The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Network Effect by Martha Wells

Book #270 of 2020:

Network Effect by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #5)

Everyone’s favorite antisocial cyborg bodyguard is back for its first full-length adventure, featuring the return of one of the more intriguing side characters from the original novellas. Murderbot’s acerbic interior monologue is always surprisingly relatable as the security unit forms grudging attachments to the humans under its protection, especially as it avoids thinking about emotions by rewatching its favorite entertainment serials instead. This book gives the protagonist several new shades of feeling to uncomfortably try on, and the greater length allows for a more intricate plot than the episodic early volumes. I think the effect might have been a little bit stronger if author Martha Wells had stuck with just the one point of view throughout rather than branching out into other perspectives at the end, but overall it’s another fine entry for the series.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Book #269 of 2020:

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

A well-written piece of historical fiction, albeit one that often feels more like a mosaic of interesting vignettes than a coherently plotted novel. The title character is Shakespeare’s son who died at a young age — and may have played a role in his inspiration for Hamlet, given the similar names — but the main focus here is on the boy’s mother as she grows up, falls in love, starts a family, and ultimately experiences that cruelest loss.

Author Maggie O’Farrell makes a few logistical tweaks to the record to round out her narrative, as well as supplying a whole lot of conjecture to fill in the many gaps. It’s plausible enough aside from the protagonist’s witchy powers of foresight, but not as educational as one might have hoped from the subject matter. (Nor is it especially concerned with the plague, despite how it’s been branded. I picked this up as a pandemic read, yet Hamnet’s death is presented as fairly isolated from any larger contagion.)

I can tell this is a book many people will enjoy, and I’ve liked certain fragments of it myself, but overall I’m struggling to connect with the material as much as I’d want.

[Content warning for racial slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Office, season 6

TV #49 of 2020:

The Office, season 6

Although not as impressively serialized as the previous season’s arc with the Michael Scott Paper Company, this year of The Office takes a few swings at tinkering with the status quo, first with the promotion of one of the characters to co-manager and then with the corporate purchase by Sabre (which brings Gabe into the cast, if nothing else). The sitcom is still pretty funny this late into its run too — although see my note below for some regrettable miscalculations — and I remember how the long-awaited wedding episode was a legitimate TV event last decade.

On the other hand, the series sensibility is slipping ever further into zaniness, which is not necessarily a problem for the humor but does make it hard to get as invested in these people’s personal lives. There’s a big emphasis this season on the will-they-won’t-they of Andy and Erin, neither of whom really have the emotional grounding for that, as well as the resumption of Dwight’s relationship with Angela, which has always suffered similarly. It also feels like the writers have completely lost track of Ryan, whose personality now in no way resembles who he’s been for most of the show’s history.

To some degree this is a warning sign for the future, and the program probably does go on a bit past its prime in the end. But it remains strong enough for the moment, and I can see why the network trusted audiences to stick with it beyond this point even as original star Steve Carell started planning his exit.

[Content warning for transphobic slur and rape jokes.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Don’t Call the Wolf by Aleksandra Ross

Book #268 of 2020:

Don’t Call the Wolf by Aleksandra Ross

The main problem with this standalone fantasy novel is that none of its characters seems to have a clear motivation driving their actions, resulting in a narrative with the shape of a quest but less weight than a typical tabletop roleplaying campaign. They’re just vaguely hunting for a dragon because that’s what heroes do, I guess. I’ve seen other readers criticize the ending too, although for me it was no more poorly set-up than the rest of the story.

The second biggest issue is that the central romance is basically love at first sight, with both viewpoint protagonists fully aware of their feelings, but still blushing and fretting for most of the book instead of doing anything about it. It’s a behavior that might make sense if there were something in the plot keeping these two apart, but debut author Aleksandra Ross never quite gets around to telling us what that would be. There’s no build-up or catharsis to when they eventually kiss, since we lack any reason for why it’s taken so long after they’ve spent countless chapters plainly wanting one another as they trek side-by-side through the woods.

