Over on Patreon, I’ve posted a recap of everything I read and watched in September, including links to individual reviews and an update on my progress in migrating the older reviews over to this new blog site.
Thanks to everyone who has already subscribed!
Book #181 of 2019:
Turbulence by David Szalay
I think I like the idea of this book more than the execution. It’s a quick read told over a dozen chapters, each focusing on a minor figure from the one before, who either has recently taken a flight or will be taking one soon. These character sketches are generally effective, but they’re so short they feel more like snapshots than fully-fledged stories. It’s a good reminder that everyone in our lives has depths of their own, and that we are connected in small ways we’ll never know to people all over the globe. Yet it doesn’t add up to much, in the end.
★★★☆☆
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Movie #9 of 2019:
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
These tentpole Marvel movies are tricky to review individually, because each one is so intertwined with both the past and the future of the franchise. Case in point: everyone knew that this latest Avengers flick would find some way of walking back the unfathomable calamity of the previous one — given the subsequent titles that had already been announced, if nothing else — even though we remained unclear on the exact mechanism and plot beats along the way. And in that context, I do think “the Snap” was a dud for the Marvel Cinematic Universe at large, as there ended up being no movies or TV episodes set during that apocalyptic time. (What’s the point of even having a “cinematic universe” linking your various media properties if you don’t follow through on having major events reverberate across them?)
Taken as its own story, however, Endgame is pretty fun. It accomplishes its anticipated reversal through some good old-fashioned time travel, revisiting key moments from the last decade of this series Back-to-the-Future-Part-II-style. The rules for how that works are not quite internally consistent, but for the most part the film speeds along breezily enough with that signature Marvel wit that it’s hard to really notice. Could the narrative have been tightened up from an indulgent three-hour runtime? Absolutely. But as the close to several long-running arcs and a sendoff to some beloved heroes, it capably delivers. Bring on whatever’s next.
★★★★☆
Book #180 of 2019:
City of Dragons by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #3)
Fantasy author Robin Hobb can effortlessly spin out a tale, but this quartet remains one of the weakest elements within her larger Realm of the Elderlings saga. Although this third volume is at least more action-packed than those before (and more concerned with shading in some further worldbuilding details), it still doesn’t have much of an arc to either its plot or any of its individual character journeys. I appreciate that the novel checks in on so many developing situations rather than just sticking to the placid river journey of book two, but the sub-series continues to lack the dramatic tension and personal stakes of this writer at her best.
★★★☆☆
Book #179 of 2019:
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
An interesting pop psychology book, putting forward the argument that training in multiple skill domains yields more breakthrough successes than narrowly focusing on proficiency in a single field. From musicians who play several instruments to students who declare a late major to teams of interdisciplinary researchers to workers who switch career paths, author David Epstein brings in countless examples of a specialist approach generating poorer results than one encompassing distinct vectors of experience. In his analysis, generalists are better situated to make intuitive connections and more sensitive to potential errors than their counterparts with a thinner scope of expertise and an accompanying predilection for groupthink.
I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by this account, and the writing doesn’t blow me away, but it’s a provocative idea that I hadn’t really considered in that way before.
★★★★☆
Book #178 of 2019:
Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield (Alice Payne #1)
Although this novella about rival factions of time-travelers isn’t as mind-bending or as inventive with the concept as the similarly-focused This Is How You Lose the Time War, it’s still a lot of fun and offers some great character moments throughout. Alice Payne herself is the epitome of wish-fulfillment in the best possible way, a mixed-race woman in the late 18th century whose inventor girlfriend builds clockwork devices to aid the heroine’s secret work as a highway bandit waylaying and robbing abusive men. The other viewpoint protagonist, Prudence Zuniga, is an idealistic black woman from the future who enlists Alice to fight in her cause against the dangerous unraveling of history.
These personalities bounce off one another nicely, and while their story ends too soon — and on a bit of a cliffhanger — that’s ameliorated by the fact that it’s the beginning of a series and not just a standalone adventure. As with many shorter works, there are worldbuilding details and plot issues that could have been fleshed out more fully, but it’s overall a fine launch to the sequel(s) that will hopefully improve upon these elements.
★★★★☆
Book #177 of 2019:
The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe
There’s some neat slipstream weirdness to this fantasy novel, and its epistolary format hints at interesting nuances of narrator reliability, but I just couldn’t get past the obnoxious treatment of all the female characters. Every woman in this story is either a perky flibbertigibbet, a nubile temptress, or an old hag, and nearly all of them want to sleep with the protagonist on sight. Several succeed at this aim, including a shapeshifting fox whose human form he praises as ‘a submissive oriental.’ Charming! Later on, two women are stripped and one of them raped in a two-page subplot that doesn’t connect to anything else in the book.
