its heroine comes to realize she’s fallen for her best friend — a girl who is mentioned a couple times in this next volume centering on Alex’s sister, but does not actually appear again.

I also just don’t like Lula as much, especially when she responds to a breakup early on in the text by casting a love spell on the boy who’s trying to leave her. (It’s ultimately unsuccessful, but leaves a sour taste in my mouth that keeps me from ever fully rooting for the character after that.) Another of her cantos later unleashes a horde of cannibalistic zombies on the city by mistake, so at this point, I think I’m siding more with the antagonists who insist that the Mortiz family’s magic is too dangerous to let go on!

Storywise, this adventure is well-told, and the #ownvoices touches to the series remain appealing. I’ll stick with it through the third and final book / daughter, but I’m disappointed that this one hasn’t wowed me on the same level as the original.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Community, season 4

TV #26 of 2021:

Community, season 4

I’d probably agree with the popular consensus that this is the weakest stretch of Community, but it’s honestly not that big a step down from the chaotic year before. Fans were reasonably upset that showrunner / creator Dan Harmon had been fired — not knowing then how abusive he was on set — and it’s true that this season doesn’t have many of those flashes of brilliance that often elevate his work. Nevertheless, I don’t know if the network needed to bring him back as they did afterwards rather than give the replacement team longer to perfect their own spin on the material. (And his later retcon that there was a gas leak on campus during these events is plain petty and cruel, although it’s almost a fair return for Abed’s deeply unearned line about making paintball cool again here.)

This run has its share of issues, but there’s also potential to stake out new ground, and in rewatching with some distance, I think a residual fondness for the study group helps paper over most of the flaws. The biggest ideas are the inherited Troy/Britta relationship and the Chang amnesia plot, and while neither ultimately amounts to much, it’s not like any romance or that problematic antagonist has ever been this program’s strongest element. The fact they flop is more noticeable with less of anything else going on, but that hardly destroys the show’s legacy. It’s still a solid three-star title, reliably delivering laughs and quirky scenarios without necessarily evidencing any grander ambitions or deeper insights. Heck, this should have been a poignant farewell moment for Pierce, whose actor Chevy Chase finally carried out his threat to quit, yet he’s missing half the time and his arc barely gets an afterthought of development at the very end of the finale.

So it’s not awful, but it really lacks follow-through, particularly in the sitcom’s trademark high-concept experiments. Under Harmon, the joke was never just that a community college was suddenly home to organized crime or a zombie outbreak or an animated holiday special or whatever; it was in how thoroughly the writers got inside those other genres and lovingly repurposed their familiar tropes. Season 4 by contrast veers closer to referential humor, as though it’s enough to simply turn the cast into Sesame Street style puppets for twenty minutes and not even try to filter that separate storytelling tradition via the distinctive Greendale weirdness.

With the length cut from 22 episodes to 13, this year flies by too quickly to make a firm impression for good or for ill, but the lingering sense is largely one of wasted possibilities and necessary ingredients present yet not quite clicking. I’m glad the series recovers and doesn’t ever get any worse, but this could have been significantly improved through a few rounds of rewrites and a clearer driving vision.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

Book #73 of 2021:

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

At this novel’s start, a dying man rouses for just long enough to utter the five words of the title (except in the US, where it was published as the blander-sounding The Boomerang Clue), thoroughly confusing the stranger who has found him lying at the bottom of a cliff. The plot which spins out from there is relatively fun, although this is definitely one of author Agatha Christie’s stories that only has the shape of a mystery and is not really something an enterprising reader could solve on their own. But the amateur leads are amusing in the Tommy and Tuppence fashion, especially if you can overlook the heavy role that luck and implausibly convincing disguises play in their adventure.

[Content warning for ableism, classism, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Later by Stephen King

Book #72 of 2021:

Later by Stephen King

This new novel from author Stephen King finds the horror master at his creepiest, blending a ghost story, a coming-of-age journey, and a crime thriller with the usual aplomb. Our child protagonist can see and speak with the recently deceased, not all of whom are necessarily friendly, and he gets caught up in a variety of misadventures both supernatural and earthbound as the loose plot unfolds. The connections to Pennywise from IT are fun too — although you won’t be lost if you haven’t read/seen that one yet — and while I don’t love the final twist, the chills throughout are well worth the price of admission. It’s vintage King, delivering familiar elements with just enough of an original spin to be great for newcomers and long-time fans alike.

[Content warning for incest, suicide, graphic violence, and police misconduct.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper

Book #71 of 2021:

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper

Struck by a lingering campus legend that she heard as a Harvard undergrad, author Becky Cooper began digging into the forty-year-old unsolved murder at its heart, sorting the facts from the mythic stature they’d acquired, following up on dusty leads, and after a further decade of effort, eventually prodding the police department to carry out new DNA testing and announce a suspect. The ultimate answer is far more mundane than the stories that generations of students had furtively passed along — many concerning a ritual slaying and a sinister professor who is still on staff today — but this book is as much about the life of those tales and the writer’s investigative process as it is about who actually killed Jane Britton.

Cooper raises several possible culprits as she walks readers through what she’s learned, and while I’m not necessarily convinced that that’s the most effective structure for this sort of true crime title, it gives valuable space to the whisper networks that surround these men, of female colleagues and junior scholars quietly raising red flags and warning one another not to be alone with them. They may not be murderers, yet they are still abusers entrenched in a patriarchal system of power and protected by an academic institution that heavily discourages a closer look. There’s no way of knowing whether justice could have been any swifter here, and no evidence that detectives were actively blocked from performing their due diligence, but all the same, it’s hard to imagine any of this coming to light before the modern #MeToo era.

