The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Book #118 of 2020:

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

As with much of 1950s science-fiction, this novel is as full of big ideas and fun characters as it is of regrettable social attitudes and bizarre plot leaps. I like the core concept of a marooned astronaut learning to teleport and reinventing himself to go full Count of Monte Cristo for revenge, but his / the text’s treatment of women is pretty abominable. (The protagonist rapes one acquaintance who eventually forgives him for it, and makes another fall instantly in love by showing off his supposed dominance.)

The depiction of soulless mega-corporations and cybernetic enhancements would certainly prove influential in the genre, and the hero’s abstract transcendence near the end heralds similar experimentation in the later 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a story that’s clearly been loved by creators whose own works I love, so with the strong caveat of the context of its time, I’d say it’s still worth checking out today.

[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 Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco

Book #117 of 2020:

The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco (The Never Tilting World #1)

I don’t know if it’s intentional on author Rin Chupeco’s part, but there’s a definite Brandon Sanderson vibe to this fantasy novel of theirs. From the title concept of a planet stuck half in sunlight and half in dark (shared with his White Sand project, although developed very differently) to the Sandersonian system of orderly magic powers, the start of this duology evokes that pillar of the genre in all the best ways. It also includes a Mad Max-style drive across a dangerous desert landscape, a poignant romance between two young women of different social classes, and four distinctive viewpoint characters that Chupeco juggles with ease.

I have some qualms about the larger worldbuilding — like how radically the twin societies seem to have diverged and forgotten their joint past only seventeen years after the globe-stopping cataclysm — but the environmental allegory is apt and I like how the night and day narratives spend the whole book propelling towards one another only to finally collide at the very end. I’m looking forward to seeing how these stories change in the sequel now that they’re entwined more directly.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

Book #116 of 2020:

The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

An incredibly frustrating read. From the coercive romance between an alien conqueror and the human prisoner he’s blackmailing, to their instant feelings for one another, to the pointless miscommunication drama that a simple conversation could have avoided, to the meandering plot, random unearned ending, and overall tendency for the writing to tell and not show… there’s just so much here that fails to launch.

Perhaps most exasperating is the heroine’s practice of name-dropping characters from other books — generally recent YA — without explanation. She wants a love like Jesper and Wylan. When she learns her companion has never heard of Star Wars, she offers to tell him the story of Ciena and Thane. Even for a reader like me who recognizes the majority of these references and enjoys the outside works in question, it’s an unwelcome and distracting quirk. (It also strains credulity that anyone teaching a completely foreign being about our planet’s culture would introduce derivative spinoffs like Lost Stars before the Skywalker Saga, The Light Between Worlds before Narnia, etc.)

In theory, this novel could be an uncomfortable but intriguing exploration of how art can transcend boundaries and demand risks from us. I do like the initial premise of a secret library providing escapism to an occupied population, and I appreciate the representation of multiple nonbinary people and a black protagonist identifying on the asexuality spectrum. But any potential here is entirely squashed in execution.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Book #115 of 2020:

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me from The Hobbit as a bedtime story, so it may not be a title I can review with any sort of critical objectivity. It both introduced me to the fantasy genre and got me hooked, and its rhythms have formed much of what I still look for in fiction. Along with its sequel trilogy The Lord of the Rings, it’s also a beloved and influential work across speculative literature, such that when we critique subsequent tales of wizards and elves as being overly broad or derivative, we usually mean that a writer is just imitating Tolkien.

The setting of Middle-Earth doesn’t seem generic, however. This children’s novel lacks the detailed history that the author builds into his later series for adults — and indeed, they fit together somewhat awkwardly as a unified saga — but the storybook atmosphere is endlessly enchanting and distinctive. Although the book follows a single character’s linear journey (literally there and back again, as per the original subtitle), it manages to convey an expansive realm of further excitement transpiring just outside our vision. A few minor issues like English month and weekday names do rub against that impression of integrity for this secondary world, yet they never bothered me as a child and don’t significantly impact my suspension of disbelief even now.

More damning, I’d say, is the overwhelming maleness of this narrative, with a few dozen named characters by the end — including thirteen dwarves in the main cast with varying degrees of characterization — and no women among them except for an early passing mention of the hero’s mother. That’s a sign of the era and perhaps not a major flaw, but I don’t know if I’d feel the same if I first encountered this book today or were a female reader myself. And I wonder with some sadness if my daughter will be able to see herself as fully in Bilbo’s shoes as I always have.

Nevertheless, as a succession of fun encounters adding up to one grand adventure, this volume takes me away every time. The protagonist’s steady transformation from fussy homebody to bold companion and defender of right is astonishing to watch unfold, and the overall effect of the charming dialogue and conversational storytelling is pure delight. I don’t have the proper distance to adequately evaluate this text, but its scenes are etched deep within me, and I’ve loved diving back into that once again.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

Book #114 of 2020:

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

There’s great potential and a distinctive character voice in this YA First Nations dystopia, but the overall effort is only sporadically effective for me. One of the particular strengths of sci-fi / fantasy as a genre is its ability to allegorically heighten and externalize real-life conflicts, and so I am completely on-board for the fictional premise of a crumbling future Canada imprisoning and harvesting its indigenous population to find out why they’re the only ones still capable of dreaming. It’s horrific, but certainly a valid and thought-provoking extension of how these peoples have been treated throughout history. The best moments in the novel arise either directly from that notion or from author Cherie Dimaline’s #ownvoices exploration of how her protagonists feel cut off from their heritage by the untimely passing of elders.

Unfortunately, too much else is left underdeveloped or underexplained in this narrative, from plot to characterization to the memory-fueled magic that pops up near the end. It also feels odd for the story to so directly equate ethnic identity with physical genetic traits, although I will leave that for native readers to unpack more fully. This book is almost short enough to be a novella, but it’s definitely one that I think could have benefitted from further chapters to flesh out its concepts.

