The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao

Book #200 of 2020:

Song of the Crimson Flower by Julie C. Dao

I wasn’t sure what to expect of a standalone spinoff sequel to the Rise of the Empress duology, whose cruel first volume of an antiheroine’s ascension engaged me far more than its softer follow-up tracking her defeat. For this new book, author Julie C. Dao has delivered a tender love story with a tone somewhere between those extremes: lacking anywhere near the teeth of the original novel, but still more distinctive and interesting than the glorified fetch quests of the second.

The East Asian fantasy setting remains compelling in its own right, and the replacement protagonists are sweet as they learn to examine their class and gender biases and see things from one another’s point of view. The fairy-tale plot around them is simple yet effective as a backdrop for that developing dynamic, and it’s fun to see some returning figures and explore a different area of their world. I wouldn’t call this a necessary read for anyone, but it’s a good argument for how the wider series can continue to grow beyond its initial stakes.

[Content warning for panic attacks, plague, and drug abuse.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer

Book #199 of 2020:

Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer

A fascinating and even-handed account of how America and Russia / the Soviet Union have each played a role in other countries’ elections — sometimes openly and sometimes not — from the end of World War I through today. This is a deep dive, drawing on author David Shimer’s interviews with over a hundred politicians, staffers, journalists, and intelligence operatives from around the globe, some as high-profile as Bill and Hillary Clinton or Steve Bannon. It explains the notorious interference in 2016 on Donald Trump’s behalf without sensationalizing or asserting unproven collusion with his campaign, while also contextualizing a century of history that led to that affair.

In the writer’s analysis, the two superpowers have both supported candidates abroad that they see as aligned with their own interests, but America has either largely or entirely moved away from that practice in recent decades, when their counterpart patently has not. The U.S. also tends to interfere in favor of free and open democracy as an aim (albeit with some occasional unintended consequences to the contrary), whereas Russia, especially under Vladimir Putin, has championed causes like Brexit that seem chosen to maximize unrest and instability in rival nations. In the latest presidential race, Trump was a volatile authoritarian figure with certain pro-Russian views running against a woman whom Putin personally detested and considered a threat, hence why the leadership in Moscow acted to aid the former.

(Interestingly, those agents were apparently as surprised by his upset electoral victory as anyone else, having already laid the foundations for further disruptions to Hillary’s presidency. As the text makes clear, influencing an election does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.)

Shimer walks us through all that, highlighting how this effort differed from earlier ones and providing an inside look at the Obama administration’s real-time response as they learned of it. The new reach of social media allows misinformation and factual but damaging propaganda to spread directly to voters, eliminating the need to first convince trusted local brokers that may have served as a check in the past. And although American counterintelligence experts knew of the danger, they were more concerned about the potential hacking of voting machines and worried they would appear swayed by partisan politics if they addressed shady Republican support publicly.

Overall it’s an eye-opening read even for someone who follows the news closely, and a good reminder as future campaigns unfold to view everything we see online with a critical lens as to its source and intent.

[Content warning for discussions of homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, and racism including slurs and death threats.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Mirage by Somaiya Daud

Book #198 of 2020:

Mirage by Somaiya Daud (Mirage #1)

I love the rich cultural history that author Somaiya Daud pours into this YA sci-fi debut, much of it drawn from her own Moroccan heritage. She has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the politics of occupation and resistance, and although the plot of a commoner forced to become the princess’s body double can be rather slow, it plays well to those inherent tensions. (I’m still confused as to how the girls so resemble each other if one’s father is a colonizer from another planet, but you sort of have to suspend your disbelief about doppelgängers going into a Prince and the Pauper / Prisoner of Zenda story like this.)

