The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #90 of 2020:

Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #5)

This fifth Chrestomanci volume — in both publication and author’s suggested reading order; actually the second chronologically — has a great set-up, but it throws out too many intriguing complications that aren’t given the development they’d need to land with any proper impact. A few of these elements feel warmed over from previous stories too, like the scheming uncle of The Lives of Christopher Chant or the secret romance against family wishes of The Magicians of Caprona. This later novel is still worth reading for the amusing look at castle servant duties, the reality-shifting wizardry, and the growing friendship between its twelve-year-old heroes, yet it’s overall a weaker effort for both this writer and this series.

[Content warning for anti-Romani slurs and fatphobia.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7

TV #11 of 2020:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7

Another solid run of this police workplace comedy (sitcop?), reliably delivering jokes but not really knocking it out of the park anymore. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has an unfortunate tendency to shy away from follow-through on any big narrative moves, and sure enough, this batch of episodes swiftly reverts to the usual status quo rather than commit to the demotion cliffhanger from the year before. And that risk aversion in writing tends to limit the impact of the comedy, for me. I do still enjoy hanging out with these characters, but I feel like it’s been a while now since the series really delivered on its full potential.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Book #89 of 2020:

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

I admire the ambition of this novel to build up an alternate world history across six centuries — in which the Black Death kills off almost all of Europe, and China and a Muslim empire become the dominant geopolitical powers instead — but for the most part I can’t say I’ve actually enjoyed reading it. Structurally, the book jumps from era to era like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the added wrinkle that the same three figures recur throughout, reincarnating but mostly not remembering their former lives until they die again. That’s one of the elements that doesn’t really work for me, since I don’t see enough continuity among these disparate folks to track them as coherent protagonists over the course of the volume.

The scope is impressive, as are the regular meditations on topics like history, science, Buddhism, and Islam. I just wish there were more here to latch onto on a character level, and less flat exposition about major historical events! It all probably works best when considered as a series of short stories (like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, maybe) rather than one single long narrative, but even those smaller segments seldom do much to grip me on their own.

[Content warning for castration, slavery, foot-binding, torture, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

Book #88 of 2020:

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1)

I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the biggest ship in the world! Microscopic mini-pirates!) The tone is somewhere between The Phantom Tollbooth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — including quirky cartoon illustrations like the former and the latter’s gimmick of regular encyclopedia entries interrupting the narrative — and author Walter Moers displays an endlessly clever inventiveness both in the outrageous situations that Bluebear encounters and the hilarious puns and other pieces of wordplay that populate the linguistic landscape of this setting. Translator John Brownjohn also deserves a shout-out here, for finding so many English ways of channeling that spirit of fun from the original German text.

Structured like a short story collection, albeit with continuity of protagonist and some delightful eventual callbacks, this book is really just such a joy to read and reread. I’m not as enamored of the later volumes in this series, which follow different main characters without much of a common plot, but I’ve come back to the ursine captain time and time again. It’s a little disappointing on the current passthrough to realize how male-dominated it is, with even the minor background figures almost inevitably described as men, yet I still can’t help but give the title my highest recommendation.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

Book #87 of 2020:

Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife by Bart D. Ehrman

An interesting topic, delivered in a somewhat dry and academic tone. The general thesis of the work is that modern Christianity’s conceptions of the hereafter are not exactly what would have been believed throughout history, and we can trace their gradual development across the centuries in the written record of the faith. The shifts detailed by religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman are fairly nuanced — often mandating both a close reading of the text and a trust in his expertise for apparent context — yet they add up to rather large drift effects over time.

This is not a book for anyone who insists that today’s church doctrine accurately represents the original teachings of Jesus, or that scripture is the infallible word of God. Although the author is a Christian who makes no claim as to which of the differing beliefs are true in any ontological sense, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that someone must be mistaken about the nature of the afterlife (whether contemporary worshippers or their predecessors, dating back to Christ himself).