I feel somewhat let down by the end of this work, and I’m not sure if that stems more from the relative dullness of the solution — an unavoidable peril of nonfiction — or the way in which it’s presented and contrasted with the scintillating possibilities earlier on in the narrative. I also wish Cooper would explore her personal feelings of possessiveness over the case, especially how she bristles at other amateur sleuths with no weaker a claim on it than her own. But she’s kept me engaged and interested throughout, and I’m grateful that she’s finally helped find closure for everyone involved.

[Content warning for rape and graphic violence.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore

Book #70 of 2021:

Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore (Graceling Realm #4)

This has always been a pretty loose series, so I don’t mind that we’ve jumped forward four years for this latest sequel, or that it basically spins an entirely new story instead of picking up any existing thread. In the time since, Queen Bitterblue’s people have established diplomatic relations with a distant and more industrialized continent, and when the narrative resumes, her agents abroad have fallen silent, prompting the monarch and a few close allies to investigate.

The best part of this novel is probably the worldbuilding, with telepathic fox companions, airships, and mysterious friendly sea creatures, all representing a major change from the previous volumes. The downside is that it feels almost too separate to spark my returning interest — this other landmass doesn’t even have any native Gracelings! — although there are definitely stronger connections back than we had between the first two installments. Yet despite the familiar protagonists, I never quite feel totally invested in this plot as an adventure they need to go on and we need to see.

Author Kristin Cashore is great at writing a sex-positive and queer-normalized fantasy setting, but I think I want either more action with higher stakes or a return to the introspective exploration of lingering trauma that makes book three so powerful. By comparison much of the conflict here seems superficial and contrived, which dampens my appreciation overall.

[Content warning for child abuse and slut-shaming.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

Book #69 of 2021:

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

I don’t love this 1983 novel quite as much as its ritzy Netflix adaptation, but it remains the strong story of a (fictional) female chess prodigy growing from a shy orphan to a capable international contender, thrilling even for audiences who aren’t able to follow the particulars of gameplay. I’m surprised to discover how faithful that miniseries has been overall, and the few changes I’ve noticed are uniformly improvements, like the dropping of an unnecessary early book scene wherein the child protagonist’s friend Jolene sexually assaults her and gets called the n-word in return.

That aside, this volume is every bit the exciting sports saga and interesting bildungsroman I’ve expected after seeing the show. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Beth Harmon an antihero, but she’s fascinatingly unapologetic for her drug addiction and her small thefts from family and friends, and her complexities and insecurities make for a great character study. As with the actual tournament rounds and the mid-century setting — less of a period piece when author Walter Tevis was writing — these elements are probably more striking on-screen, but the heart of the narrative still captures a talented young woman overcoming personal challenges to reach the top of her field, and it’s easy to see why the title has endured.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: The Good Fight, season 4

TV #25 of 2021:

The Good Fight, season 4

I want to acknowledge up-front that this latest run of the streaming Good Wife spinoff had its production cut short by the coronavirus outbreak, losing the final few episodes the writers must surely have expected they’d be able to use to wrap up various plotlines. As released, everything simply ends with no particular closure, which is all the more galling given the subsequent announcements from original cast members Cush Jumbo and Delroy Lindo that they are leaving the show. Each actor hopes to return for a proper departure, schedules permitting, but these external issues all contribute to a feeling that the creative vision for this year has not been delivered faithfully.

Even setting aside the matter of completeness, however, this is a pretty rough exhibit of a series that has utterly lost its way. The main appeal of this title had always been its laser focus on (relatively comfortable, professional, middle-class) life in Trumpian America, and the generic ‘Memo 618’ conspiracy is bizarrely divorced both from that and from reality. The story of a secret society of powerful men forcing judges to drop cases against them plays out like a bad John Grisham thriller, simultaneously too hokey to take seriously — or believe that the characters would — and too unrelated to Trump’s specific brand of corruption to bear much thematic weight. It also relies at several points on an unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of how computers work, which is a sad drift for a franchise that used to have its finger on the pulse of cutting-edge technology.

At its worst this program is still generally okay from scene to scene, although the episode where the protagonists knowingly adopt transphobic arguments to win a court case is despicable throughout. And there are occasional flashes of brilliance that suggest a revival isn’t impossible, especially since every season of The Good Fight seems to reinvent itself anyway. But overall, this is nowhere near the prestige drama that it or its forbear could once claim.

[Content warning for racism, pedophilia, suicide, and depiction of genitalia.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray

Book #68 of 2021:

Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray

I wouldn’t call this YA adventure a must-read for Star Wars fans, but it’s a big step up from Light of the Jedi, the first book in this new prequel era for the franchise, roughly two centuries before The Phantom Menace. These novels overlap in their timeframe, so that while Light goes into more detail about the great hyperspace disaster and the Jedi government’s interplanetary relief efforts, Dark focuses on one particular deep-space mission interrupted by the crash, resulting in the discovery of an ominous abandoned relay station. Author Claudia Gray nails the uneasy vibe of these travelers from the galactic core so far out from known civilization, and as usual for this writer, her characters feel fully-formed as distinctive personalities, making it easy to stay invested in their plot despite the objectively lower stakes. I especially like the ship’s crew that includes both a canonically asexual captain and a sentient telepathic boulder operating as navigator, and the moments when these inhabitants of the outer systems react with confusion to basic Jedi concepts are pretty fun, too.

I’m still not totally convinced by this whole High Republic thing, but I’m assuming some of these protagonists will go on feature in later volumes, given how one seems poised on the verge of falling to the dark side of the Force at the story’s end. Whether I continue or not, however, Gray’s work has certainly (as expected) put forth a better argument for the venture than that fairly bland debut.

[Content warning for slavery and torture.]

★★★★☆

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