I would have liked more of a dramatic climax to this first volume of the planned trilogy, and greater interaction among a few key characters, but it’s a solid foundation for the sequels to follow. The #ownvoices worldbuilding and dark-skinned, primarily-female cast add to the novel’s distinctiveness, and while the male love interest feels somewhat perfunctory so far, the strengths elsewhere in the book lead me to hope he will improve as the series goes on.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

Book #197 of 2020:

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

This story of a haunted IKEA-type store plays out about as expected, but I think it’s my least favorite of the four Grady Hendrix novels I’ve read so far. Too much in the early chapters seems like a cartoonish satire on corporate retail culture, so when the creepiness starts escalating midway through, it’s hard to feel invested in the characters as real people. Still, the labyrinthine furniture warehouse is a great setting for this sort of tale, and the Evil Dead / Betrayal at House on the Hill antics are entertainingly ghoulish for anyone with a taste for that genre. There are some clever design choices in the printed book too, giving it the appearance of a product catalog whose diagrams gradually grow more sinister as the plot unfolds. I’d recommend picking up that version if you’re interested, rather than the ebook that I had.

[Content warning for torture, gore, suicide, blinding, institutionalization, patient abuse, drowning, and claustrophobia including live burial.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

Book #196 of 2020:

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

This 1992 book is a short but super interesting piece of literary criticism, adapted from a series of lectures given by author Toni Morrison several years before. She argues for viewing classic works by white American writers through a racial lens, and discusses how the black Other is constructed in such literature as something for white characters to be defined against. If these insights sometimes seem obvious to a modern audience, that’s in large part due to thinkers like Morrison paving the way — and her insistence that ignoring the element of race in a text is still a racial reading remains particularly astute. I probably would have gotten even more out of this experience had I been familiar with all of the titles under discussion, but it’s a clarifying read regardless.

[Content warning for racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

Book #195 of 2020:

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

Moderately informative about the pre-2016 Donald Trump, but significantly hampered by author Sarah Kendzior constantly begging the question on his corruption and guilt rather than presenting neutral facts and building a convincing argument towards that conclusion. She has some odd biases too, like uncritically accepting the dubious claims of the notorious Steele dossier yet equating anyone on the left who thought Robert Mueller’s investigation had a chance of bringing down the president with the delusional supporters of the Qanon conspiracy on the right.

There’s way too much of the writer’s personal biography and other off-topic digressions here as well, including some nonsensical bragging about accurately predicting her subject would win the presidency. (In reality, the race was incredibly close and Trump lost the popular vote by millions. It was an election that really could have gone either way, and anyone who confidently forecasted his victory only happened to get it right.) And I could do without the antisemitic framing that regularly emphasizes someone’s Jewishness or connections to / views on Israel when those facets aren’t remotely relevant; since the book as a whole is tracking a criminal syndicate of powerful elites, this plays into classic harmful tropes of nefarious Jews secretly running the world, and it’s shameful that neither Kendzior nor her editors seem to have recognized that.

Ultimately, this title delivers feel-good conjecture to people who already share the author’s politics — which should include me, just to be clear — but little that would build a case to sway anyone else.

[Content warning for discussion of rape including child rape.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

Book #194 of 2020:

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio (The Sun Eater #1)

This feudal space opera reads like a sci-fi version of The Kingkiller Chronicle, in which a dreaded figure of whispered legend recounts his humble beginnings (including a lengthy sojourn reduced to a street urchin — the parallels are at times so overt that they almost must be intentional). I’ve seen other reviews liken the text to Dune as well, although I personally feel that the setting is a pretty generic galactic empire without much distinctive cultural flavoring.

I actually don’t mind the derivative nature of all this, since the familiar story is still fairly well-executed, and the first volume teases enough big mysteries that things might easily grow more interesting in the sequels. But the most egregious fault for now is that it’s just so ponderous, spending chapter after chapter on what seem like the slowest periods of the protagonist’s life. The storyline could have been tightened up significantly, and I’m definitely not invested enough to spend another four books of this size waiting for everything to resolve.

[Content warning for sexism, homophobia, slavery, torture, and mention of rape.]

