The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #89 of 2019:

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I’ll admit I wasn’t immediately hooked by this oral history of a fictional 70s rock group, yet I found myself fairly riveted by the end. The ‘behind-the-music’ format is familiar for a documentary but pretty unusual for a novel, and author Taylor Jenkins Reid uses it to flesh out some fascinating personalities for the band in question. Their passions and jealousies feel quite true-to-life, and the developments on their way to fame and its aftermath come off as wholly earned. It’s a great character-driven drama that hardly seems like fiction at all, which is no easy feat for a writer to achieve.

I do have one small critique, however: although the interview subjects contradict each other at times, these statements are generally juxtaposed immediately next to one another to make the discrepancy plain, and it’s usually clear which ones we’re supposed to understand as false. I still enjoyed the story despite this, but I think Reid could have gotten more mileage out of the untrustworthy narrator conceit and created a more nuanced narrative by not calling such overt attention to it.

[Content warning for substance abuse, abortion, and brief mention of statutory rape.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Santa Clarita Diet, season 3

TV #13 of 2019:

Santa Clarita Diet, season 3

As always, I’ve laughed a lot this season at the twisted presentation of an oddly functional human-zombie marriage, but the plot doesn’t really surprise me as much as it has in the past. Instead the show just keeps falling back on its old common patterns, to predictably diminishing returns.

There are also some unfortunate issues with casting — Alan Tudyk in prosthetics replacing Nathan Fillion is probably the most noticeable (and amusing for Firefly fans!), but Natalie Morales also seems to have been written off sooner than intended due to her new show on NBC, leaving her arc here in a weird position. Her character starts this season forming a cult around Sheila, and the season literally ends with a finale called The Cult of Sheila about an entirely different group of people, the first cult having disbanded when Anne left. It’s not hard to imagine that the original plan for this year went somewhat differently.

So this is overall a weaker outing for the series, but I’m still bummed that Netflix has canceled it. At least the last episode works as a send-off for the program at large, with its cliffhanger reading more as ‘who knows what the future holds’ than ‘these issues remain unresolved.’ I’ve really enjoyed this take on the suburban undead, and I hope its talented young cast members Liv Hewson and Skyler Gisondo go on to find further success.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season ranking: 1 > 2 > 3

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Book Review: Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin

Book #88 of 2019:

Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin (A Targaryen History #1)

One of the main attractions of George R.R. Martin’s famous A Song of Ice and Fire series, as well as its HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, is the richly textured backstory that the author has built up for his fantasy realm. That’s on full display in this historical account of its ruling Targaryen family, which spans from the founding of that dynasty and uniting of the Seven Kingdoms through the following century and a half of rebellions and intrigues — roughly midway to the point where the proper series begins. (Martin is reportedly planning a follow-up to cover the remainder, even though pretty much everyone wishes he would just finish the original ASoIaF narrative instead.)

What this book lacks, however, is the deep characterization and interpersonal drama that animates the main novels and the TV show. There are enough bloody dragon battles that it’s not quite a dry encyclopedia, but it reads more like a plot summary of important events in the history of Westeros than an embodied look at them. The go-to comparison here would definitely be J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which also maintains a certain authorial distance as it chronicles an extensive prologue to a better-known sequel.

If you’re a Thrones obsessive, I’d say this work is still worth a read — although, like me, you may have already seen previously-published portions in Martin’s earlier travelogue The World of Ice & Fire and the short story collections Dangerous Women, Rogues, and The Book of Swords. Just understand that it probably won’t sweep you away, and try to approach it as an assortment of worldbuilding details to enrich a setting you already enjoy, rather than a satisfying tale in its own right.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Man Who Risked His Partner by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #87 of 2019:

The Man Who Risked His Partner by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Man Who #2)

Stephen R. Donaldson is primarily a fantasist, and his The Man Who detective series borrows heavily from that toolkit. I wouldn’t necessarily call it worldbuilding, but the setting of these books feels ever-so-slightly heightened and off-kilter from the reality we would expect in a typical crime thriller. And that matches the general theme illuminating Donaldson’s fantasy work, which is that external tokens — be they magic spells or bottles of mescal — should be in service to internal character dilemmas.

The strange southwestern town of these first two Man Who novels is a purgatory for Donaldson’s characters, who are seeking to make sense of their respective traumas as much as of the case in front of them. This sequel offers a more distinctive investigation on all fronts than the first time around, and although there aren’t many big surprises in the narrative — a compulsive liar of a client mostly just keeps compulsively lying — the heroes feel sharper and less inscrutable as they struggle towards answers.

As ever, Donaldson provides a claustrophobically haunting look at addiction through the eyes of his alcoholic protagonist, and the novel (first published under a pseudonym in 1984 before being revised and reissued in 2003 with the author’s name attached) showcases the same sort of torturous anguish perfected in his earlier and more famous Thomas Covenant series. I don’t know if I’d recommend the story to whodunnit readers who care about plot over atmosphere, but as a nice juicy noir, it’s even better on a reread than I remember.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Movie #4 of 2019:

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

I had a somewhat lukewarm reaction to the novel this movie is based on, so although I was glad for the representation of an all-Asian blockbuster rom-com, I never made it a priority to watch myself. But it really is as fun as everyone said last year, and a major improvement over the source material. Sweet, silly, and just the tiniest bit trashy, these characters feel deeper than their literary counterparts, and the extravagance of the Singapore setting translates beautifully to the big screen. The romantic comedy is still not my favorite story genre, but this modern-day fairy tale is a very good example of it.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

Book #86 of 2019:

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons (A Chorus of Dragons #1)

I like that this massive fantasy tome from debut author Jenn Lyons takes some stylistic risks, presenting much of its story as dual-timeline narratives interspersed with comments from a later narrator reviewing both accounts. But there’s so much info-dumping early on, and so little justification for who is telling all this to whom and why. Even the bifurcated plot feels ultimately unmotivated, since there’s never really any moment that would have been spoiled by a more straightforward chronology.

“Convoluted” seems like the best word for this novel, especially factoring in the massive cast and their frequent disguises via past lives, shape-shifting, memory-absorption, and body-swapping. It’s hard keeping everything straight enough to actually care about any of the characters, and although I’d read other work by Lyons, I don’t think I have it in me to stick with this particular series for its four forthcoming sequels.

★★★☆☆

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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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