The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Book #80 of 2020:

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

This sci-fi story changes shape rather dramatically at several points, and the ending veers a bit too far into the abstract and surreal for my tastes. But gosh — there’s just so much I adore in the novel that makes up for all that. This is science-fiction at its best, with beautifully human characters grappling with strange new concepts underneath alien suns. At its core, I suppose it’s a novel about what it means to go on loving someone across unfathomable distances of space and time, whether due to warp jumps, cryogenic stasis, or dilated lightspeed travel. (The opening chapter, for instance, concerns a romance with a ship’s captain who ages eight months for every fifteen years experienced by her planetside partner.)

Throughout, debut author Simon Jimenez paints a wonderful example of a supportive found family, with the sort of effortless diversity of race and sexuality that should be a baseline for speculative fiction in 2020 and beyond. Although the composite narrative is somewhat rough as a finished statement, the big ideas and tender moments feel like they will linger with me for quite a while.

[Content warning for torture, slavery, biomedical experimentation, and mention of cannibalism.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Russian Doll, season 1

TV #10 of 2020:

Russian Doll, season 1

This story about a woman repeatedly dying in a decaying time loop — Happy Death Day meets The Langoliers, roughly — takes a little while to grow on me, and I’m still not convinced its internal logic quite checks out. But the characters are endearing, and I’ve enjoyed all the different riffs on the situation that the writing team manage to come up with. I’m really unclear on where a second season could take the concept next, but this was quick and fun enough to stick around and see.

[Content warning for domestic abuse and suicide.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Book #79 of 2020:

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

As in her earlier Station Eleven, author Emily St. John Mandel has a real talent for crafting lifelike protagonists whose personal struggles are deeply compelling to watch unfold. Here, however, I feel as though those threads are too often truncated individually, and too little connected with one another in service of a greater whole. I would have read and loved an entire book focused on any one of these people, but switching tracks so frequently tends to blunt the impact of each narrative before it can come to much.

Broadly speaking, this is a story about a fictional Ponzi scheme collapse which wipes out investor savings and sends its perpetrator to life imprisonment. Like Station Eleven, it details lives both before and after its central crisis, spanning a cast who are linked in ways they never know. (Two figures from the other work even show back up, with the framing that this is a potential alternate fate. But it’s not really a sequel, and recognizing them isn’t crucial.)

I think where this one fails for me is that the financial crash seems too abstract and tangential to most of the characters, in contrast to the global pandemic Mandel previously imagined. As a result the enterprise feels less like a novel and more like a series of loosely related vignettes, all interesting on their own but not readily apparent they need to be included with the rest.

[Content warning for drug overdose.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi

Book #78 of 2020:

War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi (War Girls #1)

This #ownvoices sci-fi novel is an amazingly brutal piece of Afrofuturism, sort of like Black Panther by way of Mad Max: Fury Road. Inspired by the Nigerian Civil War (as experienced by author Tochi Onyebuchi’s mother), it tracks two teenage sisters who end up on opposite sides of a bloody conflict in the 22nd century and get drawn into increasingly desperate acts of violence and retribution. The story is bleak as heck, both for the specific plot events and for the motivating thesis of humanity’s inability to ever break free from repeating such cycles. Our technology may improve, Onyebuchi seems to argue, but the body counts just keep rising.

There are some pacing issues in how the narrative jumps around, and I feel like the voices of the two protagonists could have been better distinguished, yet this is still a powerful and necessarily uncomfortable read.

[Content warning for racism, ableism, graphic violence, child soldier impressment, suicide bombings, and other war crimes.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 4

TV #9 of 2020:

Better Call Saul, season 4

My original review from 2018:

“I’ve mentioned this before, but one reason that I prefer Better Call Saul to its parent show is that Walter White has always struck me as being evil right from the start – Breaking Bad could be exciting and horrifying, but the story was never really about its fairly static main character; it was about his toxic effect on the people around him. Better Call Saul, in contrast, continues to offer a brilliant tragedy of its lead character’s moral decline, as the ongoing disappointments of the world grind him down into the jaded figure we know from the original show. That’s heartbreaking to watch, especially through the eyes of a character like Kim Wexler who knows and loves him (and whose ultimate fate, as someone neither seen nor referenced on Breaking Bad, remains the prequel’s greatest and most quietly devastating mystery).
This season edges us ever closer to Heisenberg’s eventual debut on the Albuquerque crime scene, and it’s a thrill to watch those pieces fall into place on both a plot and a character level. I don’t expect this show to end up with a higher episode count than Bad, but that still leaves the writers one or two more seasons to resolve all the lingering issues that this era has explored. Even though we’ve known from the start where the story is heading, there have been so many unexpected nuances that at this point I have no idea what to predict for the ultimate finale. But I have complete faith in this writing team to make it a poignant one.”

To which I’ll add in 2020 that this year also has great personal arcs for Kim and Mike, the latter of whom, like Jimmy/Saul, is being gradually shaped into the person he’ll soon be on Breaking Bad. One criticism I’ve heard about this show is that it’s answering backstory questions no one actually cared about: Where did Hector Salamanca get his bell? How did Gus Fring build his lab? And I’ll admit there’s some truth to that, especially in this season. But I don’t particularly watch for those logistics; I watch for the outstanding character moments which genuinely take my breath away on a pretty regular basis.

