The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 1

TV #30 of 2020:

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 1

This first season of the CGI show is a definite improvement over the 2008 feature film, and I appreciate the travelogue aspect of showing off different Star Wars settings. Still, it seems pretty nonessential to the canon so far, beyond the rare glimpses of Anakin and Padmé’s secret love affair. I realize this program is aimed at a younger audience than the live-action movies, and that the continuity is somewhat boxed in by Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, yet the narrative stakes just aren’t doing much to grab my attention. If anything, I feel like I’m more on the side of the Separatist droids, since the writing seldom bothers to articulate why their leaving the Republic would be such a bad thing.

Heck, I’m not even sure where my sympathies are intended to lie here. The prequel trilogy is clearly pitched around the downfall of Anakin Skywalker so that viewers will perceive him as a tragic figure rather than a typical protagonist, but I don’t really get the same feeling from his cartoon version. For now, at least, he seems flattened into a standard hero role by the series, and that’s boring and weird even if probably more kid-friendly. Much as I can’t tell the difference between all the clone soldiers, I’m having trouble investing in the doomed Jedi without a clearer sense to this part of his arc.

[Content warning for a fictional slur that’s uncomfortably close to a real one.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book #183 of 2020:

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

At first, this novel seems like it will be a simple whodunnit, perhaps even a Miss Marple pastiche, with its 72-year-old heroine making inquiries among the residents of her small town. The case stems from an unsigned note she’s found in the woods nearby: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her body.” Adding to the mystery, there is no actual corpse accompanying the paper.

Instead of really investigating, however, Vesta begins imagining details from the dead woman’s life, sinking into elaborate fantasies she comes to half-believe, which gradually reveal elements of her own history and that of her late husband in turn. As with the depressive narrator of author Ottessa Moshfegh’s earlier My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the widow can be very frustrating to read as she circles around and around in her head, stubbornly refusing to ever get up and act like a conventional protagonist.

This is a book I admire for its craft more than I actually enjoy seeing its (meager) events unfold. It’s a wrenching depiction of creeping senility, yet also a blistering satire of the Nero Wolfe school of fictional detectives who confidently make wild deductions absent any real evidence. I credit the writer for provoking an emotional reaction from me, but that rarely goes deeper than rank exasperation.

[Content / spoiler warning for fatphobia, slut-shaming, domestic abuse, animal cruelty, and death of a dog.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Starsight by Brandon Sanderson

Book #182 of 2020:

Starsight by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #2)

This sci-fi sequel goes in a pretty unexpected direction, but it’s all the stronger for it. After spending the first book training as a fighter pilot to defend her planet from alien attack, Spensa is suddenly whisked across the galaxy to the enemy capital on a mission to infiltrate the ranks, study their tactics, and steal their technology. That’s a major shift in storytelling, but it opens up great new avenues for the series plot, and author Brandon Sanderson has a blast with all the strange lifeforms and cultural practices on the space station, a cosmopolitan blend of species straight out of a Mass Effect game or Becky Chambers novel.

Although I do miss some of the supporting characters from the previous title, the personalities introduced here are excellent too, as is the heroine’s conflict, Red Rising-style, as she comes to see her foes as people and friends. I also like how the worldbuilding expands to raise the stakes of the narrative, much as in the subsequent volumes of Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy. Skyward is a fine story on its own, but it feels even richer now that I’ve seen what it develops into — and since we’re still just halfway through the intended quartet, I can only imagine where things are headed next.

★★★★★

[Disclosure: I’m Facebook friends with this author.]

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Book Review: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Book #181 of 2020:

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This American history title offers an in-depth look at Reconstruction — the short period immediately after the Civil War, marked by a measure of meaningful progress towards racial equality — and the Jim Crow era that followed, in which black citizens were gradually subjugated under the pernicious caste system that replaced slavery with a new patchwork of official and unofficial rules governing their behavior. The text is heavy, both for the occasional dry academic tone and for the horrifying examples of racist imagery, including slurs and depictions of lynchings, that author Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has assembled.

The narrative loses a little focus in its discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and the ‘New Negro’ movement, but the early part is a detailed deep dive into how and why Reconstruction gave way to its polar opposite. Gates also calls out a similar pendulum swing in recent years from the election of our first black president to the subsequent resurgence of white nationalism, a fascinating observation that could easily be expanded into an entire book on the parallel. As here, it demonstrates how rapidly racism can shift to accommodate different paradigms and, perhaps, how to push back against that.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson

Book #180 of 2020:

Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson (Chronicle of the Dark Star #1)

I’ll give a charitable three stars to this middle-grade sci-fi adventure, which hasn’t quite gripped me but may prove more exciting for younger readers. I do like that it’s basically a junior version of The Martian, with a twelve-year-old hero separated from his colony ship and trying to avoid getting left behind on the red planet. Unfortunately, however, the pacing suffers from a surplus of exposition, and there’s too much attention devoted throughout to some mysterious alien saboteurs that never really coheres together into an understandable plot. The sequels may well improve on those fronts, although I doubt I’ll personally check them out myself.

