The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: True Detective, season 3

TV #8 of 2019:

True Detective, season 3

There are quite a few elements in the latest season of this mystery anthology that feel remixed from its first year, but I think I actually prefer how they’re assembled this time around. Whereas there was really no compelling story reason for the original investigation to be presented as an increasingly cold case over multiple timelines — resulting in several frustrating moments where characters clearly know things that the audience doesn’t — the invention of a new hero with memory problems in his old age has led to a much more organic way for the writers to weave the different plot strands together.

And Mahershala Ali, as that retired cop who’s come unstuck in time, is simply incredible at crafting three distinct performances over the different eras of his character’s life. (My wife, catching part of an episode without realizing this aspect of the show, remarked that it was great casting to find an old man who looked so much like Ali.) The actor won his second Academy Award the night the finale aired, and his acting still manages to be a revelation here. Stephen Dorff, whose work I’m less familiar with, also acquits himself nicely at distinguishing the 1980, 1990, and 2015 versions of his own role.

This season is less action-packed than the series debut, but the storyline takes some surprising turns and the acting alone really is worth the price admission. I’m glad I decided to tune back in after that debacle of a sophomore outing, and I highly encourage other former viewers to do the same.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Book #43 of 2019:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I love this book just as much as I remember, and upon this reading I’m particularly struck by the quiet tone of the work. It’s all too easy for a writer of this sort of world-ending saga to lean on the action and the horror, but Mandel instead opts for a beautiful aching blend of sadness and hope as her characters seek meaning in their memories of a vanished past. It’s a very literary approach to the genre, and one that has lingered in my mind for years now.

Original review from 2015:

Following in the tradition of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Stephen King’s The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven spins a tale of our modern society collapsing and rebuilding itself in the wake of a calamitous plague that kills off much of the earth’s population. The novel follows a handful of people over the years both before and after the pandemic, gradually revealing how their lives intersect — sometimes in ways unbeknownst to the characters themselves.

Mandel paints a haunting picture of the fragility of our everyday lives, and she has clearly given a lot of thought to how the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic civilization might develop. Like Stewart, she draws very sharp distinctions between those who can recall the old ways and those to whom such things are but faint memories or even simply stories.

It is to Mandel’s credit as a storyteller herself that the sections of Station Eleven concerning a few more conventional lives well before the collapse are no less gripping than those about the Shakespearean troupe wandering across the new landscape. All in all this was an excellent novel, and I both look forward to a reread and hope for a sequel to further illuminate this setting.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims

Book #42 of 2019:

Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Cliff Sims

There’s a tendency for this new genre of tell-all books concerning Donald Trump’s presidency to come across as overly gossip-driven and vengeful, and just as the title suggests, that’s ultimately how this one from former aide Cliff Sims plays out as well. It’s at least less salacious than Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, and although I can’t speak to the accuracy of any particular anecdotes, it does feel somewhat more objective, especially in its early pages. (The first few chapters, detailing the author’s time with the Trump campaign, offer perhaps the best insight into the 2016 election results that I’ve seen since Hillary Clinton’s What Happened.)

The book does get more and more petty as it goes along, and I have very little patience for how Sims regularly wrings his hands over the president and his staff not living up to the author’s Christian faith while he continues to abet them due to misplaced conservative loyalty. It’s also just straight-up hard to take seriously any political commentator who praises the “impeccable honor and integrity” of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in addition to the many other areas where Sims and I do not see eye-to-eye. In the end there’s very little in this coverage of the dysfunctional Trump White House that I find hasn’t been already well-detailed elsewhere.

[Content warning for the author’s casual sexism in descriptions of women and downplaying of sexual assault allegations.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philipps

Book #41 of 2019:

This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philipps

I mostly know actress Busy Philipps from her work on the long-running stage show / podcast the Thrilling Adventure Hour, and I’ll admit that I primarily picked up this book hoping — in vain, as it turns out — for stories of that production. I’m glad that I did, however, because Philipps has some important, soul-baring insights to share from her life and acting career within these pages. The author is blunt and uncompromising about her experiences with rape, abortion, mental health, childbirth, Hollywood fatphobia, and abusers like James Franco and Harvey Weinstein. Although I wouldn’t quite say it’s an essential memoir on any of these topics, it rings with an emotional honesty throughout.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance by Bernie Sanders

Book #40 of 2019:

Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance by Bernie Sanders

This latest book from Bernie Sanders was published shortly before the Vermont senator officially announced that he would once more be seeking the Democratic nomination for president, but it has clearly been written with the intent of making that case to voters. And since the author’s favored policies are fairly well-known after his unsuccessful previous attempt in 2016, this volume is aimed less at explaining that progressive platform and more at arguing for its current popularity around the country and detailing in diary fashion how Sanders has fought to enact it since losing the nomination last time around.

