The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Shouldn’t You Be in School? by Lemony Snicket

Book #58 of 2020:

Shouldn’t You Be in School? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #3)

I’ve come around to the idea that this prequel quartet is not really going to add anything meaningful to our understanding of the background for A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I wish it would tell a more engaging story in its own right. Author Lemony Snicket’s talent for atmospheric allusions to greater happenings works best when it has a plot with immediate human stakes to ground it, and I’ve still yet to find that here. We do get to see a different side of a few minor characters at least, which helps keep things interesting enough to press on to the final book.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Book #57 of 2020:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

This is for the most part an enjoyable madcap picaresque, but its entitled manchild of a protagonist can be awfully infuriating. Admittedly much of the humor of the text is at that character’s own expense, but I still found myself gritting my teeth more than grinning over his antics as he romps his way across New Orleans. I think this may also be a case where the backstory behind a book’s publication — the author’s suicide, his mother’s efforts to get the manuscript published over a decade later, and ultimately a posthumous Pulitzer Prize — is more interesting and moving than the written story itself. It’s remarkable that we have the novel at all, but I can’t say that I entirely love it.

[Content warning for racist, ableist, and homophobic slurs, fatphobia, and repeated use of ‘abortion’ as an insult.]

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

Book #56 of 2020:

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

The first part of this 2018 book by then-presidential candidate Andrew Yang lays out a clear assessment of the growing trend towards industrial automation and accompanying job loss, but I find his logic hard to follow when he moves on to discuss possible solutions to that crisis. I particularly think the author doesn’t make a great case for his signature policy of a $1000 monthly ‘freedom dividend’ to every adult American, and I consider his preoccupation with the threat of unemployed masses launching an armed revolt against the government to be downright bizarre. Some of his talking points in that regard overlap uncomfortably with MRA and alt-right rhetoric, as well. Yang certainly has some provocative ideas, but this is not the most compelling argument for any of them.

(The irony, of course, is that I’m writing this review in the midst of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, when no less a figure than conservative Mitt Romney has just proposed exactly such a UBI measure to offset economic fallout. But my rating reflects this title itself, not the Yang platform or the overall concept of a universal basic income.)

[Content warning for racism including slurs that the author mentions facing.]

★★☆☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

Book #55 of 2020:

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (The Poppy War #1)

I really like the beginning of this novel, with its Ender’s Shadow plot — i.e. an orphan child acing the entrance exam for a prestigious military academy — set in a fantasy world inspired by modern Chinese history. But it loses me a little in the back half of the book, when our protagonist leaves her school for the battlefield, encountering vengeful gods and a variety of grisly war crimes along the way. This part of the narrative is as bloody and brutal as the actual Second Sino-Japanese War, and although my rating reflects that the quality of the writing and storytelling remains high throughout, there are some real moral atrocities in here that I’m just not interested in reading about in such vivid detail. Based on how the closing arc sets up the sequel for even more of the same, I don’t know that I’m in a hurry to continue on with the rest of the series.

[Content warning for self-harm, drug addiction, rape, torture, mutilation, genocide, and infanticide. Not YA and not for the faint of heart.]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

TV Review: The Mandalorian, season 1

TV #4 of 2020:

The Mandalorian, season 1

The plot to this season doesn’t really resolve as neatly as I would like, and a few character beats don’t feel properly motivated, but overall it’s a stellar achievement — no pun intended — for the first live-action Star Wars show. The budget behind this project must have been absolutely massive, and it pays off with the sort of deeply immersive, lived-in world that even the movies don’t always manage to convey. I love the repurposed Western elements like the protagonist’s gunslinger ethos, and of course, his diminutive ward is just as adorable as all those memes suggest. There are so many individual moments of brilliance to this debut that I’m tempted to give it a full five stars, but I’m just not sure I’m satisfied by the shape of the story now that it’s done. Luckily all the pieces should be there for an even better season two.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Book #54 of 2020:

