The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

Book #85 of 2019:

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

I’ve never been especially familiar with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, but I was struck by all the fans who tearfully praised his warm, empathetic approach to food culture after his suicide in 2018. I heard over and over again that he was kind and curious and generally just loved learning about local recipes around the world and bringing people together over a meal.

So it’s somewhat jarring to move from that mental image to the rougher Bourdain of this book that first made him famous two decades ago. He’s exceedingly crass in these pages, which is not a problem for me as a reader, but he’s also callous and arrogant, which is. He compares vegans to Hezbollah, he disparages women for their weight, and he’s rather cavalier about acts of groping and verbal abuse he’s witnessed in his kitchens.

On its merits this is a solid memoir of the restaurant industry, and Bourdain does a great job at conveying the controlled chaos that customers rarely get to see. But his personality overwhelms the rest of the narrative, and I’m honestly having a hard time reconciling this self-proclaimed asshole (always a red flag!) with the loving teddy bear that people have eulogized.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik

Book #84 of 2019:

Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #2)

Having really enjoyed author Naomi Novik’s later standalone fantasy novels Spinning Silver and Uprooted, I figured I should go back and give her debut series another chance. Unfortunately, I feel similarly about this second Temeraire volume as I do the first: delightful characters and a neat twist on world history, but not nearly enough of a plot to maintain my interest. In this sequel, the dragon and his handler are sent to China and face a few military skirmishes and assassination attempts… and that’s it. Novik is a great writer, but I need more from a story than this.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

Book #83 of 2019:

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #1)

I gave up on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles at some point, and I don’t know if I’ll ever resume and finish the series, which seemed to get lost in its own convoluted mythology along the way. But having enjoyed the earlier volumes when I was a teenager, I figured it might be time to go back and revisit them.

This first novel is a definite gothic classic, offering both an immersive supernatural world and a lush sensory exploration of 19th-century New Orleans and Paris. It’s a vision of vampires steeped in Catholic guilt and homoerotic sensuality, and its original publication in 1976 marks a clear turning-point in how these creatures are presented in popular fiction. Through the eyes of Louis and everything he’s lost, Rice transforms the Dracula figure into a sympathetic (if brooding) protagonist, a tragic hero for whom existence is a curse.

I remember the next book doing a lot to puncture this one’s self-importance, for better or worse, and I know the baroque philosophizing isn’t to every reader’s taste. But it rightly stands out in the history of the genre, and it more than lives up to my memories.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Breaking Bad, season 5

TV #12 of 2019:

Breaking Bad, season 5

Are we ultimately meant to root for Walter White? That’s a question that divides Breaking Bad viewers, and although I am firmly in the camp that the show’s central figure is an awful, terrifying cancer of a person, I think the writers are at least somewhat to blame for how many fans cheer him on as an antiheroic role model. This final season especially makes it easy to celebrate White’s triumphs, while only sporadically holding him accountable for his many sins.

There’s so much that the end of this story gets right, of course — To’hajiilee and Ozymandias alone are two of the finest hours of writing and acting I’ve ever seen on TV, and in the very last episode Walt finally seems to recognize and seek to address the massive character flaws that have driven his actions throughout the entire series. It’s not redemption and he’s no tragic hero, but it’s a fitting conclusion to such an outstanding drama.

And if Heisenberg is the rot lurking within a seemingly healthy body, then this whole venture has never really been about him, anyway. Despite how incredibly Bryan Cranston inhabits that role, the true focus of this narrative has always been more on the people in his orbit whom he damages, and how they react to that unwanted catalyst. Season 5 is an eye-opening time for all of them who’ve made it this far, and my heart gets lodged permanently in my throat watching everyone process the fallout.

So I have qualms, yes, but I could also spend days analyzing and dissecting this program, which is a good sign of true art in my opinion. I’ve watched and rewatched each episode, I’ve argued passionately about it with anyone willing, and six years on, I still feel deeply invested in this fictional universe. All my nitpicking aside, it remains a modern classic and a personal favorite.

This season: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★★

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

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Book Review: The Black Ice by Michael Connelly

Book #82 of 2019:

The Black Ice by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #2)

I’m of two minds about this second Bosch novel. On the one hand, the detective and his associates feel more like the versions that I know from the TV adaptation of the series, which presumably means that they’ve settled more into their long-term characterization. And I can’t complain about the storyline itself, which is a solid enough police procedural. Yet on the other hand, a lot of the plot beats feel copied straight out of the first book, from a man Harry knows turning up dead to the final one-on-one standoff after a chase through a tunnel. It’s still enjoyable, but perhaps just a touch formulaic.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn

Book #81 of 2019:

A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn

This is a weird book, and although I enjoy some of the individual strands, I ultimately don’t feel like they add up to a satisfactory whole. The main plot is a loose retelling of Joseph’s slavery from Genesis, split between a tech genius who’s kidnapped in Egypt and her sister back home in America. But there are also scenes with Solomon Schechter, the 19th-century historical figure who uncovered documents in the Cairo Geniza, and with Maimonides, the medieval philosopher whose personal writings were among those papers.