Overall, the latter goal is better achieved than the former, with Bernie often asserting that Americans are with him on a topic without offering any particular proof to that effect. But he does offer specific concrete actions that he’s taken to shift the nation leftwards, from campaigning tirelessly on behalf of Hillary Clinton, to holding townhalls on the need for single-payer healthcare, to joining protests for a living wage at Disney parks and the fight-for-fifteen more broadly, to introducing legislation with Elizabeth Warren for universal childcare, and so much more.

In the end, this is a politician’s campaign book, an ephemeral object that might be helpful in the context of an election but likely won’t even be worth remembering a year from then. And even within that genre, this one is a little unpolished, with its journal entries often coming across as strange after the fact: the senator includes his initial opposition to Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, without any reference to the later allegations that have surfaced about the eventual Supreme Court justice’s alcohol abuse and sexual assaults, and he brags about helping certain candidates win their primaries even when they have not gone on to victory in the general.

Common criticisms of Sanders also remain relevant, such as an occasional unfortunate tone-deafness on issues of race. He is quick to describe groups of his supporters or people affected by an issue as “white, black, Latino, Asian-American, and Native American,” but less skilled — although improving, especially compared to many other Democrats — at discussing the particular concerns of particular racial communities. Voters who have never liked the independent Vermonter are unlikely to be won over by anything in this book, but readers like me who have previously felt their support cooling may well end up feeling the Bern once more.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Book #39 of 2019:

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I think this is my favorite of the three Dostoyevsky novels I’ve now read, but that still isn’t saying much. Aside from an electrifying early sequence depicting the titular crime and its initial aftermath — which favorably brings to mind certain suspense writers that I enjoy like Poe, King, and Highsmith — I find much of this book to be an overwrought slog through unrealistic character psychology. And as always for this author, that’s peppered with sporadic racism and antisemitism that makes it clear Dostoyevsky’s imagined audience was never people like me or my loved ones anyway. At this point, I am more than willing to concede that arrangement.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Book #38 of 2019:

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #2)

Another great robo-noir story, following the weary Murderbot as it attempts to protect a crew of in-over-their-head humans and solve a mystery that’s been wiped from its memory logs. I really enjoy spending time in the mind of this hardboiled robot, who is almost like Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if his depression were more than just a punchline. I still can’t shake the feeling that I’d rather be reading a novel-length story about the antisocial cyborg with a heart of gold rather than these shorter, episodic adventures, but there’s enough character growth in this first sequel that I can’t complain too much.

(I also love that a good portion of this novella involves artificial intelligences talking to one another about how weird humans are, which is always good fun. I’m not at all surprised that Ann Leckie has blurbed it, given how similar a tone this strikes to some of her own work.)

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty

Book #37 of 2019:

The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty (The Daevabad Trilogy #2)

As with its predecessor The City of Brass, this sequel displays super-immersive fantasy worldbuilding inspired by #ownvoices Islamic folklore, but not much of an overall plot. There’s a whole lot of political intrigue in Daevabad, but much of it feels like wheel-spinning until the three viewpoint characters are reunited, especially given that we know one of them is planning an attack on the mystical city. I’m also still a little confused by some of the different factions of djinn, which lessens the impact of all their maneuvering. Still, the protagonists are sympathetic, and I continue to enjoy seeing this world through their eyes. And since the action at the end of this novel picks up dramatically, I have high hopes for the final volume as well.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Book #36 of 2019:

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #3)

I always worry that these novellas about children who miss their adopted fantasylands are going to get formulaic and stale, but somehow author Seanan McGuire keeps coming up with new variations that I find endlessly enchanting. I’m not sure if this third volume is my favorite of the series so far, but its story of a group of the students venturing into a world of sugary nonsense to make sure its past happens on schedule is definitely the first to feel like it justifies the short length and doesn’t leave me wanting more. With McGuire’s trademark diversity of characters and thoughtful consideration of how different people can feel like they don’t belong — here explored primarily through fatphobia — the book easily lives up to its predecessors and shows that there are plenty of doors in this setting still waiting to be opened.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss

Book #35 of 2019:

Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss

This novel has a razor-thin plot and some truly ridiculous millennial caricatures, but it’s kept me laughing almost despite myself. I also really like the cleverness of the epistolary format, which tells the story entirely as an ongoing email thread (with occasional text message interludes) from the various members of this central friend group as they coordinate a series of hangouts, workouts, bachelorette parties, and interventions over the course of a year. The titular NYC ladies can be basic and trashy, and the audacity with which they continually make and break expensive plans without consulting one another is somewhat cringe-inducing, but overall the book is a quick, fun read. I’m very glad that the lead-up to my own wedding was nothing like the trainwreck depicted here, though!

★★★☆☆

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