The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Bosch, season 5

TV #18 of 2019:

Bosch, season 5

The weird thing about Bosch — which can strike me as either brilliant or lazy storytelling depending on my mood — is that it regularly eschews all the rhythms of a typical TV show. There’s seldom any particular plot difficulty or thematic throughline tying a single hour together, with the result that each season feels more like an incredibly long movie than a series of discrete episodes. Subplots also intersect and resonate less than I would prefer, so that although I appreciate a lot of what the program does, it often seems like only the rough draft of some platonic urban crime drama that could be truly great.

This latest season is a neat instantiation of all of my enjoyments and frustrations with the show. The two main stories of an opioid mill and a scheming inmate are well-told, and I especially like that the writers have aged Bosch’s daughter up to college and given her more to do with her father’s cases. Yet I’m baffled by the decisions of when to check in on certain peripheral events, and the end credits take me by surprise nearly every time. A little bit more narrative focus could go a long way towards boosting this show to the quality its cast deserves.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Giant’s Bread by Mary Westmacott

Book #98 of 2019:

Giant’s Bread by Mary Westmacott

This 1930 novel is the first of six that Agatha Christie published under a pseudonym due to their divergence from her typical whodunnit fare and her desire to have this other work ‘judged on its own merits and not in the light of previous success,’ per the original author biography in the first edition.

It’s a curious book — the storyline is heavy on coincidence and resolves into a general shape only at the end, and the characters are arresting yet seldom behave quite like actual human beings would. It reminds me quite a bit of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, both for some specific plot points and for the difficulty in capturing the overall premise of the tale in a pithy and spoiler-free blurb. The narrative shifts from one perspective to another at odd intervals, and I’m sometimes at a loss to say what anyone’s specific motivations are as they progress through the pages.

Yet for all these oddities, I’ve ended up liking this experiment quite a bit. I don’t know if I could have identified the true writer on my own, but I think I’d be glad to read more from ‘Mary Westmacott’ regardless.

[Content warning for some of Christie’s casual uses of the n-word, and a clumsy attempt at denouncing antisemitism that still feels rooted in the author’s othering of Jewishness.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 6

TV #17 of 2019:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 6

This show isn’t really surprising me anymore, but it’s still nice as a hangout sitcom with funny writing and great, only-somewhat flanderized characters. This first season on NBC is also a bit of a retooling for the program, with some occasional infodumps for the new audience members who never watched it on Fox. I’m still enjoying it all, but I think I’ve reached the stage where I won’t be too upset when it finally gets canceled for real.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner: A Lifetime Plan to Finish Rich in Real Estate by David Bach

Book #97 of 2019:

The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner: A Lifetime Plan to Finish Rich in Real Estate by David Bach

My wife and I went to a home-buying seminar put on by our credit union, and one of the speakers recommended this book. It’s a quick read, and although it’s a little dated — author David Bach is writing in 2005 just before the housing bubble crashed, and he also over-explains some computer things like how to access Google — the main points still seem valid. Namely, it’s easier and more affordable to buy a house than many renters assume (especially if you aren’t holding out for a dream home), real estate that you aren’t buying just to flip is one of the best low-risk ways to build your finances, and paying half your monthly mortgage fee every two weeks won’t squeeze your budget too much but will net you the equivalent of a whole additional month’s payment every year, drastically reducing the overall interest you will pay over time.

Bach does include some tiresome cliches like cutting out a daily latte as another pathway to prosperity, and he mistakes correlation for causation when he notes that the average renter has far less personal wealth than the average homeowner, but these faults are oddly so glaring that it’s easy to see past them to the advice that’s good. And while the more advanced topics in the book like leveraging one house purchase against the next, converting your home into a rental property, and gaining the millionaire status of the title are not currently as interesting / relevant for me, I’d still recommend it as a solid introduction or crash course for anyone else looking to transition away from renting in the near future.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration by Emily Bazelon

Book #96 of 2019:

Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration by Emily Bazelon

Overall a decent look at the shockingly wide latitude given to prosecutors in the American justice system. Journalist Emily Bazelon walks readers through how these figures are given great leeway in bringing and dropping criminal charges, yet are also shielded in many ways from punishment for any misconduct. She also touches on the post-2016 movement to elect progressive attorneys who will exercise more discretion and not view prison as an automatic first option for minor infractions, although this topic is not covered in as much detail as I would have expected.

The major limitation of this book is that the author focuses primarily on two cases she has personally been acquainted with, and neither one seems like the strongest argument towards her thesis about the need for reform. If you’ve read other work on this topic, like Just Mercy or The New Jim Crow, you will already be familiar with miscarriages of justice that go far beyond the scope of these incidents, which involve the tedious bureaucracy of escaping a juvenile weapons possession charge and some potentially exculpatory evidence being withheld from a defense team. One gets the sense that Bazelon is writing about the borderline instances she already knows, rather than digging up categorical examples of extreme prosecutorial overzealousness that would better illustrate the point.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Book #95 of 2019:

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

I don’t quite love this 1936 novel, but I can understand why so many people do. It’s a layered and complex narrative that demands a close reading, and author William Faulkner’s run-on prose is perfectly pitched to capture the slow crumbling of its central family, their manor house, and the more general antebellum way of life. That deterioration is the sign of a true southern gothic, and although the exact chain of events isn’t completely clear to me after an initial sifting through of its various unreliable narrators, the sweltering tone of this tragedy is certainly one that lingers.