There are certain echoes across these timelines, and in the hands of author Dara Horn, the novel generally rings with a clear Jewish authenticity. But the storylines never actually intersect in any meaningful way, and Schecter’s in particular seems barely more than an extraneous framing device.

I can’t help but compare this work to Rachel Kadish’s exemplary The Weight of Ink, which depicts geniza research in such a way that the modern scholars and their subjects feel both profoundly connected and sharply drawn as characters. Horn has enough potential that I’ll happily read more from her, but this specific exercise doesn’t quite work for me.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams

Book #80 of 2019:

A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams

I expected to really love this anthology, based on its foreword and stated goal of bringing a Howard Zinn recentering of marginalized perspectives to the world of tomorrow. The authors and characters include women, LGBTQ people, racial minorities, and others who don’t always see themselves represented in science-fiction. There’s a definite boldness in a group like this declaring that the MAGA era will not be the final word on America, and that there will still be a future with all of us in it, for better or worse.

In practice, however, too many of the stories herein seem like either generic dystopias divorced from actual history or exercises in worldbuilding without compelling plots attached (or both). Luckily there’s a string of stronger entries near the middle of the book, from a time traveler coming back to tell Donald Trump his ideas don’t last in Ashok K. Banker’s “By His Bootstraps” to an interesting look at life under Universal Basic Income in Hugh Howey’s “No Algorithms in the World.” And while not particularly futuristic, I especially enjoy how the final tale, Alice Sola Kim’s “Now Wait for This Week,” pairs its Groundhog Day plot with a timely message to#BelieveWomen.

Overall, though, the collection struggles to live up to its potential of original speculative fiction distilling the essence of 2019. I’d still recommend it for the occasional gems and its sheer existence as a book with such a diverse set of writers, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed from what I imagined this exercise could produce.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Friday Night Lights, season 4

TV #11 of 2019:

Friday Night Lights, season 4

On a macro level, my biggest criticism of FNL thus far is that every season seems radically different from the one before it — and never in a way that feels especially organic or planned-out as part of a larger design. This year the program shifts suddenly to the poorer and blacker side of its fictional Texas town, and although the writing explores the new supporting cast with great nuance and interrogates some of the founding assumptions of the show quite nicely by presenting its original team as the new face of entitlement, it’s all a bit too radical a break from the past.

The easy comparison here is The Wire, given a shared seasonal rebooting of focus, interest in what drives children into urban crime, and excellent use of rising star Michael B. Jordan. Yet for all its facets, that earlier drama manages an overall cohesion that just keeps escaping Friday Night Lights. Season 4 of this high school football series is yet another outstanding individual string of episodes — probably the strongest since the first — that requires not looking too closely at the circumstances that have brought the narrative here or the goals that have previously been driving its characters.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

Book #79 of 2019:

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson (Truly Devious #1)

This novel has a great hook of an unsolved kidnapping from the 1930s and a modern teenage crime buff going off to the boarding school where it happened. Unfortunately, it all rather falls apart for me by the end. Author Maureen Johnson is essentially juggling three plots here: the cold case itself, the fallout of a certain present-day event at the book’s halfway mark, and the heroine’s social life on campus. I find these to be of decreasing interest, yet Johnson clearly feels opposite as the story progresses.

Although this verges on spoilers, I think I should also mention that there’s no resolution to either of the central mysteries, and an attempt at a shocking cliffhanger is basically just another development about the love interest who has never captured my attention. Presumably the sequel(s) will provide some closure, but this first book in the Truly Devious series is way more open-ended than I expect for a whodunnit.

[Content warning for anxiety, panic attacks, and off-page murder.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

Book #78 of 2019:

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

This 2009 book from Michael Chabon is an excellent memoir, focused less on the novelist’s specific life history and more on his general musings about parenting and gender roles, as filtered through his own experiences. He’s a bit preoccupied with the notion that modern kids have too much structure — they can’t ride their bikes anywhere, their Lego sets are all for existing media properties, etc. — but he mostly seems to realize that this situation is just different than his own upbringing, not worse. Although I’m closer in age to his children, Chabon and I share several major touchstones from Judaism to Doctor Who, and overall I appreciate reading his insights as I stand now on the cusp of fatherhood myself.

★★★★☆

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