The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

Book #173 of 2020:

The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of her works have survived to today (unless they were misattributed to him, as some people have claimed). But as a young woman in the 18th century, she was kept from pursuing her talents into adulthood, and she settled down into a quiet family life as her brother’s career took off.

That’s already a strong basis for a historical fiction novel, but author Marie Lu incorporates a fascinating obscure detail from Nannerl’s biography as well: the siblings had a game they played on tour that involved trading stories of “Das Königreich Rücken,” a magical kingdom where they were king and queen. And so, Lu posits, what if the Mozarts really were traveling Pevensie-like to that other land, and what if the girl’s thwarted desires to shape her own fate were caught up with the machinations of a dangerous prince of the fey?

It’s a lovely idea, and although some of the fantasy elements can feel a tad generic, the heroine’s frustrations and willingness to be tempted are well-drawn; if you can accept the basic leap of the speculative premise, this is a plausible enough account that fits with the recorded facts. It’s also a passion project for the writer, who mentions in an afterword that she first drafted the book twelve years ago and has been tinkering with it ever since, even while some of her subsequent titles have gone on to become bestsellers. Bringing this forgotten figure to a new audience clearly means a lot to Lu, and that shines through across the resulting text.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Book #172 of 2020:

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

This book by Jason Reynolds attempts to condense Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America into a more streamlined version for younger readers. (Both men are credited as authors, but the language is nearly all Reynolds, much like the novelization to a movie script.) It’s a largely successful effort, although the whirlwind pace doesn’t leave much room for elaboration and I sometimes find the conversational tone distractingly patronizing.

I think fewer people would be convinced by this version than the original, but at around one-fifth the length, it’s admittedly more accessible. I’d probably recommend anyone interested in the topic to start with the full Kendi text, though, and only switch to this one if it proves too difficult a read.

★★★☆☆

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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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