I think my favorite part of this book is the subtle tension that stems from the protagonist having known no other life than Mars, when his parents and the rest of the older colonists view it as only an overlong layover between Earth and their ultimate destination. It reminds me of the children who grow up in new dystopia stories like Earth Abides or Station Eleven, and is a neat play on the first-generation immigrant experience. I just wish the narrative held more thematic focus on that element and fewer of the somewhat repetitive action scenes.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Street by Ann Petry

Book #179 of 2020:

The Street by Ann Petry

Upon reading this novel from 1946 I am stunned, both by the sheer raw power of the text and by the fact that I’d never even heard of it before seeing a friend’s rave review earlier this year. The title clearly had an impact at the time, reportedly making Ann Petry the first black woman author to sell over a million copies, but for some reason it seems to have fallen out of our broader cultural awareness in the decades since. And that’s a shame, because this is a story that demands and deserves to be held up with works like The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God as another classic of African American literature. (A few frank scenes of domestic service put the white-saviorism of The Help to shame, too.)

Petry’s grasp on her characters is achingly poignant, particularly in the ways they understand themselves to be trapped by the forces of poverty and racism. There’s a real timelessness here, with such insights into hierarchies of race, color, class, and gender that the book practically could have been written today. And although fierce single mother Lutie is undoubtedly the core protagonist, the narrative builds up an entire community ecosystem for her with other viewpoint figures who are no less well-drawn. As a result, the titular Harlem setting breathes off the page with absolute realism.

Some of the plot threads feel truncated by the abrupt ending, but that’s a stylistic choice I can respect for how it underscores the thematic message of the piece. Life on ‘the street’ as Petry depicts is messy, angry, and above all inexorable. If she leaves us with unresolved tension and no tidy answers, that says something about it too.

[Content warning for stalking, sexual assault, and slurs.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Jingo by Terry Pratchett

Book #178 of 2020:

Jingo by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #21)

This is a reasonably funny satire on the pointlessness of war, but as with many of Terry Pratchett’s books, there’s a certain degree of low-level racism and sexism underpinning some of the jokes. (Although the most overtly bigoted characters are generally positioned as fools, the worldbuilding itself relies on some tired Middle-Eastern stereotypes for the enemy nation, and a real slur appears rather than an invented alternative.) Witty puns and droll observations on human nature are always a great reason to visit Discworld, but with those problematic elements and a somewhat convoluted plot, this volume is perhaps not the best showcase.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 8

TV #29 of 2020:

Shameless, season 8

What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes that’s a gradual process that introduces meaningful new relations and plot concerns to supplant the old, but too often in this season it’s just a complete flattening of everyone’s situation into the most basic version. The main cast are largely kept siloed in their own storylines, and while some are at least moderately interesting — in increasing order: Frank’s early efforts to go straight; Fiona’s fresh challenges as a landlady; Lip’s struggle to stay sober as his support structures crumble around him — they don’t feel particularly connected to one another or to the larger ongoing Gallagher narrative. And other threads, like Ian’s bizarre “Church of Gay Jesus” thing, seem to come out of nowhere and never generate any interesting stakes.

There’s so little interaction amongst the family in this batch of episodes, and almost no conflict save a contrived Fiona/Ian fight over real estate that soon gets forgotten in his move to start a cult. (Her NIMBY attitude at least feels grounded in her recent arcs towards independence and a career, but his position standing up for his ex’s youth shelter doesn’t seem motivated by anything at all.) The series really needs to find a better way to integrate its various stories, or at the very least strive for moments of greater pathos in the scenes when they do come together again.

[Content warning for amputation.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

Book #177 of 2020:

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

An interesting yet not particularly surprising look at the Trump dynasty from the president’s estranged niece, detailing her grandfather’s emotional abuse of Donald and his other children and how that unloved arrogant boy has been enabled to fail upwards his entire life. The author is bitter and disdainful, but her version of events seems plausible enough, and I don’t begrudge her airing the dirty laundry like this. I do think it’s wildly inappropriate for her as a clinical psychologist to attempt to diagnose her uncle within these pages, however, and those sections are far less convincing than when she merely relates her understanding of their dysfunctional family history instead.

I’m vacillating between a two-star and three-star rating for this book, but the thinness of the text ultimately pushes it to the lower end of the scale for me. Although I haven’t read any other Donald Trump biographies, I feel like this one skips over too many salient details, focusing more on Mary’s father with only snapshot cameos from the title figure himself. That approach could be fine for a memoir that happens to feature a famous relative, but since the apparent aim of this account is to shine a light on that other person, there’s nowhere near enough support to bracket the narrative — let alone validate the unprofessional armchair diagnosis of mental problems and personality disorders.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Running Man by Richard Bachman

Book #176 of 2020:

The Running Man by Richard Bachman

I still love the propulsive adrenaline rush of this pseudonymous Stephen King dystopian piece, but I had forgotten just how needlessly steeped in bigotry it is. Presumably in an effort to make his protagonist more of a hard case, the author has him think and say some things that are pretty shockingly racist, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic, including slurs and an offhand rape fantasy. It’s a frustrating distraction from what’s otherwise a pulse-pounding adventure, and while I don’t particularly enjoy the campy Arnold Schwarzenegger film adaptation, I can understand why that script largely starts over with his role rather than staying remotely faithful to the book.

If you can get past the hero’s odiousness, this is a neat exercise in telling a tightly-focused sci-fi story with just enough details to suggest an interesting wider world. Its premise of a televised manhunt game show was ahead of its time in 1982, foreshadowing both modern reality TV and subsequent genre fare like The Hunger Games. (Some deepfake-like manipulation of video footage feels eerily prescient too.) The short staccato chapters carry the action well, and their countdown format adds a further tension to an already taut narrative. I only wish “Richard Bachman” could have come up with a better shorthand for character toughness.

[Content warning for claustrophobia, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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