I can sometimes stomach archaic attitudes in older works of fiction, but this was written in 2010. There’s simply no excuse, and those issues overwhelm any positive qualities of the text. I’m sorry to have to pan a title that one of my Patreon donors recommended, and I wish I could have better enjoyed all the magical transformations, appearing and disappearing rooms, and hidden twins, but this is the worst sort of throwback. It hearkens to an era of the genre when only white men got to be portrayed as actual people rather than objects, and that’s all the more tiresome from a modern author who should know better.
[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!]
★★☆☆☆
Book #176 of 2019:
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale #2)
With this novel, author Margaret Atwood returns to the setting of her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale a decade and a half later on (and ignoring how its recent TV adaptation has imagined what happens after the end of that first book). Unfortunately, the effort falls somewhat flat by comparison.
This time the story is told by three different narrators, and only one of them is anywhere near as engaging a character voice as the original handmaid Offred. That would be the returning figure of Aunt Lydia, and the passages reflecting on her history with Gilead are searing towards both the theocratic-fascist state and its ruthless enabler herself. She’s a compelling antiheroine, and although few readers would willingly admit they’d make the same choices in her situation, Atwood excels at deepening Lydia from the villain we’ve met before. Perhaps she even goes too far — as I’m personally skeptical that a redemption arc was really called for — but it’s an interesting journey nonetheless.
The same can’t be said for the other two protagonists, however. One young woman has been raised in Gilead and one in Canada, and the latter especially feels plucked from some generic YA dystopia, complete with a bland resistance-fighter love interest. They seem more like plot devices than fully fleshed-out humans with organic interests and motivations, and the narrative slackens during their viewpoint chapters even after the three different storylines have converged.
There’s a potential version of this sequel — call it “The Aunt’s Tale” — that could have been truly outstanding, if the writer had dispensed with the teenage theatrics and leaned into what was so effective in the previous volume, using characterization and quiet worldbuilding details to hold an uncomfortable mirror up to our own society. It’s great that she does so for a third of this new text, but that’s not enough on its own.
★★★☆☆
Book #175 of 2019:
The Institute by Stephen King
Stephen King’s latest novel finds a secret government program kidnapping children with latent psychic abilities, running unethical experiments upon them, and harnessing their powers for nefarious purposes. That’s a variation on a plot device the writer has utilized several times before, but it’s given its most in-depth consideration here — and undoubtedly gains additional poignancy from a political moment in which real-life minors are being ripped from their families and placed in cages. (The parallel is left as subtext, which may be a mercy but is somewhat odd given the digs at other aspects of the Trump administration that King delivers along the way.)
The book also strongly evokes Stranger Things, completing a feedback loop with the Netflix series that was famously inspired by some of the author’s classic horror works of the 1980s. Neither is exactly a rip-off, but they feel very much in conversation with one another and keenly interested in how kids can unite to process and resist dangers from the adult world that only they can see, along with how their elders can justify abominable behavior in the interests of a perceived greater good.
So the story isn’t groundbreaking, yet it’s well-told and feels like quintessential Stephen King, to the point where it could be a great introduction for readers new to his style and typical concerns. Another of his favorite tropes, that of the noble small-town lawman, even serves to bookend the narrative, although this character disappears for the entirety of its middle. That’s a bit of structural weirdness that is, again, fairly on-brand for King. Anyone who’s disliked his writing or his politics in the past probably won’t care for this volume either, but my fellow fans should enjoy it as I have.
[Content warning for child abuse, torture, sexual assault, gun violence, and slurs]
★★★★☆
Book #174 of 2019:
Star Wars: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova
This Young Adult licensed novel is one of three 2019 books exploring the Galaxy’s Edge setting that has been developed as a new theme park area in Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Its main purpose is to showcase the locations, characters, and lore of that environment, and the narrative accomplishes this aim well enough: I imagine that my first visit will be at least somewhat enriched by bringing a sense of history to Batuu as more than a generic Star Wars outpost.
As its own tale, however, A Crash of Fate is a fairly run-of-the-mill space opera romance. Two childhood friends from this backwater world reunite in their teen years, have instant chemistry, and get caught up in a dangerous smuggling ring. The plot points are predictable and coincidence-heavy, and there’s nothing so powerful as the epic anguished love story that Claudia Gray created in Lost Stars. This one is worth reading if you have a few hours to spare before a Disney trip, but most fans can safely give it a miss.
★★★☆☆
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