[Content warning for rape and torture.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin

Book #113 of 2020:

Very, Very, Very Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 by Albert Marrin

I’ve been reading up on last century’s ‘Spanish’ Flu pandemic, which seems the closest historical precedent for the ongoing COVID-19 crisis of today. And this title is a generally solid contribution to that body of knowledge, but it has a few issues that keep me from giving a full endorsement. For such a short book it often wanders quite afield of its topic, and author Albert Marrin makes a few tenuous claims that I’d love to see better supported. (I don’t reject outright the idea that widespread appreciation for influenza nurses helped lead to American women’s suffrage a few years later, for instance, but that’s the sort of claim that really requires evidence accompanying it.) There’s also an uneven tone that feels as though certain passages were constructed for younger audiences than others, with authorial asides to define commonplace concepts like autopsies alongside unexplained references to more obscure / adult topics like enemas.

My biggest issue is probably how Marrin, writing in 2018, derides the practice of mask-wearing during an outbreak as completely ineffectual. Not only does that strike me as insensitive to the people back then who were operating with the best information available, but it also flies in the face of what scientists are telling us now, suggesting that this writer and his fact-checkers may not have performed their full and diligent research throughout.

It’s not a complete waste, and I have picked up some details that I haven’t seen elsewhere before (to the extent they can be trusted, of course). I appreciate how the 81-year-old author includes his own parents’ experiences with the disease, which really help bring the era to life. But I wouldn’t suggest anyone check this out as their first or only coverage on the subject.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Plague by Albert Camus

Book #112 of 2020:

The Plague by Albert Camus

This 1947 novel is pretty astonishing to encounter in 2020, in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Albert Camus was not seeking to predict the future, and his presentation of a fictional outbreak in his own decade is of course not a perfect match for COVID-19. Nevertheless, the parallels are uncomfortably striking in the logistics of the disease’s spread and belated government response, and downright uncanny in the author’s insights into a quarantined people’s psychology. As per his existentialist bona fides, Camus captures vivid impressions of characters struggling to make sense of the unfathomable disruption to their lives, as well as their complicated reactions to authority figures’ instructions on best practices.

I honestly found it all kind of exhausting to read in our present day, and I abandoned an early effort to copy down passages that seemed particularly apt after realizing I’d be quoting most of the book that way. I can’t possibly recommend it as escapism for modern audiences, even on the level of political allegory that Camus likely intended — but as literature that distills and expresses our uneasy reality, it really can’t be beat.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Dead to Me, season 2

TV #17 of 2020:

Dead to Me, season 2

The first season of this show felt somewhat at war with itself, trying to marry a serious exploration of grief with an over-the-top, twist-heavy plot in a way that ultimately hindered either aim. This time around, the writers have largely jettisoned the former element — and although that’s the one I greatly preferred, I can’t argue that the end result is a stronger and more cohesive narrative. It’s ludicrous as heck, but still good fun and a worthy successor to the suburban bloodshed of Santa Clarita Diet.

The storyline kind of peters out in the last few episodes, though, and writing off Natalie Morales so early is, as usual, a grave mistake. I imagine this series will follow the usual Netflix pattern and end after its third year, but at this point that feels like it might be more of a blessing than a curse.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Book #111 of 2020:

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

This long-awaited second collection of science-fiction from author Ted Chiang more than lives up to the promise of his earlier Stories of Your Life and Others (which contained the basis for the alien linguistics movie Arrival). These tales don’t just posit exciting technologies or shed light into bigger questions of the human spirit; at their best they radically expand our notions of what the genre can even contain.

In the exquisite first entry, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” an ancient Babylonian devises a portal for visiting decades past or future, thereby marrying familiar time-travel tropes with a delightful Thousand and One Nights narrative style. Later on, in “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” Chiang ponders how technological advances impact memory and self-perception by weaving together a tale of breakthrough digital recall devices and one of the introduction of western writing to an isolated oral culture.

Some of the stories play out like episodes of Fringe or Black Mirror, exploring alternate worlds and new avenues for dangerous temptation, yet they maintain a heart and appreciation for their characters that is all this writer’s own. My average rating for the book is four-out-of-five stars, and even the few pieces I don’t love — which tend to be short drabbles anyway — are well worth the read to see a master turning over such ideas.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

Book #110 of 2020:

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

This is a difficult read, challenging the widespread mode of philanthropy — in both direct charity and private-sector services — that aims to improve people’s lives but does little to address any underlying systemic forces at play. (For example: a platform for smoothing out unstable paychecks by automatically banking one month’s excesses to dip into for future shortfalls, ignoring what root causes might be driving that volatility. Or a lesson on confident ‘power poses’ for women that doesn’t push back on why such body language is necessary for them to be taken as seriously as men.)

In author Anand Giridharadas’s analysis, these efforts devote valuable resources to treating symptoms and not seeking cures, because the status quo benefits those very individuals and institutions who are charting the course to distribute funding. Channeling Audre Lorde’s classic dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” he takes aim at all such efforts for the rich to ‘give back’ that don’t interrogate how they amassed their fortunes in the first place, thereby guaranteeing that others like them will continue to benefit disproportionately over the folks they claim to want to help.

I don’t know that I completely accept the writer’s reasoning in every case presented here, and I wish he would distinguish more between a rational consumer using a product like Uber or Facebook for its entrenched societal value and the venture capitalists actually carrying out that entrenchment. Still, the text is unsettling and provocative in the best way, and has given me quite a lot to ponder vis-à-vis working within a flawed system versus working to tear it down.

★★★★☆

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