The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Americans, season 1

TV #14 of 2021:

The Americans, season 1

I’m really enjoying this tense spy thriller, which so far has been equally about its outlandish premise of Soviet operatives in deep cover as a normal American couple and the quieter moments within their marriage (or sham thereof). There’s a natural thematic element of negotiated trust in the espionage genre, and mirroring an exploration of that in a long-running quasi-romantic partnership is a slick writing decision. I’m less sold on some of the plot mechanics throughout this debut year, like the fact that the protagonists’ new neighbor is the FBI agent unknowingly investigating their activity, but episode by episode it’s delivering a lot of fun and showing good insight into its various characters. The 80s period setting provides a distinctive vibe too, especially when the moves and counter-moves in its pulse-pounding action sequences are impacted by the limitations of the era’s technology. Overall this season represents a great start, with clear potential for the series to get even better as it settles further into itself.

[Content warning for gore and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

Book #38 of 2021:

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

A short but interesting travelogue exploring different funerary customs around the world. From ancient practices of cannibalism to modern peoples who mummify and go on living with their deceased loved ones to body farms that study the science of human decomposition, this might not be a great choice for squeamish readers — although author Caitlin Doughty’s point throughout is that our feelings about what’s appropriate (or not) to do with the dead are largely a matter of cultural relativity.

It’s a pop anthropology sort of book, very readable but somewhat exoticizing of its subjects and lacking much of a throughline or connective tissue between its chapters. I’ve also noticed a minor inaccuracy in an offhand reference to Jurassic Park — which is not a big deal in and of itself, but suggests that the title may not have undergone careful fact-checking as part of the editing process. Since the writer is a mortician and not a researcher or reporter by trade, that gives me a little bit of a pause at accepting everything here at face value.

I do appreciate her insider complaints on the big-business nature of death in America, and it’s eye-opening to consider some of the alternatives to the expensive coffins and other purchases regularly pushed by her industry. But overall, I think I would prefer if this volume had adopted more of a focused and internal perspective on the topics it covers.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana with Abigail Pesta

Book #37 of 2021:

How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyimana with Abigail Pesta

A harrowing account of author Sandra Uwiringiyimana’s early life during the Second Congo War, in which she was forced to flee her childhood home, witnessed the murder of her younger sister in an armed massacre at their settlement camp, and was sexually assaulted by a trusted relative — all before she was twelve years old. Emigrating to the United States saved the family from immediate danger, but did little to resolve the lingering trauma that the writer continues to navigate as an adult. As she transitions into a career as a humanitarian activist, this memoir provides a valuable firsthand look at the horrors of ethnic cleansing, the refugee experience in America, and the difficulties of understanding local race relations as an outsider.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: The Good Fight, season 3

TV #13 of 2021:

The Good Fight, season 3

This series is still doing the best job of anything I’ve seen on TV at capturing the actual experience of living through the Trump presidency, and even as that era recedes behind us, it remains validating to see these protagonists grappling with the issues of family separation, alt-right violence, judicial corruption, and so forth that have likewise commanded audience attentions in real life.

With that being said, however, this third season makes some frustrating choices that don’t always utilize that throughline to its fullest potential. Diane’s joining an underground resistance saboteur group never quite feels in-character for her, especially once it requires her to compromise attorney-client privilege, and the educational Jonathan Coulton clips that pop up each episode are annoyingly twee. The new over-the-top figure of Roland Blum is a bad tonal match for the show too, although the acting there is admittedly a tour-de-force (given how much he differs from actor Michael Sheen’s performance as Aziraphale on Good Omens the same year). And of course, Maia’s storyline is way too disconnected from everyone else’s, generally seeming as though she’s off on an entirely separate program that only occasionally crosses back to rejoin her former peers.

The overall effort is hanging together better than the worst stretches of The Good Wife, so I’m not ready to give up on this spinoff just yet — but my hopes aren’t exactly high going into the fourth / latest run, which had its production unexpectedly cut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. That would be a blow for any serial drama, and it might prove fatal for one that’s already grown this wobbly.