[Major content warning for nineteenth-century racism and sexism and the frequent use of the n-word even by ostensibly more enlightened characters.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, season 8

TV #16 of 2019:

Game of Thrones, season 8

The final season of this powerhouse HBO fantasy drama is both entertaining and frustrating for long-time fans. Well past the most recently published novel of the source material, the TV writers have been forced to use their own judgment (along with input from original author George R. R. Martin) on how to resolve the sprawling storylines and character arcs, and the result has a very different feel from the show’s early years as a more straightforward adaptation.

In its heyday, this series was renowned not only for the twists that eschewed many genre tropes, but also for how its bloody actions rippled out in consequential and unforeseen ways. It was a world where choices had stakes: where foolish nobility could get you killed, where a kingly procession through a realm at peace would still proceed cautiously over several episodes, and where plot developments unfolded steadily enough that even the most shocking events seemed unavoidable in hindsight.

Unfortunately, Thrones hasn’t been that show in quite a while. In the last few seasons, characters have speedily crossed continents off-screen and without incident, decisions voiced in one scene will be enacted in the very next, and important moments have seemed dictated more by authorial fiat than any well-established characterization. Cool scenes are still very cool, and a bullet-point summary probably wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, but without more time to breathe it all feels a little more cartoonish than the gritty lived-in setting that originally got me hooked.

Other than the very end of its last episode, the final season of Game of Thrones does largely satisfy me on a story level. It’s nowhere near as solid as the initial run of the show, but if we view it as a rough draft of the novels that Martin is still finishing up, I’m pretty happy with where the narrative is generally headed.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season ranking: 2 > 1 > 4 > 3 > 5 > 6 > 8 > 7

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TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 44

TV #15 of 2019:

Saturday Night Live, season 44

The current iteration of this sketch comedy show can be kinda hit-or-miss, and I don’t know if I’d have the patience to binge a whole season after the fact. It’s pretty fun to watch on a weekly basis, though, especially for the topical political humor in the Weekend Update segments and beyond. I can’t think of any all-time-classic bits from this season, but I did really enjoy Adam Sandler’s recent advertisement for Romano Tours of Italy, the way-too-close-to-home What’s That Name game show, and the delightful weirdness in Bok Bok and Cheques. I’ll be quoting lines from those skits for a while yet.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Friday Night Lights, season 5

TV #14 of 2019:

Friday Night Lights, season 5

It’s hard to separate my feelings about that excellent finale from the rest of its season, but on reflection I think this last run of Friday Night Lights is maybe just a minor step down from the one before. I appreciate its focus on winning the right way and the lessons that both Vince and Coach Taylor learn in that regard, but I’m just never going to care about presumptive champions as much as underdogs.

And as ever, the rich history of this show is both a blessing and a curse: characters grow organically and believably before our eyes, but major thematic and plot concerns from one season suddenly vanish the next. The previous year’s football rivals are now barely an afterthought, and interpersonal complications that could have lingered are instead brushed aside to set up the new status quo.

I harp on these issues more for FNL than for other series that retool and refocus between seasons just because this show’s narrative is regularly positioned in conversation with its past, which adds nuance and poignancy but makes it harder to ignore the discrepancies. Taken on its own, this final season is another stellar look at what it means to live in a small town built around high school sports — but why would you ever want to take just one season of this show on its own?

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season ranking: 1 > 4 > 5 > 3 > 2

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Book Review: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Book #94 of 2019:

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut #1)

I really like this alternate history novel, in which a natural disaster in 1952 accelerates the timeline of space travel and a female pilot and mathematician struggles to break the glass ceiling of the new rocket program. The first quarter or so of the text deals primarily with the immediate aftermath of a meteorstrike near Washington, D.C. and reads like a classic doomsday survivalist tale, after which we jump ahead four years to follow the heroine and other scientists scrambling to devise a way off-world. The whole book is rooted in a richly-drawn character trying to prove her worth against the sexist notions of her time.

I also want to highlight author Mary Robinette Kowal’s treatment of her protagonist’s Judaism, which is more detailed and accurate than I can remember seeing from a non-Jewish writer in the past. I was actually surprised to learn that Kowal is not from a Jewish background herself, but she has been as respectful and methodical in her research there as she has been for the narrative’s other topics in which she can’t claim expertise. I loved being able to see myself in the character that way, much as I loved seeing the realistic depiction of her anxiety attacks and her growing realization of her respective privilege over the astronaut candidates who aren’t white.

In the end, this is a warm-hearted and triumphant — dare I say, “hopepunk” — story, although I would issue a content warning for the period-authentic sexism, racism, and antisemitism levied against the protagonist and her friends along the way.

★★★★☆

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