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Author Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s continual process of trying on and discarding various metaphors to describe his experience with gender dysphoria and transition reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado’s masterful In the Dream House, which adopts a similar approach to the topic of domestic abuse. And those parts of this memoir work really well for me, but there’s a lot here that feels rather extraneous to Ortberg’s own life, with extended riffs on pop culture or scripture and other classical texts that don’t always seem wholly relevant. Given that range of topics, I wish this book were structured more like a traditional essay collection, so that I could more easily point to the sections I do and don’t like.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom by Louis Sachar

Book #53 of 2020:

Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom by Louis Sachar (Wayside School #4)

I’m a little torn in my reaction to this novel. On the one hand: it’s good quirky fun, with author Louis Sachar seamlessly slipping into his old rhythms a full twenty-five years after the last Wayside School book. I have fond childhood memories of the original series, and I was surprised by how much came flooding back throughout this unexpected sequel. (The therapist who hypnotizes students with a pickle on a chain! The nineteenth floor that doesn’t exist! Sachar writing himself into the story as a janitor!) I’m sure there are subtler callbacks that went over my head too, especially since I didn’t take the time to reread the first three volumes when I heard this one was coming out.

On the other hand: I don’t think this project ever really justifies why it exists, like there was any burning need for a Wayside revival so long after the fact. I also don’t feel as though the latest bunch of loosely-related vignettes is quite as entertaining as those before — although that could easily be because I’m an older fuddy-duddy now and/or viewing what I remember of last century’s trilogy with rose-colored glasses. I’m rounding my rating up a tad, under the assumption that anyone in the right age range to love the previous titles will probably enjoy this latest as well.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink

Book #52 of 2020:

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink

This is an engagingly written pop science book, and it’s short enough that I do recommend it for anyone interested in learning some surprising patterns behind hourly mood swings, peak performance times, and the like. It’s cleverly positioned as a ‘when-to’ self-help manual as well, with tips at the end of every chapter for recalibrating one’s own schedule to boost efficiency. Yet the data seems somewhat cherry-picked, and the topic that I know the most about — cross-linguistic differences in how grammar encodes the past and future — is way more nuanced and contentious than how author Daniel H. Pink presents it here. That makes me somewhat reluctant to take the rest of what he says at face value, let alone use it as the basis for overhauling my life.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Girls with Sharp Sticks by Suzanne Young

Book #51 of 2020:

Girls with Sharp Sticks by Suzanne Young (Girls with Sharp Sticks #1)

Blown away by this series debut, which reads like a wild blend of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Stephen King’s The Institute, with shades of The Handmaid’s Tale and Westworld to boot. Its story of a finishing school that is clearly grooming teen girls for some nefarious purpose probably most resembles the creeping dystopian dread from the first book in that group, but with a far more propulsive plot as the students uncover and push against the evil of their world. I love these characters and their resilience, and am properly horrified by how they are treated as the narrative unfolds. The love interest feels a little thin, and I wish the ending carried more resolution, but I am on the edge of my seat to find out where the sequel takes things next.

[Major content warning for sexism and violation of bodily autonomy / consent, although never to the level of sexual assault or rape.]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor

Book #50 of 2020:

Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch #2)

This second novel in the Akata Witch duology has a messier and more episodic plot than its predecessor, but it also feels more like a fully-formed fantasy vision rather than just an #ownvoices West African take on Harry Potter. (Although as with that series, the characters and tone have aged up slightly in between books, shifting the genre from Middle-Grade to Young Adult for this sequel.) The characters and their motivations seem less generic now, providing readers with a better understanding of both Sunny as a protagonist and the ways in which her identity as an American-raised albino girl marks her as an outsider in Nigerian society. The series looks to be complete for now, but on the strengths of this adventure I would definitely return for another volume.

[Content warning for racism, colorism, sexism, and use of the r-word.]

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Individual rankings: 2 > 1

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter