The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

Book #249 of 2018:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #7)

And so my Harry Potter reread comes to an end with what I consider the weakest volume of the series (not counting oddities like the Cursed Child screenplay or the flimsy textbook tie-ins). The major problem in this concluding novel is that it completely throws away the school year structure that has served the previous books so well, resulting in a loose narrative that feels more like the episodic quests of a tabletop roleplaying game. That’s not an inherently bad method of storytelling, but it doesn’t work here because it doesn’t play to author J. K. Rowling’s particular strengths. When her own characters regularly voice their frustrations with the “complete waste of time” and “meandering pointless journey” — actual quotes from this book! — it’s hard for a reader to disagree.

This is a Harry Potter novel that feels radically different from every other title in the series, and while that’s reasonable in the liminal space of a conclusion, I find myself missing the magic for long stretches of time. It’s not until Harry’s delayed return to Hogwarts in the last quarter of the text that the story really kicks into gear for me and reminds me of why I fell in love with this fictional world in the first place. It’s a true homecoming on several levels, and Rowling’s trademark clever wizardry and fun personalities are on full display for those final chapters, even if they’re only sporadically around beforehand.

As a conclusion this novel also pulls its punches with a few of the ongoing issues of the series. Is it ultimately a good or a bad thing for Harry to be brave enough to say his enemy Voldemort’s name? To use the Unforgivable Curses? To shut himself off from the Dark Lord through occlumency? In the end I’m not sure, and each case feels less like an intentional ambiguity and more like something Rowling just forgot to resolve satisfactorily in her final draft.

And yet — I do love the closing segment of this tale, and there are moments that shock, delight, and move me all throughout. It may be the weakest of the seven core Harry Potter books, but I would never dream of ending a series reread without it (as I fully intend to do with Cursed Child). It’s a darker and weirder story than all the rest, and it doesn’t hit their heights or tie up as neatly as I’d like in the end. But it’s Potter through and through, and for all its flaws, I cherish it still.

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★★

Book ranking: 3 > 5 > 4 > 2 > 6 > 1 > 7

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Book Review: The Book of Magic edited by Gardner Dozois

Book #248 of 2018:

The Book of Magic edited by Gardner Dozois

Gardner Dozois was a prolific editor of speculative fiction, and this is most likely his final project, having come to publication soon after his death in 2018. It’s a series of stories about sorcery — the companion to last year’s Dozois fantasy collection The Book of Swords — and that remit is wide enough to allow for some nice variation among the assembled entries, only one of which seems to have been previously released outside of this volume.

This is my fourth book of short stories from the editor, and it’s an unusually strong selection. I keep coming back to Dozois because of his ability to find gems that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen, but our tastes are different enough that his picks sometimes do little for me. And there are still one or two duds in The Book of Magic, but the average story quality in this assemblage is much higher than I’ve seen from him before.

As usual, there are some great new stories in here from authors I like already — Garth Nix’s “The Staff in the Stone”; Scott Lynch’s “The Fall and Rise of the House of the Wizard Malkuril” — some that immediately mark new authors for me to seek out further — Kate Elliott’s “Bloom”; Matthew Hughes’s “The Friends of Masquelayne the Incomparable” — and plenty of others that are no less fun to read. At their best, these tales of wizardry suggest whole worlds of invention happening just off their pages or offer intricate morality plays about the dangers of arrogance in spellcasting. It’s overall a fitting send-off for an editor who clearly recognized magic when he saw it.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal

Book #247 of 2018:

The Incomplete Book of Running by Peter Sagal

This short fitness memoir — titled after Jim Fixx’s 1977 classic The Complete Book of Running — is a lot of fun, especially for readers who run themselves. I don’t always agree with author Peter Sagal’s advice, like that runners should do without headphones, avoid treadmills, or join a local enthusiast group, but I still find much of his personal journey with the sport to be relatable and great to hear expressed in words. Even non-runners will likely be moved by the writer’s experiences at the Boston Marathon bombing or his mid-life crisis about his body’s reduced performance, but anyone familiar with the particular joys and struggles of long-distance running should especially give this book a read.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Book #246 of 2018:

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay is a talented writer, but I must confess that I don’t find this 2014 essay collection as engaging as her later work Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. There’s little thematic cohesion across the pieces in this volume, most of which were independently published elsewhere before being collected here, and although her analyses of pop culture are generally insightful, topics like the movie The Help or the song “Blurred Lines” were already dated at the time of publication and seem downright primeval now.

Gay also displays an unfortunate tendency to occasionally punch down in her critiques, lambasting her lazy college students or trashy reality shows with no sign of the nuance she brings to discussions of racism and sexism in our society. In a way, that lives up to her title for this book, but I would have liked more exploration of how feminism can be a messy label for a messy movement and fewer unintended examples of Gay herself failing to meet its ideals.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Elevation by Stephen King

Book #245 of 2018:

Elevation by Stephen King

A lackluster novella from a writer who should know (and can obviously do) much better. Part of the problem is the warmed-over premise of a man gradually losing his body weight, which can’t help but recall the author’s earlier novel Thinner — which if not quite a classic still conveys a creeping horror at its central predicament rather than the bemused acceptance on display here. But mostly this latest Stephen King offering is just tone-deaf through and through, with a clumsy attempt to show a conservative town coming to recognize the humanity of a lesbian couple and an awkward extended metaphor about terminal health conditions. It’s a mess that King’s talents and the book’s short length save from being a complete disaster, but only barely.

★★☆☆☆

[I listened to this as an audiobook that also included the author’s short story “Laurie” about a Florida widower and his new puppy. Three out of five stars for that one, which isn’t spectacular but at least avoids all the problems of Elevation.]

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Book Review: How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

Book #244 of 2018:

How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

A few of these short stories miss the mark for me, and the ones I like best seem front-loaded in the first half of the collection, giving the book at large an uneven feel. Still, author N. K. Jemisin’s imagination is on full display throughout, and it’s easy to root for her characters, many of whom are the sort of black heroes that are still all too rare in science-fiction and fantasy. In my favorite pieces, Jemisin uses the heightened reality of speculative fiction to cast the struggles of marginalized peoples as resistance against fantastical oppressors: from monstrous insect parasites (“Walking Awake”) to A.I. overlords (“Valedictorian”) to the fey (“Red Dirt Witch”). These stories resonate as outstanding allegories, and if you can push through some of the slower patches that follow, the book as a whole is definitely worth checking out.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: 41: A Portrait of My Father by George W. Bush

Book #243 of 2018:

41: A Portrait of My Father by George W. Bush

My political views are very different from both the author and the subject of this presidential retrospective, but thankfully the former steers largely clear of politics to talk about the latter’s character. (The author’s brother Jeb, for example, barely features in the narrative at all, despite the fact that he was surely prepping his own presidential run upon its publication in 2014.) Of course, this apolitical framing is still a political act, and there are times when former president George W. Bush comes across as frustratingly myopic, like when he defends his father’s infamous Willie Horton ad, now widely seen as a racist attempt to stoke white fears of black crime. But overall, this is a solid portrait of the life and career of George Herbert Walker Bush through the eyes of his son, and I’m glad to have read it in the wake of the 41st president’s recent passing.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy

Book #242 of 2018:

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy

An informative overview of the country’s current opioid crisis, which has deeper roots — dating to the turn of the century in its present form or even further for historical analogues — and a more singular origin — stemming largely from Purdue Pharma’s blithe insistence on the harmlessness of their addictive drug OxyContin — than I had realized before. Journalist Beth Macy shares these details as well as personal stories she’s gathered through her reporting in rural Virginia, and although the resulting work falls short of comprehensive, it’s a great introduction to the scope of the problem at hand.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

Book #241 of 2018:

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (Montague Siblings #1)

Overall, I adore this historical fiction novel about queer teens on their grand tour of eighteenth-century continental Europe. It’s phenomenal representation in a genre that often starves for any diversity at all, and the action of the story is almost entirely character-driven, especially in the first half. Those characters themselves are well-drawn and lovably flawed, with a protagonist who is equal parts charming and sweetly poignant in his romantic feelings towards his best friend / traveling companion.

My only real criticism is that there’s a sudden shift midway through the book to focus on a quest for a piece of alchemical mad science, and that’s a jarring departure for the otherwise grounded narrative. (The story is admittedly a madcap adventure that plays like a modern college road trip, but it’s still firmly rooted in reality until then, and it feels odd that the characters all accept the new development without question.) That change also seems downright unnecessary, as author Mackenzi Lee has pitted her heroes against so many pirates, highwaymen, affronted nobles, and stifling gender roles that the extra fantasy macguffin is a needless further complication.

By and large, however, I’ve loved spending time with these rakes, and I’m looking forward to picking up the female-led spinoff that Lee has just released. If she can keep the stakes more personal, the ladies might even surpass the gentlemen for my affection.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Doctor Who, season 11

TV #52 of 2018:

Doctor Who, season 11

I love the new Thirteenth Doctor, along with plenty of other tweaks in this first chapter of Doctor Who under showrunner Chris Chibnall. I adore the dynamic between companions Ryan and Graham, and I like that the season is immediately approachable for brand-new and lapsed viewers, which is not something that this show always manages to achieve.

Looking at the season as a whole, though, there’s a lot of room for improvement. There’s no real seasonal plot arc even by Who standards, and the thin threads connecting the first two episodes and the finale feel like they’re from a rough draft that really needed further polishing (similar to many of the episode resolutions this season, actually). And while a crowded TARDIS can be fun and opens up different storytelling avenues, I feel like Yaz got really underserved in her characterization as compared to the other members of the main cast.

Still! It’s Doctor Who so it’s not all bad, and the episodes It Takes You Away, Demons of the Punjab, The Witchfinders, and Rosa in particular are stellar achievements. There’s a lot of potential here for even better stuff ahead, especially if Chibnall eases back on his own episode-writing duties to concentrate more on fleshing out future seasons at large.

★★★☆☆

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