I haven’t yet seen any of the season that’s currently airing — now confirmed as the penultimate — but I’m so ready to dive back in with that next chapter of this universe. There’s guaranteed to be further heartbreak ahead as Jimmy McGill completes his transformation into Saul Goodman, and I can only hope for Kim (not to mention Nacho Varga) to somehow make it out of that alchemy intact.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket

Book #77 of 2020:

Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #4)

I’ve been somewhat lukewarm on this prequel series, but it goes out on a suitably climactic high note, with most of the action confined to the tight spaces of a speeding train. Lemony Snicket the author provides some of his sharpest writing yet, and young Lemony Snicket the protagonist comes to a few important realizations about himself, his associates, and the larger plot in which he’s been embroiled. Ultimately this quartet of novels never really provides the Unfortunate Events backstory that I want from it, yet it’s a generally solid middle-grade spy adventure and a fine character piece for its hero.

(Since the title of this last volume is a reference to the four questions traditionally recited at a Passover seder, I moved it up in my reading queue to just before the holiday. However, there’s not much here that resonates with the Exodus narrative. Still, Snicket the author is Jewish — and has mentioned in interviews that “by default, the characters I create are Jewish, I think” — and I appreciate that a stated goal in this book is to repair the world, an echoing of Judaism’s ethical concept of tikkun olam.)

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Individual rankings: 4 > 2 > 3 > 1

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Book Review: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

Book #76 of 2020:

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland (Dread Nation #2)

This Reconstruction-era zombie sequel is enough of an improvement over the debut that I’m happy to bump my rating up to four stars. Overall the various elements are maybe still pulling in too many different directions, but a nebulous plot works better here with the story positioned as more of a straightforward western, complete with our gunslinging black heroines roaming the plains for vengeance, bounties, and general protection against the undead. Switching back and forth between two perspective characters this time also helps deepen them both beyond the more limited versions we saw in the first novel. In the end this is still not my favorite series, but I appreciate that it’s the rare genre project to tackle both racism and revenant hordes head-on.

[Content warning for anti-vaccination rhetoric.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: And I Darken by Kiersten White

Book #75 of 2020:

And I Darken by Kiersten White (The Conqueror’s Saga, #1)

I like the idea of this YA alternative history about the young life of a female Vlad the Impaler, but the plot throughout this first volume hasn’t gripped me just yet. Although Lada and her brother are captives of the Ottoman sultan, most of the drama stems from the personal stakes of their shared feelings for his heir, a messy love triangle that’s weakened by the prince’s bland characterization. The narrative tells us again and again that he is their friend and later the object of their attraction, but I feel as though we are rarely shown why in any particular detail.

I may read further in this trilogy if my library acquires the sequels, yet for now I’m wishing that author Kiersten White had stuck to her usual fantasy genre. I realize that Bram Stoker’s supernatural invention of Count Dracula is nothing like the historical figure, but a few well-placed vampires could really have spiced this novel up.

[Content warning for sexual assault and infanticide]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: His Dark Materials, season 1

TV #8 of 2020:

His Dark Materials, season 1

For all its spoken exposition, this literary adaptation somehow manages to be downright inscrutable in terms of motivation and worldbuilding, such that neither the characters nor their setting feel anywhere near as fleshed-out as they do on the page. (The climactic battle for the panserbjørne throne, for instance, comes off as simply good bear versus bad bear, with no deeper nuance as to why the outcome would matter.) And although I understand the impulse to introduce Will Perry earlier in the series, the writers have come up with nothing for him to actually do, leading to endless check-in scenes with him, his mother, and their stalkers that cycle through the same stale beats sans any meaningful progression. It’s like when Game of Thrones had Theon Greyjoy spend a whole year being tortured, unwilling to exclude him from a book he wasn’t in but unable to find a way of incorporating him into any of the other ongoing storylines.

The biggest flaw in this project, however, is its treatment of dæmons, the animal companions who are the external representation of people’s souls. Every human in Lyra’s world should have a dæmon by their side at all times, and they should be interacting with them regularly as our young heroine does. Yet in practice, these creatures are missing from most shots — with an offhand reference to staying hidden in pockets — and rarely provided any dialogue or particular characterization. As a result, several big moments related to dæmons and their mythos fall completely flat, since the audience has been given no compelling reason to truly care about them.

Now, the casting is pretty great, and I love the decision to turn Lee Scoresby from a stoic cowboy into a motormouth Lin-Manuel Miranda type. No single episode is a complete bust, and I appreciate that the show has the courage to stick with the original dark ending to the first novel (as the 2007 film did not). I’m probably invested enough to watch another season, but I can’t say I’m really looking forward to it.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

Book #74 of 2020:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

As a self-help book, this text seems difficult — albeit worthwhile — to implement in day-to-day life for salary discussions, vehicle purchases, and so on. Anyone interested in using its tips to improve their own persuasive ability in these situations should probably acquire the title for regular reference, rather than just reading over a library copy as I have. Yet it’s equally valuable as an interesting memoir of author Chris Voss’s time as an FBI hostage negotiator turned corporate consultant, full of examples of how he and his students have used honed strategies and an understanding of psychology to breeze through conflict to their desired ends. The writing is workmanlike and somewhat repetitive, but it’s kind of fascinating to watch Voss do his thing.

★★★☆☆

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