The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

Book #26 of 2019:

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

This 2018 book is an interesting review of the current scientific understanding of dinosaurs, much of which is different from what was taught in schools decades ago (and from the representation in popular culture like Jurassic Park). Author Steve Brusatte is an expert paleontologist himself, and he’s fairly skilled at conveying complicated ideas from the field to a general audience.

Unfortunately, Brusatte’s own personality intrudes a lot into this narrative, making its ‘history’ as much about himself and his colleagues as about the fossilized species they study. There’s a degree of casual sexism here as well, both in who the writer chooses to cite and in his occasional comments like a dino having “the emaciated build of a supermodel.” So although the actual facts are educational, I wish they had been presented in more of a textbook format.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

Book #27 of 2019:

Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

In principle, horror about air travel is a fine concept for a short story collection. There’s so much that can go wrong on a plane, at least in the domain of fiction: from supernatural cloud-dwellers (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson) to terrorism (“The Fifth Category” by Tom Bissell) to witnessing a nuclear war (“You Are Released” by Joe Hill) to a good old locked-room mystery (“Murder in the Air” by Peter Tremayne). At their best, tales like these get at the sheer helplessness of being adrift miles from the rest of humanity when terror strikes. For modern authors like Stephen King (“The Turbulence Expert”), airplanes cut us off from our accustomed web of internet and smartphone connections. For earlier writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Horror of the Heights”), the dawn of aviation was inherently a journey into the unknown where anything could be lurking.

So thematically, the idea for this book is a good one. The problem lies in its execution, and the more middling stories that join those mentioned above. As is common for this sort of collection, the editors have privileged quantity over quality, resulting in seventeen total entries of which maybe half are any good. The afterword also makes clear that this assortment is intended to be exhaustive, with Google searches and Facebook posts having been employed to gather up every known example of the genre.

I’m skeptical that that’s truly the case, of course. (These two male editors couldn’t find a single relevant piece written by a woman? They couldn’t put out a call for new submissions, joining the original fiction that King and his son Hill have premiered in this volume?) But even if a reader takes them at their word that they’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel for stories of skybound horror, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have delivered us a product of half the size with the dregs left out.

Flight or Fright alternately soars and plummets like a turbulent aircraft itself, and if you can put up with the moments when your metaphorical oxygen mask deploys, there’s much to enjoy along the way. But it’s altogether a bit of a bumpy ride.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

Book #25 of 2019:

Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne (The Tales of Pell #1)

This novel aspires to be a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale sendup a la Discworld or Shrek, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the heart or cleverness to pull that off. Instead it reads more like just the plot beats of someone’s first tabletop roleplaying campaign — and although that’s a common criticism of the fantasy genre, most stories still offer more than just the thin characterization and intended punchlines on display here.

Look, I love a good pun probably more than most readers, and there are a few nice ones within these pages. But a lot of the book is just puerile jokes and lazy referential humor, as though the height of comedy is for elves to live in a forest called Morningwood. I would call it sophomoric, but even high school sophomores would likely find this a tad immature.

The nicest thing I can say is that the authors have avoided many easy opportunities to be sexist or racist, and there’s a lesbian relationship that is mostly not played for laughs. Overall, the farcical elements punch up, not down. But it’s hard to really appreciate that when the main focus is literally on a goat that keeps pooping everywhere.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale

Book #24 of 2019:

Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale (Princess Academy #2)

Much like the first book, this Princess Academy sequel seems like a great title for readers transitioning between the middle-grade and young adult publishing categories. It’s a tough act to balance the atmosphere of class consciousness and fermenting revolution against a lighter preteen tone, but overall author Shannon Hale manages it quite nicely. I also like how she takes a love triangle that could easily feel perfunctory and instead illustrates the different choices more broadly facing her heroine, which is a great use of that genre trope for this sort of coming-of-age story. I’m not sure if the next novel is intended to close out the series as a trilogy or if Hale will go on to publish further volumes, but I’m looking forward to reading on and finding out.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

Book #23 of 2019:

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart (Kopp Sisters #1)

The heroine in this historical fiction novel has a plucky Willa Cather vibe to her, and it’s neat that her story is based on real events (which have also been recently portrayed in an episode of the show Drunk History). The narrative struggles to keep my attention, however, and an invented mystery subplot essentially goes nowhere until an egregious betrayal of attorney-client privilege late in the book. I don’t think I’ll bother with the rest of this series.

[Content warning for antisemitism presented as a charming personality quirk — which arguably fits the 1914 setting, but is a curious authorial choice a century later.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander

Book #22 of 2019:

Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander (The Chronicles of Prydain #4)

I like the section near the end of this book when the hero apprentices under a series of artisans who sneakily give him life lessons along with crafting skills, but as a whole it’s a bit too meandering for my tastes. Living up to its title, this fourth Prydain novel really is just a story about its main character wandering around on side-quests while vaguely wanting to learn more about his parentage. It’s a little dull, especially for the continuing absence of the princess whose hand he’s supposedly trying to win. I hope the final volume in the series picks back up.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Thanos: Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga

Book #21 of 2019:

Thanos: Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga

Originally announced and written as the first novel set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before Disney walked back that claim just before publication, this book presents the backstory of its title character and the origins of his quest to destroy half of all life in existence. (The exact reasons for the Mouse revoking a canonical status remain unclear. I see no contradictions with any of the on-screen continuity through Avengers: Infinity War, so presumably there’s something in here that goes against future plans for the MCU’s cosmic inhabitants, unbeknownst at the time to author Barry Lyga.)

Even if this were still an official part of the series, though, I wouldn’t be able to really recommend it to anyone. The plot is largely unremarkable, and there are so many ridiculous leaps in character logic, most of which hinge on Thanos’s absolute conviction that he’s mathematically determined the certainty of a planet’s entire population dying off — despite making numerous other miscalculations over the course of the text — or him killing whole worlds of people anyway when they don’t agree with his diagnosis or proposed cull.

And while there’s definitely potential for someone to tell an interesting, compelling story about such a misguided savior, rich in dramatic irony about what he’s overlooking, there’s no attempt at that sort of complexity here. Instead the narrative is completely on Thanos’s side, which makes it practically impossible to ever take seriously. It’s just the tale of a bullied child who refuses to check his math, kills a lot of people, and eventually learns what Infinity Stones are. It’s inessential, non-canonical, and generally not worth your time.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller

Book #20 of 2019:

Circe by Madeline Miller

I’m not well-versed enough in Greek mythology to recognize everywhere this novel diverts from the traditional versions of the title character’s story, but it’s nevertheless clear that this presentation of her life on her own terms is something special. Much like Wicked, it’s a feminist reclamation of a demonized woman and a thoughtful consideration of what it’s like to be cast as the villain in someone else’s narrative. As a protagonist, Circe is both hardened and tempered by her various experiences, and author Madeline Miller crafts that personal journey into a profoundly moving tale.

My prior knowledge of this figure comes mostly from The Odyssey, but my favorite chapters here are actually the moments before and after her fate intersects with the wandering Odysseus. Miller has constructed an authentic-feeling mythic world for the witch-nymph to inhabit, and her origins and her destiny there are more interesting than just the retelling of Homer from a different point of view. In fact, my sense is that this book would largely succeed even for readers who know nothing of the original legends beforehand — for if considered solely as a work of fantasy, it would still be an outstanding character piece about the power of moving past early trauma to define one’s own legacy.

[Content warning for rape, graphic violence, and emotional abuse.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother by Danielle Teller

Book #19 of 2019:

All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother by Danielle Teller

I have a soft spot for fairy tale retellings, and in theory this novel offers a fine premise: Cinderella is a spoiled brat, her stepmother is a former servant struggling to keep the household solvent, and all the wickedness and magic in the familiar version of events is nothing but hurt feelings and exaggerated court gossip. In practice, however, the book is unfortunately rather lifeless. The heroine doesn’t even marry Cinderella’s father until the last quarter of the text, and there’s no conflict particularly driving her narrative either before or after that point. Some sharp observations on the historical restrictions of class and gender are appreciated, but the idea that a conventional villain is just a misunderstood woman from the lower classes isn’t enough on its own to justify telling the story this way.

[Content warning for rape.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Breaking Bad, season 3

TV #6 of 2019:

Breaking Bad, season 3

This series has been incredible from its very first scene, but the third season is where it truly hits its stride in terms of plotting and character work. This run of episodes is all about the chess game against Gus Fring and the battle for Jesse Pinkman’s soul, both of which offer ever-ratcheting tension and sporadic outbursts of deadly consequence. I have some issues with Breaking Bad as a whole in its treatment of its central antihero, but the writing is best when it functions like it often does here, puncturing Walt’s ego and stripping his illusions from both himself and the audience.

If I have any complaint about this period of the Heisenberg story, it should be clear from the names above: this is a very male-centered narrative. Even Mike and Hank emerge this season as more complicated and compelling figures, but the women like Skyler and Marie are increasingly being left on the sidelines. That’s not necessarily a damning fault — there’s plenty to say about these men alone — but it sometimes leaves me wishing for the interesting cross angles that, for instance, Kim Wexler brings to Better Call Saul.

All in all, however, I love this show, and this season has some of my favorite, most iconic moments. It’s darkly funny and beautifully shot throughout, and it’s the year that cements the series in my mind as one of the greats.

★★★★★

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