The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Good Wife, season 4

TV #28 of 2020:

The Good Wife, season 4

There’s a lot that I enjoy in this run of episodes, from the trustee played by Nathan Lane to Alicia’s growing disillusionment with her firm’s management style (which really pays off next year, but is fun to watch build up gradually for now). Since the initial concept of this show is that its heroine is a legal shark who was content to be a housewife until circumstances forced her to pick back up with her career, there’s some good thematic resonance in seeing her once again moving from complacency to strength in response to unfair treatment.

On the other hand, the election subplot often feels like a weak retread — especially since Matthew Perry’s character had to be largely off-screen due to another acting gig that he picked up over the break — and there’s sadly not a single element of the storyline about Kalinda’s husband that works well. Nick is an over-the-top gangster caricature who never fits in with the tone of the series, not to mention an abusive jerk and a dramatic deadweight in his every scene. His inclusion is just a baffling miscalculation on every level, and I can’t in good conscience rate the season particularly highly as a result.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Book #171 of 2020:

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

With their farmhouse and associated livelihood repossessed, 50-year-old Raynor Winn and her husband elect to pack up their few remaining possessions and hike a 630-mile trail around the coastline of southwest England. This resulting memoir is a good travelogue of that region, but I find many of the writer’s choices to be either frustratingly ill-thought-out or just plain mystifying (especially the decision to make the journey in the first place, given its grueling nature and her spouse’s debilitating medical diagnosis). I do appreciate her observations on homelessness, and how differently people respond to the lie that the backpackers have sold their house rather than lost it, but I can’t connect enough with their thinking for the book to be particularly affecting.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #170 of 2020:

The War Within by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #2)

I’m not quite loving this fantasy trilogy, but the second volume is a major improvement, offering an expansive plot of castle intrigue and warfare preparations in place of the somewhat stilted morality play of the first novel. The addition of further viewpoint figures helps too, and although we’re still stuck in a small corner of the map as great deeds happen elsewhere, the worldbuilding seems more complete, with kingdoms who know of their neighbors (who would know of their own neighbors, etc.).

Author Stephen R. Donaldson often creates characters rigidly governed by the oblique strictures they’ve imposed on themselves, which I find interesting in a literary sense even when I can’t really relate to their struggles. Here, for instance, his returning protagonist Bifalt feels he’s been reduced to a tool by the events of Seventh Decimate, forced onto a path where he can only seek honor in the total abnegation of agency. That’s a fascinating sort of ideology with clear shades of Donaldson’s classic antihero Thomas Covenant — yet for the most part, this series showcases the writer rhyming and riffing on his favorite themes, rather than outright repeating himself.

This title is a high three-out-of-five stars for me, falling short merely in that its middle-book storyline features a lot of setup for the finale at the expense of rewarding payoff in the present. A few threads in particular are left without any satisfying immediate climax, and while I’m fairly invested in their ultimate resolution, I do wish we had more of a taste of it right now.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Be Not Far from Me by Mindy McGinnis

Book #169 of 2020:

Be Not Far from Me by Mindy McGinnis

A short but harrowing person-vs-nature novel, about a seventeen-year-old who gets lost in the woods with an injured foot and just the clothes on her back. I feel drawn into this story almost immediately by the sharp interior voice of the heroine, and author Mindy McGinnis does an excellent job balancing Ashley’s extreme competence with the desperate stakes that she nevertheless finds herself in. The writer also tells a gripping tale with essentially just one character, maintaining a long internal monologue with only occasional interruptions for brief flashbacks. That’s a challenging task pulled off with apparent ease, reminiscent of Stephen King works like Gerald’s Game or (especially) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

I really love this protagonist, whose ordeal I couldn’t look away from even at its most stomach-churning. I also appreciate her lower-class Tennessee background, and how McGinnis makes this narrative concern precarity and the difficulty of breaking away from a small town as much as immediate survival. This is my favorite sort of Young Adult project, where the lead figure isn’t that age just because it’s a popular convention that will move audiences, but rather because she’s situated on the cusp of maturity making difficult decisions about her path forward.

Objectively I think this book probably has a few too many convenient coincidences, but it’s overall a bravura performance that I would have happily and anxiously kept reading for many times this length. Five stars for that achievement seems more than fair.

[Content/spoiler warning for gore, amputation, starvation, eating live worms and fish, racism, sexism, and domestic abuse.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

Book #168 of 2020:

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

This new 2020 release is probably the best book I’ve yet read on global pandemics like the still-unfolding COVID-19 scenario — although admittedly not much of the text actually addresses its title claim, and those recommendations for individual steps during an outbreak should already be familiar to most readers. Stay home as often as humanly possible. Wear a mask or other face covering and try to avoid people when you do go out. Wash your hands frequently, try not to touch your eyes, nose, or mouth, and disinfect things that you bring inside if they’ll be handled again soon. There’s no surprise panacea here, but public health expert Michael Greger brings a light approach to his in-depth yet easy-to-follow explanations of just why these measures are so effective.

Mostly, however, this is a guide to how diseases like the novel coronavirus spread, and how our societies could better mitigate against them. As with preventative medicine for a single person’s body, it is cheaper and healthier in the long run to shore up our critical systems in advance, rather than acting to respond only once a crisis hits. The author’s primary suggestions concern unsafe meatpacking practices, which are stomach-churning from both an animal rights perspective and that of simple basic hygiene. On issue after issue, Greger shows how industry greed in a globalized economy has cut corners and introduced risks of infection that will inevitably result in eventual calamity.

