The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer

Book #103 of 2020:

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here by Esther Safran Foer

There are many personal accounts of the Holocaust out there, but I think this new memoir may be the first I’ve read from the child of survivors, exploring what it’s like to grow up with that sort of household trauma hanging overhead. Esther Safran Foer’s father killed himself when she was eight years old, and her mother long resisted sharing details of their experiences from before emigration to America. As a result, the author has spent much of her life trying to reconstruct that story and track down relatives both living and dead — helped along by the attention raised through her son Jonathan’s famous fictionalized version of events, Everything Is Illuminated.

This is a good companion piece to that 2002 novel, but it also works fine as an independent meditation on the Jewish diaspora, Nazi violence, and the difficulties in researching a time and place with so little existing documentation. Foer’s narrative stretches forward and back over multiple generations, making clear how deep these scars linger in everyone’s memories, continuing to shape countless facets of the family’s existence for decades to come.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Book #102 of 2020:

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

I appreciate how this fantasy novel’s protagonist is a heavyset, middle-aged, gay social worker, any single element of which would be rare enough for the genre (and liable to be used as a punchline, rather than treated with empathy and respect as here). Taken altogether, he’s certainly a distinctive perspective to deliver the story. Yet the orphaned magical creatures in the hero’s caseload feel a tad cartoonish and interchangeable to me, which tends to blunt the emotional impact of their newfound connection. I still ultimately like the book more than I dislike it, but an overly predictable and low-stakes plot keeps it from being anything more than a nice comfort read.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 45

TV #13 of 2020:

Saturday Night Live, season 45

Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang are fun new additions to this long-running sketch show, and I have to credit the whole team both on and off-screen for bouncing back so strongly after the COVID-19 coronavirus curtailed the original plans for the season. (The three pre-recorded “SNL At Home” episodes that close out this run lack some of the energy and most of the production quality of the traditional live performances, but they’re still funny and a familiar comfort in these strange times.) As ever, the political material could occasionally stand to be sharper — I think I counted three different guests tasked with playing Joe Biden this year, rather than one dedicated cast impressionist — but there’s enough consistency in the laughs to keep me watching week after week.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

Book #101 of 2020:

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #8)

Although this book contains one of those Agatha Christie solutions that I deduced well before her stalwart investigator, I don’t consider that a weakness of the text or a detriment to my enjoyment of its puzzle. (Indeed, my top complaint about this author is that she sometimes withholds key evidence from her readers to keep us from solving the mystery ourselves, so I appreciate that she plays fairly here instead.) The case of a young woman who keeps narrowly escaping death right under Poirot’s nose gives the detective some interesting shades of humility, and so long as you don’t mind the continued insulting of his ‘friend’ Hastings, it’s overall a fun scenario to watch unfurl.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab

Book #100 of 2020:

A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #2)

An unfortunate continuation of the thin plot and character motivation issues that are keeping me at a distance from this fantasy series. The biggest event in this second volume is a magical tournament that isn’t even mentioned until a third of the way through, and we’re never really given any compelling reason why either of the two protagonists should want to compete — or why one still has her heart set on being a pirate, for that matter.

Chapter by chapter the action is solid enough, but there’s no particular urgency driving any of it. Regular scenes checking in on the villains off-world also do little to advance any larger narrative until the very end, and overall the work suffers by limiting the dimension-hopping that made the first novel so distinctive. Both stories have their faults, yet this one doesn’t even feel like it will be all that memorable (beyond randomly introducing someone named Alucard who isn’t even a vampire).

[Content warning for sexual assault and threat of worse on practically the first page, plus several instances of the heroine slut-shaming and bragging about not being like other girls.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Book #99 of 2020:

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

This novella sort of feels like it’s over before it’s even begun, but within those sparse pages is a fun snapshot of a post-apocalyptic world and a young lesbian running away to find her place in it. The story reads like a typical western, and author Sarah Gailey nails that atmosphere even while populating it with the kind of radical queer love and nonbinary pronouns that have not traditionally been a part of this genre. Although I wish the book were longer, it’s perfectly pitched for what it is.

