The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

Book #273 of 2020:

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

Like that of many Americans, my formal education about world history has primarily focused on the threads that lead to modern ‘Western’ civilization, with minimal attention to the Muslim sphere of influence even in those eras when it was a more dominant power. This 2009 work by author Tamim Ansary is an important course-correction to that, laying out a comprehensive yet easy-to-follow narrative of Islam as a religio-political force in its own right, not just a minor chapter or subplot in the story of the past millennium and a half.

In some cases, the book presents detailed developments like the early caliphate dynasties that had been largely unknown to me; in others, it recenters familiar events like the Crusades to show how they would have been experienced by Islamic peoples rather than the West. Although the writer cautions that certain parts of this text are more reflective of an oral tradition than verified historical fact, it’s overall a great encapsulation of a different received wisdom on how we’ve arrived at the present.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

Book #272 of 2020:

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

A short but disturbing read, focused partly on author Natasha Trethewey’s experiences growing up mixed-race in the segregated Deep South and partly on her abusive stepfather threatening, beating, stalking, and ultimately murdering her mother. It’s obviously a deeply personal account, but it’s also oddly bifurcated, with the writer’s presence seeming to dissipate as she relates the facts of the latter case, including police records and phone transcripts presented in their entirety with minimal commentary. It’s not at all my intention (or my place) to tell Trethewey how to grieve, but as a memoir this work would be stronger if she had elaborated more on the parts of the story that no one but her could tell.

[Content warning for gun violence and racism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis

Book #271 of 2020:

Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #4)

Although perhaps not as enchanting as the original Narnia story, this first sequel (in writing / publication order) does much more to flesh out the worldbuilding, providing a sense of history, geography, and culture to the setting that had been fairly absent before. It’s also surprisingly busy for such a slim volume, with the title character’s Hamlet-esque plot, the reveal that a millennium has passed for the other world in the year since our returning heroes left it, and the usual heavy-handed Christian allegory, this time mostly aimed at the importance of faith without proof.

It all largely succeeds, though the children’s warm nostalgic memories of their reign as kings and queens would likely land better had we the readers gotten to see those events firsthand — a deficit only slightly remedied by the writer’s later midquel The Horse and His Boy. And it seems strange that they never spare a thought for how all of their old friends must have died long ago, unless that’s simply too morbid a concept for this series to consider, further developments to the contrary notwithstanding.

But the adventure here and now is a cracking good one, and new characters like Trumpkin the Dwarf and Reepicheep the warrior mouse are some of Lewis’s most indelible creations. The narrative is still leaning on a few outdated gender roles, and there’s a bizarre passage that appears to champion shoot-on-sight racial profiling, yet for a kids novel from 1951, it holds up remarkably well on balance.

★★★★☆

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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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