The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Veronica Mars, season 1

TV #31 of 2019:

Veronica Mars, season 1

What an incredibly satisfying and well-crafted season of television. The high school noir tone is pitch-perfect, the title figure is layered far beyond her initial feisty appeal, and subtle clues to the ultimate answer of who killed the teenage sleuth’s best friend are threaded brilliantly throughout the year. (The first time I saw this show, I came nowhere close to guessing the solution in advance but still had an immediate frisson of recognition upon the reveal. On repeat viewings, I’ve simply enjoyed watching the writers build up to it in plain sight with masterful misdirection.)

Even beyond that overarching plot, a succession of episodic cases consistently delivers trenchant critiques of the social class dynamics in this fictional California beach town. These smaller mysteries spin out endless variations on the widespread entitlement of the haves and the resentment of the have-nots, which nicely echo the conflicts in Veronica’s own life. The other major question introduced in the pilot, the heroine’s rape, receives less overt attention than the murder from week to week, yet it nevertheless adds raw energy to her newfound status as an avenging angel for Neptune’s powerless.

For all my praise, this debut outing of Veronica Mars is not quite flawless. There are a few false starts, like the journalism teacher in the early opening credits whose actual role ends up fairly minimal, and the gender politics can already feel dated just a decade and a half later. Veronica’s disbelief and slut-shaming towards a fellow student’s allegations of staff impropriety are at least somewhat framed as a learning opportunity for the young detective, but the series narrative never once sees anything wrong with positioning a 20-year-old police officer as a love interest for its 17-year-old protagonist. (If anything, we’re invited to see her as the worldly operator manipulating him!) The resolution to the rape storyline, too, is somewhat of a mess even before next season retcons it further.

Nevertheless, it’s the characters, the class consciousness, and the homicide investigation that stand out for me — along with a certain unexpected romance — and all of them succeed beyond belief. There’s a real clarity of purpose to this original run of the program that it never quite manages again, and that’s worth celebrating despite the occasional misstep.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss

Book #148 of 2019:

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #1)

I think I admire the ambition of this Victorian horror pastiche, which is like a feminist next generation to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, more than I care for the finished product. It’s a fun idea to throw together the daughters and other female survivors of Frankenstein, Jekyll, Dracula, Moreau, and beyond, but I rarely feel as though the ensuing story has much weight to it. I also cannot stand how all seven heroines regularly interrupt the action to offer snarky commentary, as though they too are reading some later account of their adventures.

I might have liked this book better if I hadn’t already read Megan Shepherd’s The Madman’s Daughter trilogy or Kiersten White’s The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, which dig deeper into the treatment of women in those original texts and are a closer match to their nineteenth-century tone. By comparison, the ladies here feel far more modern and interchangeable.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

Book #147 of 2019:

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

I’ve known and followed Gretchen McCulloch since 2012, when we connected as fellow grad students drawn to the messy question of how to apply the systematic approaches from our linguistics classes to the strange new frontier of informal writing that we saw developing in digital spaces everyday. I mention that as both a disclaimer — Gretchen’s a friend! We’ve even met in person! — and an endorsement — Gretchen’s an expert! You can trust her on this stuff!

For this book exploring some of the distinctive elements of online language use, the author adopts the same informative yet casual tone that has made her such an engaging science communicator in her All Things Linguistic blog, Lingthusiasm podcast, and The Toast and Wired columns. There’s so much neat creativity going on in electronically-mediated communication, from expressive lengthening (“sooooooo coooooooool!”) to sarcastic encoding (“~so cool”), and McCulloch captures and explains it all with a deft touch. It’s great nonfiction, in that the topics she covers are recognizable to an insider, interesting to a novice, and entertaining no matter what.

It’s also a strong showing for creative writing, peppered with clever turns of phrase like calling irony “a linguistic trust fall” or Morse code “dashingly dotty.” Although the cited examples of tweets and whatnot are probably easier to grasp in print, it’s fun to listen to the audiobook as I did for Gretchen laughing at her own jokes and somehow managing to pronounce an aksjdfhlaksjg-style keysmash.

Internet culture changes quickly, and today’s dank meme can soon become tomorrow’s dated lolcat. McCulloch’s strength as an ethnographer of cyberspace is that she doesn’t attempt to present this inevitably static snapshot as some definitive report, but rather walks her audience through the social and historical forces that have allowed variation from the formal rules to flourish online in the first place. Drawing upon her personal observations as a curious digital native as well as decades of studies from before and after such a status was even possible, the writer connects research on network ties, dialect maps, emerging technologies, and more into a fairly cohesive and persuasive account of how the language we see and use on our devices has acquired its particular characteristics.

Throughout it all, Gretchen conveys what a sheer joy it is to dig into this weirdness, both to uncover the underlying patterns of this ubiquitous new medium and to lovingly participate in and remix them oneself. Whether you’re plugged into that same ecosystem or not, this is an outstanding guide to its many linguistic wonders.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman

Book #146 of 2019:

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman

One part memoir of an American journalist’s life abroad in Paris, one part ethnography of French attitudes and approaches towards childraising. Mostly, the latter boils down to firmer rules, not feeling pressure to meet particular milestones, and pausing longer before responding to an infant’s demands. Perhaps I’m more of a cultural relativist than author Pamela Druckerman, however, as I largely find the French mindset just interestingly different from what she and I are used to, rather than self-evidently superior.