[Content warning for implied transphobia and homophobia, including backstory of the protagonist’s first girlfriend being hanged for ‘deviance’.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Book #98 of 2020:

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

I’ve been reading a lot lately about disease outbreaks as a way of understanding the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and this book from 2017 is a solid overview of the influenza pandemic that ravaged the global population last century. The misleadingly-named ‘Spanish’ Flu ultimately infected one out of every three people worldwide with an estimated death toll of 50 to 100 million, and although we all hope the current coronavirus will fall well short of those numbers, it’s probably the closest analogue for historical comparison.

My three-star rating for this title reflects its discursive organization, with little apparent structure guiding which chapters occur when, as well as the fact that author Laura Spinney doesn’t really provide satisfactory answers to the question she raises of why such a massive upheaval has so faded from the public consciousness. Still, the work overall is quite informative, and I recommend it for anyone interested in seeing how society handled these circumstances the last major time they arose.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Movie #5 of 2020:

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

This is the first Star Wars release in my lifetime that I didn’t see in theaters, partly due to new parent challenges and partly because of the mixed-to-negative reviews it seemed to be getting everywhere. Now that it’s out on Disney+ and I can watch it from the comfort of my sofa… it turns out I actually really like it!

The script definitely makes a few odd choices, but for the most part that weirdness lies in the relation of this film to the larger Skywalker saga (as well as the unfortunate reduction of Leia’s role to what scraps of dialogue could be cobbled together from the previous episode’s unused footage after her actress passed). There’s some major new backstory presented as an unearned fait accompli, and quite a bit of backtracking that suggests a behind-the-scenes power struggle among the respective writers. Star Wars as a series has sort of always had those issues, but they’ve seldom felt so egregious as they do here.

Nevertheless: if you can approach the movie on its own terms, it’s a fun, funny, and exciting capstone to this trilogy (and what’s come before, to a lesser extent). Fans will find plenty to nitpick over, but also great character moments and cool additions to the Force mythos which make this galaxy a more interesting setting. For a franchise that lives as much in the stories off-screen as on — both canonical and imagined — I can’t fault the basic shape of the plot. Finally seeing it has surprised me in good ways and in bad, yet on balance I’ve certainly enjoyed the ride.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa

Book #97 of 2020:

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa (Profesorowa Szczupaczyńska #1)

The idea of a nineteenth-century Polish Miss Marple has potential, but I haven’t found the characters or plot in this series debut to be especially interesting. The amateur detective in particular seems motivated to look into the case largely out of boredom with her comfortable lifestyle, and her breakthroughs often feel like guesswork more than deductive cunning or even vague intuition. There’s also some awkward writing throughout, and although that may be due to the translation, the novel overall isn’t strong enough to lead me to be charitable there.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 1

TV #12 of 2020:

Shameless, season 1

I like most of this large Chicago family, and I especially enjoy the hardscrabble depiction of their poor financial straits, which is pretty rare for TV. The Gallaghers’ lives are precarious in any number of ways, and seeing them cleverly hustle both in and outside of the law to make ends meet and weather a steady succession of crises is generally a whole lot of fun.

But tonally, I don’t know that I’m entirely vibing with this show. There’s a lot of rape in the debut season, often either not framed as such by the writing or treated as a punchline (or both). There are a few broad cartoonish elements that stick out for me as well, and the uneven plotting leaves many ongoing arcs feeling unintentionally unresolved. Any serialized program is of course going to keep some threads open for the future, but overall I expect a more impactful and satisfying conclusion than Shameless is able to deliver this first year.

Also: love interest Steve is both a worthless character and a bit of a sociopath. I really hope the writers realize how little he brings to the table and that he’s nowhere to be found after this.

★★★☆☆

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