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket

Book #193 of 2020:

File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #2.5)

This is a fun little diversion, albeit one wholly unnecessary to the series in which it takes place. The book is structured like an Encyclopedia Brown title, with short mysteries solved by the protagonist but not explained until the very end, so that readers can attempt each puzzle for themselves before flipping ahead to learn / verify the answer. Some entries are straightforward and others more convoluted, but in general they play fair for an observant junior detective. It’s also just neat to revisit this setting, and author Lemony Snicket is always good for some clever wordplay, but don’t go into this collection expecting any particularly strong character moments or movement on the larger plot.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Good Wife, season 5

TV #33 of 2020:

The Good Wife, season 5

Although it peters out slightly at the very end, this is overall an electrifying year of television, boldly delivering on character and plot arcs that have been in motion since practically the pilot. The Good Wife has been plenty strong to begin with, but the momentum this season from one consequential action to the next is honestly breathtaking, and the accompanying fallout just devastating to watch. All the things we’ve learned about Alicia Florrick click into place in one rapid rush as she charts her own course through turbulent times.

I try to avoid major spoilers in my reviews, but this run hinges upon two key episodes: 5×5 “Hitting the Fan,” in which the ratcheting tension at the protagonist’s law firm finally boils over and sends everyone scrambling to launch moves and counter-moves, and 5×15 “Dramatics, Your Honor,” which lures the audience in via an endearing personal study before wrenching our hearts with a sudden cast departure. (The following hour, “The Last Call,” is arguably even more affecting, as a succession of former colleagues hear and start processing the news in basically real time.) If those moments were in a typical season of The Good Wife, I’d already be tempted to award it five stars on their strength alone. But here, everything building up to and resulting from these pivot points is equally elevated, cementing this as one of the single best seasons of any show, ever.

Even drama on the production side can’t derail this level of quality. Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi had an infamous (and infamously murky) falling out at some point, as a result of which their characters share no in-person scenes after season 4. But if you don’t follow that sort of gossip, you might not even notice anything yet, so seamlessly do the writers stage their respective storylines and utilize strategic phone calls whenever the two still need to interact. And the exiting performer reportedly wanted out when their initial four-year contract expired, yet was persuaded to come back with the promise of a worthy send-off that could be plotted out to maximize its effectiveness. Needless to say, the showrunners delivered.

There are some occasional quirks, most notably Damian Boyle and his cop friend, who are the latest figures in Kalinda’s orbit that don’t quite seem to be on the same wavelength as anyone else in this universe. But there’s also the program’s signature attention on issues of emerging technology rupturing the line between how power is wielded in the public and private spheres, as in the truly inspired runner of NSA agents bugging Alicia’s cell and acting almost as a meta-Greek chorus of TV viewers themselves as they get caught up in the soap opera of her life. There’s simply no other series like this, and it’s so thrillingly on its game this year as never before (or sadly, again).

All in all, I stand by what I wrote back in 2016:

“I’m utterly gobsmacked by how amazing this season of television is. I loved the show to pieces already, but this stretch really elevates it to a whole new level. (I’ve already gone back and watched “Hitting the Fan” several times, and it works even better in the context of the episodes around it than it does in isolation like that.) Everything about the program’s tense plotting and sharp character work is firing on all cylinders here, and while I’m a little sad at reports that the next two years aren’t nearly as good, it was definitely worth it for this.”

[Content warning for mass shooting / gun violence.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Book #192 of 2020:

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

There’s a real visceral horror to this new 2020 release, in which a group of adult friends are revisited by a supernatural manifestation from their youth. I was expecting the book to be structured something like Stephen King’s It, but it plays out more like a slasher film, with the characters stalked and killed by a being bent on revenge for their perceived sins. As with a King story, however, readers are drawn deep into the minds of these figures as they are tormented, led to doubt their sanity, and even lured into killing loved ones.

The protagonists are all Blackfeet, as is author Stephen Graham Jones, and the novel benefits from the #ownvoices realism that he brings to their experiences, even as events veer more and more into the uncanny. It’s a great showcase of how a distinctive perspective can anchor a narrative, and an especially bloody and atmospheric contribution to Native American literature.

[Content warning for racism, lynching, tense interaction with police, violence against animals, gore, suicide, and death of a dog.]

★★★★☆

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