As with most parenting books that offer some level of prescriptive advice, I’d like there to be greater scientific rigor behind certain recommendations, and I also could have done without Druckerman’s upper-class blinders or the snidely passive-aggressive tone she sometimes adopts when talking about her loved ones. Still, this was a neat reminder of how variable the notion of best practices can be, and a good introduction to areas where the received wisdom for parents in the States could stand to be a little more flexible.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

Book #145 of 2019:

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

In this 2019 collection of essays, most previously published elsewhere, culture critic Emily Nussbaum explores many facets of television as a medium and how it has grown as an avenue for artistic expression over the past few decades. She deftly articulates much of what I’ve loved about shows from Hannibal to Jane the Virgin, and offers interesting takes on series that I’ve never seen (or sometimes even heard of). No taste is universal, so Nussbaum does occasionally pan a program that I’ve enjoyed, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or the first season of True Detective — yet always in a way that’s reasonable and challenging and leaves me with a lot to consider. It’s a level of insight I aspire to myself!

This book would be exceptional enough on the strength of those reviews, but the author supplements them with other pieces about showrunner personalities, writing room conflicts, debates over product placement, and more. I found my own thoughts echoed in an early article on what it means when characters like Archie Bunker or Walter White, intended by their creators to represent the worst of humanity, instead become figures of identification and celebration among certain viewers. Later on, there’s a great look at the rhythms of standup comedy and the blurring of ironic and actual bigotry in our reality TV star of a president and his followers, as foreshadowed by South Park and Black Mirror.

The standout essay is an extended reflection on the central question for fans in the #MeToo era: “What should we do with the art of terrible men?” There are no easy answers to the issue of how/whether to keep watching creators like Woody Allen and Louis C.K. once their abuses come to light, but Nussbaum grapples with the nuances of the matter in an honest and affecting manner. “But if I never saw Louie again, or Louis again, I’d still know the show by heart,” she writes. “I’m its creature, the way we are all creatures of the art we care about, even if we decide to throw it in a garbage can.”

I’m Emily Nussbaum’s creature now, in part. Reading critics like her and writing my own reviews like this one have profoundly changed how I engage with the media I consume, forcing me to actively confront my preferences and their implications. Although I’m less of a TV buff than a bookworm, this distillation of the author’s Pulitzer-winning career has sharpened my own appreciation for that visual medium tremendously — and left me with several new shows to watch, too.

★★★★★

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Book Review: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

Book #144 of 2019:

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy #4)

This novel is packed with the usual dry witticisms and absurdist observations of author Douglas Adams, but it carries a very different tenor to the rest of this comic sci-fi series. The new storyline is almost entirely earthbound, and the genre is more romantic comedy than action-adventure. That’s not the most natural mode for Adams, and although the central relationship eventually grows rather sweet, it’s hard to get past its beginning in the hero’s bizarre obsession with an unconscious woman he sees only briefly. The narrative basically rewards his entitled behavior towards this stranger, and that gives me a lot more pause now than when I first read this book as a teenager.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Pennyroyal Academy by M. A. Larson

Book #143 of 2019:

Pennyroyal Academy by M. A. Larson (Pennyroyal Academy #1)

This middle-grade fantasy novel keeps its heroine a cipher for far too long, and when readers finally learn her peculiar backstory, it doesn’t really track with what we’ve seen or elucidate her driving goals. (Why does she want to be a warrior princess? Does she agree with her school’s perspective on dragons and witches as beasts to be slain? If not, how does she reconcile that?) The setting also feels like a generic fairy tale, and there are some would-be shocking reveals that aren’t established well enough to elicit more than a shrug. Overall it’s a messy work that’s hard to even discuss without spoilers but generally not worth the effort.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

Book #142 of 2019:

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

A deep dive into a fairly short span of Roman history, from the defeat of the enemy city-states Corinth and Carthage in 146 BCE to the death of the general Sulla in 78 BCE. This is a period often glossed over in favor of the transition to empire under the caesars which followed it, but author Mike Duncan shows how the instabilities of that later era can be traced back to their origins here. It was a time of widespread income inequality, partisan divides, political brinkmanship, and the sudden flouting of long-standing but unwritten rules among civic leaders — “an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.”

America isn’t Rome [he reassured himself, nervously], but the parallels are interesting, and the writer’s point in the introduction that this would be the comparable moment to our present one rather than any subsequent dictatorships or ultimate collapse is well-taken. Even setting aside the issue of historical precedent, however, this volume is an informative look at the decades in question. Although sometimes a bit jargon-heavy and perhaps overly focused on military conflict, it’s a solid overview of an understudied yet pivotal stage in the arc of this ancient civilization.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix

Book #141 of 2019:

Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix

A lightweight Regency romp with a sprinkling of fantasy elements. I’d like to see more of how the magic works — especially coming from Sabriel author Garth Nix — but that fuzziness doesn’t get in the way of the quick-paced story Nix is telling. His tale of a young heiress who dresses as a boy to recover a stolen talisman is trope-filled but charming, and although I doubt it will prove memorable in the long run, it was an entertaining morning’s read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

Book #140 of 2019:

Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope

I appreciate this novel’s Israeli kibbutz setting — and debut author Jessamyn Hope’s inclusion of so many non-religious aspects of Jewish life there — but I find the characters to be a uniformly miserable bunch. It’s hard to root for any of them to do anything but grow into better people, and even without being invested in their specific struggles, I’m pretty unsatisfied by how everything resolves in the end. I also think I just want more focus on the centuries-old brooch at the heart of this story, like a People of the Book exploration of its long history through to the present. As it stands, this item is largely a maguffin that kicks off the plot but doesn’t signify too deeply.

★★★☆☆

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