Indeed, the most surprising aspect of this read is how it largely downplays the present catastrophe and warns of greater dangers still to come. I’m sure I’m not alone in viewing COVID-19 as the big one that’s shaken everything, but Greger, while acknowledging that millions may ultimately die from it, repeatedly contextualizes the coronavirus as a relatively minor threat compared to the other pathogens that are out there mutating in the animal reservoir and could someday jump to our species. We wouldn’t necessarily be in this predicament if leaders had listened as this writer and his colleagues sounded the alarm all along, and it’s not too late to start now.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff

Book #167 of 2020:

Separated: Inside An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff

This title is pitched as a deep dive into the Trump administration’s draconian policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern U.S. border, but it’s instead somewhat narrowly focused on author Jacob Soboroff’s personal experiences investigating that story, including tedious descriptions of his every research step and fawning quotes from his journalistic peers. There are also wide swaths of relevant background information on immigration and asylum that are not provided, rendering the project less of a definitive reference text and more of a meandering memoir that only occasionally educates along the way. The writer’s heart is in the right place and I value his reporting on the subject elsewhere, but this book is fairly unnecessary.

(The audiobook is also pretty bad, with endnotes divorced from their context and interstitial document excerpts only identified at the end of their quotes. It’s a production that opts to read through the printed version cover to cover, rather than considering how formatting should be adapted for the spoken medium. My rating reflects the written content and not these editing choices, but they were frustrating enough to raise in this review.)

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

Book #166 of 2020:

Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

I like how this new fantasy novel of a princess whose touch is poison — so inadvertently appropriate for our pandemic era of masks and social distancing! — blends #ownvoices Persian folklore with elements of the Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel fairy tales, by way of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” That’s an unusual combination of influences, and it gives the text a fairly distinctive flair. I also appreciate that the heroine has both a male and a female love interest as the plot progresses, with nary a sign of any biphobia or homophobia built into the worldbuilding.

Unfortunately, it feels as though all the relationships in the book, including those two romances, are founded upon secrets and lies, which are not always well-motivated or examined for their effects on the characters’ trust. I’m kept somewhat at a distance from the narrative as a result, unable to fully invest in any of these personal dynamics. It’s still a neat read, but not nearly as captivating as author Melissa Bashardoust’s Girls Made of Snow and Glass debut.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 7

TV #27 of 2020:

Shameless, season 7

Although still recognizable, this is a quieter and more thoughtful year of Shameless, with arcs that build gradually to a boil rather than the show’s typical frenetic style. It doesn’t always work with what we know of these characters — Fiona’s new focus on business and disinterest in mothering her siblings is particularly hard to square with her earlier pursuit of custody rights, and the writers can’t seem to decide whether Debbie is a genius who can ace her GED without studying or a hopeless case who might as well beg on the streets — but the slower pace generally serves the narrative well. Frank’s time running a nearby homeless shelter, while absurd, also positions him nicely as a minor antagonistic presence in his children’s lives, a much better use than when the series treats him as a full-fledged antihero.

Shameless’s exploration of transgender issues this season is also more grounded and compassionate than I would have expected/feared (based on how it’s handled race and disability in the past). We do get some hurtful things said in ignorance and one scene that reduces people to their pronouns as an apparent punchline, but Trevor, as played by trans actor Elliot Fletcher, is a nuanced and interesting role. And overall, the program is again messy but effective: maybe not quite back at the heights of season 4, but still a big turnaround from early season 6. Despite a few dropped plot points here and there, the ongoing Gallagher story seems in a relatively stable place for once.

[Content warning for alcoholism, racism, rape, and incest.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson

Book #165 of 2020:

Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson

I remember liking this historical fiction title when I first encountered it as assigned reading back in middle school, so when my library acquired the digital audiobook in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I figured it might be worth revisiting. And overall, I’d say the 2000 novel holds up well. Author Laurie Halse Anderson captures the panic and terror of an outbreak more acutely than I had realized, and although her plucky protagonist is an invention, the work is quite educational on the facts of Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever crisis. It’s not a perfect analogue to our own circumstances, of course, but there are recognizable parallels that add further poignance to an already gripping plot.

I also appreciate how the book features race in the form of black supporting characters and (brief) discussions of discrimination and slavery. The topic is somewhat flattened for the middle-grade genre and is hardly a focus of the text, but it’s an element that many writers would have likely elided altogether, so I’m glad to see it here. As with the descriptions of dead and dying bodies, Anderson walks a fine line to impart the seriousness of the situation without ever growing too heavy for her young audience.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Book #164 of 2020:

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

I have mixed feelings about this story of psychic twins, separated at birth, who nevertheless find each other via telepathy and end up forging an unshakable bond. I like the protagonists themselves, and the plot reads like classic Stephen King as they use their special talents to evade evil and undo a few doomed timelines. I especially appreciate the complicated nuances of Roger and Dodger’s often-codependent relationship, and that author Seanan McGuire resists ever turning these estranged siblings into lovers (as I worried she’d do after a similar development in her Newsflesh trilogy).

On the other hand, the backstory to the experiment that created the rhymed pair is frustratingly vague, as are any other details to the alchemical worldbuilding and the exact goals that anyone is fighting to achieve. I can’t help but feel checked-out as a reader when the primary villain’s motivation seems to be just a generic power grab, which the nominal heroes only oppose because it involves their deaths. We also spend too many scenes — including the entire first hour of the audiobook — from the perspective of this antagonist or his lieutenant that are dramatically inert, telling us nothing more than that they continue to be nebulously diabolical in their schemes. The narrative crackles back to life whenever we rejoin the main characters, but this would be a much stronger novel if it could focus solely on them throughout.

[Content warning for a graphic suicide attempt.]

[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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