But the element that irritates me the most is probably the worldbuilding, which draws on Slavic folklore yet isn’t particularly well-defined overall. One detail that Ross makes a point of mentioning, however? That certain ghoulish monsters are the tormented souls of unbaptized children, an idea that’s pretty shockingly offensive to non-Christians like me for a writer to draft into the rules for this setting. (And despite the unfamiliar countries and presence of magic, it appears that we are meant to understand the place as a version of medieval Europe, given the mention of crosses and churches elsewhere in the text.)

I’m sorry, but it’s 2020. Publisher HarperTeen has no excuse for putting out such a low-quality work with no apparent editing for sensitivity.

[Content warning: In addition to the above, the underage heroine ends up accidentally naked in front of people on multiple occasions.]

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby

Book #267 of 2020:

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby

This is an interesting read on the history of racism within white American Protestantism, although I think it would benefit from deeper insight at times into why and how dominant church positions (both implicit and explicit) have kept aligning to reinforce an unequal racial hierarchy. When author Jemar Tisby provides such analysis, as in the commonly-held biblical justifications for slavery and segregation, it goes a long way towards explaining how bigoted parishioners could still see themselves as just and even devout. He also offers a compelling account of the Protestant focus on personal relationships and responsibility, and how it leads believers away from engaging with discriminatory issues as widespread structural problems that can be addressed through laws and organizational policies.

Like many Christians, Tisby occasionally falls into the trap of accusing people of not being true followers of Christ due to their hypocritical actions or asserting that it’s worse when Christians are immoral than when other folks are, because the tenets of the religion preach freedom, justice, and love. Although that’s well-meaning, the ugly implication here is that non-Christians don’t hold themselves to the same moral standards, and that Christianity is some pure entity that can be divorced from — and thus not challenged by — the worst things done in its name. If members of the faith are going to truly grapple with the racist legacy that this writer lays out, they will need to see the precise scale of the matter more clearly than he himself always does.

[Content warning for slurs, mention of rape, and graphic descriptions of lynchings.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis

Book #266 of 2020:

Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis (Not a Drop to Drink #1)

I picked up this 2013 debut about a girl and her mother protecting their post-apocalyptic water source on the strength of author Mindy McGinnis’s wrenching survival tale Be Not Far from Me, but I’ve been pretty disappointed by comparison. The earlier book sometimes feints in a similar direction of hard choices and catastrophic accidents, but for the most part, it offers up an underbaked dystopia that substitutes generic teenage hormones — with the protagonist falling for the first dweeby boy she ever meets — for any meaningful character connection. (He literally has to teach her about kissing and let her know that she’s good-looking. My eyes could not stop rolling.) I’m not quite ready to give up on the writer entirely, but I’ll certainly be giving the sequel a miss.

[Content warning for gun violence, death of a parent, and mention of rape.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Book #265 of 2020:

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Author Susanna Clarke’s second novel is an odd beast, closer in tone to experimental mind-bending works like House of Leaves, Annihilation, or The Slow Regard of Silent Things than her Victorian fantasy classic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The narrator is an amnesiac in an otherworldly flooded labyrinth, satisfied by his simple life of fishing, looking after the thirteen skeletons which share his domain, and keeping a journal that reveals more about himself than he seems to realize. Once a week or so, he meets up with the only other person he knows, a bristling scientist type who is likewise clearer to us than he is to Piranesi.

There’s more to the story here, but much of the enjoyment comes from deciphering the protagonist’s distinctive worldview and world. (In fact, it’s almost a letdown when relatively everything makes sense by the end.) Although I miss the expansive scope, colorful cast, and delightfully detailed footnotes that make up the writer’s first book, this is an ethereal curiosity that’s fittingly easy to get lost in. It won’t succeed for every sort of reader, but if you can handle the early disorientation, I think you’ll find that it draws you in deeper and deeper to the meaning at the heart of the maze.

[Content warning for gaslighting and fatphobia.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Thud! by Terry Pratchett

Book #264 of 2020:

Thud! by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #34)

Maybe it’s due to the inevitable comedown from the thoroughly excellent Night Watch, but I haven’t enjoyed this next City Watch novel nearly as much as I expected to. There’s a great worldbuilding revelation at the end, yet this is one of those Discworld books that seems to consist primarily of Commander Sam Vimes looking askance at various fantasy ethnic groups that he considers backwards and inscrutable. As is often the case, his prejudice keeps him from picking up on certain clues as quickly as he otherwise might, and although he learns better eventually, it raises the question of just how many times that particular cycle needs to repeat for the protagonist or his readers to finally get the point.

This volume contains a fair bit of misogyny too, and while I believe it passes the Bechdel test, it still sometimes feels as though Terry Pratchett, writing in 2005, finds women to be as alien as his hero sees vampires, dwarves, and trolls. These elements don’t quite sink the narrative, which offers plenty of the author’s typical droll wit, but they also stop it coming anywhere near the series at its best.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Good Fight, season 1

TV #48 of 2020:

The Good Fight, season 1

So far this streaming spinoff sequel isn’t quite hitting the heights of its network forebear, but at least it picks the franchise back up after the dull plotting and inconsistent character work that plagued the end of The Good Wife. My biggest complaint about this first year of The Good Fight — other than new actress Rose Leslie’s somewhat breathily artificial American accent — is probably that it doesn’t have enough of its own voice figured out just yet, and plays instead as almost a season 8 of the original series. A lot of the fun, in fact, lies in spotting all the familiar guest-starring lawyers, judges, and clients who have been able to make the transition over to CBS All Access for this.

But a similarity to The Good Wife in its prime is not necessarily a bad thing, and there’s further potential here too, especially in the switch to a mostly-black law firm and in how the writers are consciously pitching their project as a show for the Trump era, with governmental corruption that already feels a step beyond the established ethos for this universe. (And this ten-episode run was released soon after the inauguration in 2017, so I’m assuming that aspect will only grow increasingly prominent over time.) Lucca Quinn seems much more fleshed-out as a believable person now that she has a function besides Alicia’s sounding board, and Marissa Gold takes on the larger role that she has always deserved, as well.

I put off watching this program for a long while, partly because I didn’t want to pay for another service and partly since I felt so burned-out by how Diane and everyone else’s story ended before and didn’t particularly relish reopening that seam to see what happened next. But as it turns out, there’s a pretty compelling turn of events waiting in the wings, so I’m glad I’m finally getting around to it now.

[Content warning for rape threats, death threats, suicide attempt, racism, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

Book #263 of 2020:

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland (A Conspiracy of Truths #1)

It’s a definite testament to author Alexandra Rowland’s talent that their 2018 debut novel is so utterly engrossing despite being set almost entirely within the confines of a cramped jail cell. On trial for espionage in a strange land, the old itinerant storyteller who narrates this tale does what he does best: spin out an enchanting succession of myth, rumor, history, and the occasional falsehood to sway his captors and earn his release (and maybe even tear down an unjust and oppressive system or two, while he’s at it). I love Chant’s irascible yet wry personality, the nested stories which he relates Scheherazade-like, and his / the narrative’s ultimate belief in the power of words to champion humanity and freedom.

I’m also delighted that, for all the intrigue which builds up at our antihero’s instigation, he doesn’t turn out to actually be a spy on some secret mission that he’s hiding from the reader. That’s a common genre twist, but in this case, the narrator really has just been arrested on a trumped-up charge that he’s fighting the only way he knows how. Coupled with lovely cultural worldbuilding that normalizes queer and polyamorous relations and includes meaningful disability representation as well, it’s a marvelously fresh fantasy adventure that feels far more action-packed than I suppose it literally is.

★★★★★

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