The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

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★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Palm Springs (2020)

Movie #11 of 2020:

Palm Springs (2020)

This is a fun spin on the old time-loop story, situating it as a romantic comedy with both leads stuck in the same repeating day (which happens to include a wedding, a classic romcom setting to begin with). It’s as funny as you’d expect from Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, and I particularly love how she gets to play a dynamic character with her own arc of self-empowerment, rather than just being there to service the narrative of her schlubby co-star. There are some of the typical plot beats to this genre, but the script surprises me at several points, and even makes some smart philosophical observations that feel straight out of The Good Place. I’m not saying I would watch the film again and again, but it’s pretty great on this first time through.

[Content warning for torture and suicide.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Altered Carbon, season 2

TV #26 of 2020:

Altered Carbon, season 2

I still have some issues with the logic of this sci-fi series, from the frequent foolishness of its elite super-soldiers to the persistence of sexism centuries after humans have started casually swapping their minds from body to body. (If anything, that decoupling of mental and physical should allow for a nuanced consideration of gender and other identity aspects that the show is just categorically uninterested in pursuing.)

Nevertheless, even more so than the first season, this sophomore outing has made a lot of really smart adaptation choices, keeping the basic premise of the worldbuilding and a few particular plot beats from the books but generally spinning a fresh take on the material that shores up its many weaknesses. Characters and concepts are remixed together in a way that likely disappoints fans of the original Richard K. Morgan trilogy, but as someone who was only ever lukewarm on that version, I greatly prefer what the TV writers have come up with.

Of note this year is the recasting of protagonist Takeshi Kovacs from Joel Kinnaman to Anthony Mackie — a seemingly necessary reconfiguration for the new story that many shows would surely have resisted regardless, plus just a win for diversity — as well as the decision to bring back the endearing hotel A.I. who only appeared in print for the first novel. These are clever production moves that further service the action and the fun exploration of the setting’s mythology that follows.

I’ve been hard on this franchise before, and it definitely offers more here that I could nitpick, but since this is its finest iteration yet, I think it’s earned my first four-star rating.

★★★★☆

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