The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb

Book #211 of 2019:

Blood of Dragons by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #4)

This final volume in The Rain Wild Chronicles embodies all of the problems of that fantasy quartet. It’s long and uneventful and curiously detached from its characters, none of whom seem to have much of an arc or any particular goal they’re striving for. It doesn’t help that author Robin Hobb is juggling at least a dozen different perspectives, jumping around to follow the (minimal) action rather than presenting personal stakes for readers to invest in. There’s some worldbuilding and plot development for her larger The Realm of the Elderlings saga, but unless the next series goes in an unexpected direction, I would say this franchise offshoot can be safely ignored.

[Content warning for rape.]

This book: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Book ranking: 3 > 1 > 4 > 2

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Book Review: Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal by Renia Spiegel with her sister Elizabeth Bellak

Book #210 of 2019:

Renia’s Diary: A Holocaust Journal by Renia Spiegel with her sister Elizabeth Bellak

I have mixed feelings about this diary of a Polish Jew who was killed by the Nazis at age 18. The obvious comparison point is fellow Holocaust victim Anne Frank, but Frank was a consummate observer who hoped to someday publish her record of events, whereas Renia Spiegel is clear at several points that she is writing only for herself. She also makes scant — albeit always arresting — mention of the turbulence of the times around her, being instead more concerned with her teenage poetry and her feelings for a local boy. There’s a certain uncomfortable voyeurism in reading these passages, and although putting a(nother) human face on a tragedy can be beneficial, I don’t know that the payoff is worth the intrusion.

Perhaps more interesting are the Preface, Afterword, and Notes written by Renia’s younger sister, now in her late 80s, who took the diary out of storage and had it published in the original Polish in 2016 and an English translation in 2019. These sections provide important historical context and constitute an invaluable aspect of the overall text. But I’m just not convinced that a story so personal and so trivial really needed to be shared with the world.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Book #209 of 2019:

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

This is an interesting topic, and I appreciate the array of studies that author Tom Vanderbilt has assembled for the task, but I find many of his arguments hard to parse, reliant on unjustified assumptions, and frankly somewhat repetitive. I also think he stretches in tying local traffic norms to purported cultural values such as individualism or civic corruption, and I feel that his critiques of innovative technologies like GPS navigation and self-driving cars have proven overly pessimistic since the book’s publication in 2008. So overall, this has been something of a disappointing read.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

Book #208 of 2019:

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

This is one of those popular history volumes that’s a deep dive into a fairly narrow topic, and I definitely learned a lot about the shipwreck incident that’s usually rendered as just a sentence or two in the account of how America was drawn into the first World War. I especially had no idea that so many surviving passengers had written about their experiences (as obvious as that now seems in hindsight). With a wealth of material in the form of those memoirs and other primary documents, author Erik Larson is able to recreate events surrounding the fatal voyage in great detail.

Most affecting, of course, are the moments immediately after the torpedo hits, and I wonder if the overall text might have been stronger if it had stuck more closely to that window of time and wandered less afield to some of Larson’s more quixotic inclusions like President Woodrow Wilson’s love life. As with his book The Devil in the White City, I feel as though the writer has thrown together everything from his research that was at all related to the topic at hand, when more discipline could have produced a tighter and more coherent narrative.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Book #207 of 2019:

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2)

This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between middle-grade or children’s fantasy and YA, and I imagine that that balance shifts over the course of subsequent volumes. But the protagonist is currently in seventh grade.)

Early on, one of Percy’s friends is called the r-word, and the hero protests, “He’s not _,” repeating the slur and giving no indication that the term and the ideology behind it are what’s truly unacceptable. There are also jokes about the same character’s weight and multiple stereotypical comparisons to “Comanche warriors,” as well as a running gag of a satyr hiding himself from a hungry cyclops by donning a wedding dress and speaking in falsetto. Although such cross-dressing does feature in some of the classic Greek myths that author Rick Riordan has drawn upon for this franchise, it’s a dated use of gender as punchline that reads differently in the twenty-first century.