[Content warning for rape / #MeToo, drug abuse, SWATting, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker

Book #36 of 2021:

Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker (The Up-and-Under #1)

This is a cute children’s fantasy adventure, sort of like a cross between The Phantom Tollbooth and L. Frank Baum’s classic Oz series. It’s also a bit metatextual, as “A. Deborah Baker” is a pen name for the real author Seanan McGuire, whose (rather adult) novel Middlegame mentions and quotes from Over the Woodward Wall as a fictitious text hiding secret lessons on alchemy. The writer later decided to expand those excerpts into a full book, giving this title a status similar to Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which famously originated as a story within a different work too. Readers don’t have to pick up the earlier volume first — and a younger audience emphatically should not — but coming at this one with an understanding of its original purpose does add something to the experience.

I initially expected to give this project a four-star rating based on how it starts, but the ultimate shape of the plot is largely a sequence of unrelated encounters, and the ending feels somewhat sudden and anticlimactic. I’m invested enough to check out the forthcoming sequel, but the present narrative doesn’t resolve quite as strongly as it begins.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Book #35 of 2021:

The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones

It’s always neat to see a fantasy story built on Welsh mythology, but the plot to this one is a slower and pretty generic quest narrative, and I haven’t quite found the protagonists interesting enough to justify spending so much of the novel with just the two of them journeying together. (And the reviewers who call this a friends-to-lovers arc are mistaken — the characters don’t even know each other at the start, and they are clearly set up as mutual romantic interests as soon as they first meet.) The antagonist is a fairly one-note greedy landlord too, and the atmosphere isn’t as spooky as I’d like for all the zombie revenants wandering around the countryside. I do appreciate that the hero has a chronic pain condition, and the inclusion of a friendly undead goat is an unexpected delight, but overall this book has only sporadically managed to grab my attention.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Fleabag, season 2

TV #12 of 2021:

Fleabag, season 2

I’m aware that I’m joining the chorus here, but it’s frankly astonishing how much Fleabag has improved in its sophomore outing — possibly more than any program I’ve seen since Parks and Recreation. Although still relying slightly on cringe humor, now that the protagonist is no longer sabotaging herself with meaningless sex and blurting out awkward things seemingly just for the joy of that chaos, the show has turned into a really thoughtful character piece with relatable and grounded emotional stakes. Even the romantic attraction to her family’s priest is played honestly and respectfully throughout, when that sort of scenario would have been nothing but a sick punchline in season one.

That may all sound sanctimonious, but the writing never loses its comic instincts, and the scenes are even funnier coming from a place that understands these people so deeply. Over six short episodes nearly everyone in the cast goes through a significant personal plot arc, and the laughs in service to those storylines are genuinely hilarious. I’m almost tempted to recommend new audiences skip the first run altogether, but it probably does help to bring that background knowledge into the better stuff.

I don’t know if I’d say this works great as the conclusion to the overall series that creator / writer / star Phoebe Waller-Bridge later announced it would be, and there’s an intriguing development with the fourth-wall-breaking asides that feels particularly unfinished at the end. But as a somewhat open tragicomic exploration of love, it’s a remarkably strong viewing experience.

[Content warning for miscarriage.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Book #34 of 2021:

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Susan Ryeland #2)

This is another fun postmodern detective story, but it’s a bit too similar to its predecessor Magpie Murders, in a way that rather strains credulity. (The same dead writer knew about a second killer who had escaped justice and placed subtle clues to that effect in one of his other novels? Really? Is his whole bestselling catalogue going to turn out to contain such mysteries hidden underneath the surface? That’s so much effort — not to mention coincidence — with so minimal a justification for why he never simply alerted the authorities instead.) I also feel like some of the protagonist’s insights are too flimsy to support her deductions, and I don’t understand why the police inspector is willing to humor her staging of a dramatic parlor-room reveal scene at the end, beyond that the genre conventions demand it.

As in the first volume, a lengthy section of this text is given over to the book-within-a-book detailing a Poirot pastiche working a case that’s both enjoyable in its own right and a mechanism for taunting references to the real crime in the framing narrative. But at this point, I think I prefer the doubly fictitious Atticus Pünd to his editor-cum-investigator Susan Ryeland, and the meta trick that author Anthony Horowitz plays with the parallels between the two is starting to lose its novelty.