Overall it’s a reasonable and well-supported account, sure to ruffle some feathers but not particularly revolutionary in terms of the writer’s field. From simple nothingness to bodily resurrection to heavenly paradise and eternal damnation, the historian’s framing of this progression of ideas towards the now-dominant paradigm is something to behold.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Book #86 of 2020:

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (The Machineries of Empire #1)

The technology in this setting is interesting — powered by dogmatic acceptance of mathematical principles throughout an area of space, and weakened by anyone there entertaining alternate heretical theories — but readers face a pretty steep learning curve before that worldbuilding starts to make intuitive sense. And even once we understand it, the action is primarily the sort of military science-fiction that I personally don’t find very engaging. The novel offers some neat twists in the exploration of its speculative premise, but without more of an emotional connection to the characters and a better grasp of their lived-in cultural reality, it all feels a bit abstract and bloodless to me.

[Content warning for suicide and 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: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

Book #85 of 2020:

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

The tone of this novel in which a group of 90s housewives take on an undead interloper in their suburb community could so easily trip over into camp, but author Grady Hendrix avoids that by rooting the narrative in a deep anger at how men disregard the contributions and lived experiences of women (and, to a lesser extent, how white folks do that to black people). There’s still a degree of humor here, but none of the winking playfulness that could undercut the characters in service to a laugh. The premise is instead played straight, and the result is both a cracking vampire story in its own right and one that feels in serious conversation with the classic pillars of the genre like Dracula and ‘Salem’s Lot.

Even for horror fiction the tale gets a lot darker than one might expect, but it’s decidedly gripping and creepy throughout. The protagonists are neither too quick to accept the supernatural nor too dense to trust their instincts and — primed by the true crime literature they read in their book club — follow the evidence about their new neighbor’s red flags. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, these ladies are underestimated at their opponent’s peril.

I think I enjoy the back half of the project a little less than its beginning, yet the overall effect is strong enough for me to give the book a full five stars and seek out more of Hendrix’s work immediately.

[Content warning for rape, suicide, lynching, drug overdose, pedophilia, gaslighting, Nazi atrocities, rats and insects burrowing into flesh, and death of a dog.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

Book #84 of 2020:

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah

This popular science title from 2016 offers an engaging and informative explanation of disease outbreaks, focused primarily on the biology of the pathogens that carry them. Author Sonia Shah has literally given TED Talks on the subject, and it shows in her expertise and clear writing (which I found so much easier to follow than the similar book The Pandemic Century that I read earlier this month). Shah also humanizes the work via her own history with a MRSA infection, and paints an interesting picture of the ongoing immunogenetic conflict between the microorganisms that plague us and our adapted individual and group practices to resist them.

Like anyone else who warned of a coming global pandemic, Shah seems a bit prophetic when read in the time of COVID-19, but her very point is that such predictions were/are inevitable, given what we know about how these things have spread in the past and what’s not being done to mitigate their contributing factors today. Policy-makers should have been listening to folks like this all along, and it’s not too late to study up now for an understanding of how we got here.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb

Book #83 of 2020:

Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb (The Fitz and the Fool #3)

The closing chapters of this 2017 fantasy novel form a meaningful sendoff to the hero and world first introduced in 1995’s Assassin’s Apprentice. Overall, however, the book is far too slow and exposition-heavy — and because the larger Realm of the Elderlings series has been so spread out in time and place, there’s a lot here that consists of one character telling another something that the reader likely already knows. I’m glad I finally got around to this volume for the unfinished business in the setting that author Robin Hobb wanted to resolve, but this whole last trilogy could have been edited down to a fraction of its length and been all the stronger for it.

[Content warning for rape, torture, and a claustrophobic scene involving a viewpoint character being buried alive.]

This book: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Individual ranking: 2 > 3 > 1

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Book Review: As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden

Book #82 of 2020:

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden

A light but sweet look back at the production of the 1980s cult classic The Princess Bride through the eyes of its leading man. This is definitely one of those books that’s helped by a reader’s pre-existing fondness for the subject matter, although the writer(s) do provide a detailed plot summary of the film regardless. The behind-the-scenes access is fun and interesting, as are the reflections on what rare factors have made the movie so enduringly popular. I wouldn’t call it a must-read for fans, but it’s sure to enhance your enjoyment of an already great piece of cinema.

★★★★☆

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