I’m sure many kids and even adults who pick up this novel either will not notice the above concerns or will simply shrug them away. But I’ve found them to represent a pretty glaring departure from the lighthearted fun of the previous story, and there isn’t enough substance in this new quest plot to distract from that. I’d like for Riordan to be more mindful in how he writes about people’s differences, but I’d also like weightier consideration of the peril in these adventures and further divergence from the original mythology canon. We’re two years into Percy’s narrative at this point; it’s well past time for some worldbuilding details to distinguish this from any other modernization.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Book #206 of 2019:

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

This intergenerational drama reads fine on the surface, but so many elements ring false upon a moment’s reflection. Like the fact that the central family is repeatedly described as Catholic but never shown doing anything religious, or that the college professor complaining about millennial students is actually young enough to be in that generation herself, or that her teenage nephew shows no sign of having any friends, teachers, or other social structure outside the home. These two viewpoint figures are joined by an unwieldy additional five, and their various subplots progress erratically and seldom intersect as the novel goes along. Fairly major life decisions are neither explained nor explored, which further distances the reader. For this sort of story to work we have to care deeply about the characters, and that’s challenging when everything feels so hollow.

[Content warning for eating disorders, miscarriage, and uncritical use of the r-word and related slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: Cooties (2014)

Movie #11 of 2019:

Cooties (2014)

Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by child bodies. The tone is all over the place too, and the parameters of the fictional setting don’t feel coherent even before the outbreak hits. The big-name cast members are mostly game, but they’re wasted on this material.

[Content warning for repeated misgendering, along with all of the above.]

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Book #205 of 2019:

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This story of a New York City Jewish family on the verge of divorce has well-drawn (albeit realistically frustrating) characters and some sharp observations on marriage, parenting, and gender roles. I like the late perspective shift that complicates our understanding of the Fleishman dynamics and raises questions of narrator reliability. But at the end of the day, it’s a literary novel about rich people going through midlife crises, which is every bit as depressing and exasperating as it sounds. There’s also just a whole lot of sex and masturbation, which I personally could have done without. I’m sure some readers will love all of the above, and I’d happily check out further works by the clearly talented debut author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, but this wasn’t an ideal book for me.

[Content warning for graphic descriptions of childbirth, sexual assault, child pornography, and revenge porn.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Nightbooks by J. A. White

Book #204 of 2019:

Nightbooks by J. A. White

In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and the larger framing device are sure to please the Goosebumps crowd (or whatever today’s comparable phenomenon would be). There’s a late twist that genre-savvy older readers will likely see coming, but it’s deployed well and is no less enjoyable even when guessed in advance. This novel has a lot of heart to it, and it deftly captures the fun of frightening fiction without ever growing too terrifying itself.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Book #203 of 2019:

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

This experimental novel starts out like a cross between Memento and House of Leaves before taking a detour through Neverwhere and ending up finally at Jaws. In other words, it’s a story about an amnesiac receiving messages from his former self, wherein the actual printed text on the page sometimes forms a sort of concrete poetry or otherwise functions in ways we wouldn’t expect, and a manic pixie dream girl leads our everyman protagonist through a hidden underside of Britain on their way to hunt a shark. Only this is a conceptual fish that swims in the semantic ocean of human cultural interactions, and it’s the living meme that ate his memories in the first place. It’s a weird book!

Yet somehow in the hands of debut author Steven Hall the daftness mostly all works, even if it’s ultimately a narrative that hints at complexities rather than developing them for us outright. It’s also a very empty fictional universe — I count just five characters, no more than three of whom ever share a scene — and although that further detracts from the worldbuilding, it adds a lonely and haunted aspect that fits the self-reflective mood of the overall piece. Like the shark or the first Eric Sanderson, there’s a lot to this tale that feels just out of sight, as though if we had finished each chapter just a little bit faster, we might have caught a glimpse of the truly significant events that passed beforehand. But instead we’re left with the rustling whisper of ripples spreading out across a dim surface in their wake.

I don’t quite love the volume as a finished statement, but I find that I can’t stop thinking about it. And I’ll take ambitiously flawed over perfectly competent any day.

[This title was suggested to me by a Silver-level Patreon donor. 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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