[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

Book #33 of 2021:

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #7)

What a depressing and offensive conclusion to a generally solid children’s fantasy heptalogy. Author C. S. Lewis has always had his share of mid-twentieth-century hangups, but they are seldom so blatantly awful as here, where traditional feminine interests like makeup and fashion are given as a reason to keep someone from reaching paradise, where dark-skinned foreigners are explicitly described as wicked enemies, where racial slurs are used against them and pale heroes don blackface to pass among their ranks, and where their Muslim-analogue religion is conflated with devil-worship and said to secretly route to the setting’s leonine Jesus figure on the rare occasions when its adherents manage to do good in its name. Did I miss anything?

Ah, yes — there’s also the actual plot of the novel, which concerns a literal apocalypse of falling stars and boiling seas, destroying the idyllic land of the previous six books. Many returning protagonists are killed as well, and although the writer shows them frolicking in a sort of afterlife, I can attest from personal memory that that can still be a traumatizing development for a young reader to witness. Even before armageddon arrives, this is a much crueler Narnia than we’ve seen elsewhere, one full of greed, corruption, and doubt where miracles just don’t seem to happen anymore. (In a way it’s similar to the setup for Prince Caspian, but instead of a resurgent golden age, this one results in a biblical day of judgment — a distinction in outcomes that isn’t satisfactorily justified, from my perspective. It may be in line with Christian teachings that no one can predict the hour of the endtimes, but it’s a frustrating narrative choice that reads as though Aslan is wiping out his world on a whim.)

I honestly kind of dread each reread of the series knowing that it culminates in The Last Battle, whether the various titles are approached chronologically or by publication order. This volume doesn’t merely offer the weakest individual storyline, in which no one appears to have any meaningful control over their fate; it also casts a long shadow that weakens the impact of earlier events once you realize how little they end up mattering at the close. Certain scenes are visually striking and the themes are interesting(ly horrifying) to examine critically, but as the finale to a heartwarming sequence of adventure tales, this all feels like a mean joke.

[Content warning for gaslighting and slavery.]

This book: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader > The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe > The Horse and His Boy > Prince Caspian > The Magician’s Nephew > The Silver Chair > The Last Battle

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Book Review: The Orchard by David Hopen

Book #32 of 2021:

The Orchard by David Hopen

This novel’s all-Jewish cast helps disguise the familiarity of its tropes, but it’s ultimately a pretty conventional coming-of-age plot, one part Mean Girls (sheltered new kid falls in with the school’s popular crowd of bad influences) and one part The Secret History (scholarly discussion group chases after esoteric philosophy to increasingly disastrous ends — although here’s where I should confess that I haven’t read that classic Donna Tartt title yet, so I may have the summary a bit wrong.) Author David Hopen paints a hyper-realistic portrait, both in the thorough #ownvoices Jewishness of the text and in the dimensions of his teenage subjects, who generally feel like actual youths compared to the stylized heroes who populate much of the YA market. When the protagonist is called out for forming an idealized image of his romantic interest and ignoring her human flaws, the moment is all the more powerful for how seductively recognizable his thinking has been. I remember being that boy, and I’ve rarely seen the mentality conveyed so exactly or critiqued so cuttingly in fiction.

And yet… For all of these strengths, I don’t know that I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed the reading experience as a whole. The students may be lifelike, but they’re also fairly insufferable, and although the writer seems aware of that, it’s hard to root for them to do anything but improve as people, which, without getting into spoilers, is not quite how the narrative trends. There’s a non-consensual drug trip that introduces a potential supernatural element into the mix as well, and I think the issue would have been better off resolved one way or the other, rather than remaining ambiguous throughout.

Do I love the fact that the frum Jew faces temptation from peers who are more secular but still clearly members of the same faith with some common touchstones and values of the sacred? Of course. And I really appreciate how rooted the book is in its Judaism overall; I don’t believe an outside audience would be lost, but I hadn’t realized how refreshing it could be for a story featuring my religion to dispose of the explanatory comma spelling out each and every offhand remark. This is a tale that trusts you to already understand about Purim and davening and plenty beyond, or at least be willing to look such items up on your own time. That is truly a rare gift; I only wish I could bring myself to care more for the petty figures at the heart of it.

★★★☆☆

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