The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor

Book #107 of 2018:

Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor

Laini Taylor is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers, thanks to the gorgeous emotional landscapes that her lyrical prose always ends up painting for me. In this short book, she uses that gift — and the help of actual illustrations from her husband Jim Di Bartolo — to revisit a side story from the first novel in her Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, sharing the magical first date between two of its minor characters. Taylor brilliantly captures the excitement and wonder as Zuzana and Mik come together one night in the snow-swept streets of Prague, and although the character voice is more quirky and irreverent than what the author usually writes, it’s every bit as warm.

The whole book is pretty much an extended deleted scene, and it’s in no way essential to anything in the rest of the trilogy. It’s just one isolated moment between two new lovers, and it could probably even be read by someone who didn’t know the context of the larger story. But if you’ve read and loved the series already, this companion novella is definitely worth seeking out.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

Book #106 of 2018:

The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein

This 1957 sci-fi romp is fun, but it bears many problematic hallmarks of the genre fiction written by white men in that era. Minor setbacks are blithely compared to slavery and rape, female characters are treated patronizingly, and the 30-year-old protagonist kind of falls in love with a preteen girl. (She asks him to marry her before he enters cryogenic sleep. He says that if she still feels that way when she turns 21, she can go into suspended animation herself at that point, and they can get married when they wake up in the future together. It’s a pretty small part of the overall plot, and you can argue that the character ultimately has adult agency, but their romance verges on predator grooming in a way that personally makes me uncomfortable.)

If you can get past all of that, this novel really is a neat little adventure story from the golden age of science-fiction, with clever time loop shenanigans and some imaginatively goofy visions of the then-future. It especially sparkles anytime the hero shows his utter devotion to his pet cat, as when he insists that it get cryo-frozen along with him. But the book is very much a product of its time, and some modern readers may wish to give it a miss.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Book #105 of 2018:

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

I wanted to be drawn in by this novel about a secret society operating out of a used bookstore, but I ended up rather put off by the tech bro vibe of its protagonist. There’s a lot of casual sexism in how he and the text frame various female characters, and way too much focus on his friend’s company that models the physics of moving breasts for video games. The plot also kind of falls apart as the story goes on, and all of the awkwardly-inserted teaching moments about things like Mechanical Turk resemble the worst writing tendencies of Cory Doctorow (or even, less charitably, Dan Brown).

In the end I feel like there are many elements in this story that I could have liked, had they been developed by another author instead. But I think this first book I’ve read from Robin Sloan will also be my last.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: A Higher Loyalty by James Comey

Book #104 of 2018:

A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey

Former FBI Director Jim Comey is a polarizing public figure, and it’s nearly impossible for a contemporary reader to set aside their preconceptions of him in reading this book. (He’s also a fellow graduate of my alma mater and someone with whom I have mutual acquaintances, and although we’ve never met personally ourselves, these connections do further shade my objectivity.)

Nevertheless, the author acquits himself well in laying out the conflicted thought process behind some of his more controversial actions during the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath. We may still find some of his decisions to be obtuse, but overall his reasoning seems clear, defensible, and non-partisan. And while his insights into the personal character of Donald Trump — or lack thereof — are not quite revelatory, they still represent an important perspective of someone who has interacted with him closely.

If you take Comey at his word, this book is intended less as a personal critique of President Trump and more as a handbook of lessons the Director has learned for leading with integrity. Drawing on his personal experience serving under three presidents and beyond, Comey has a lot to say on loyalty to an ideal larger than one person or political party. It’s sometimes hard to see that in neutral terms, or to trust that this author is being truly neutral himself, but it’s still a valuable lesson for our current political moment.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher

Book #103 of 2018:

A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths by Tony Fletcher

I am probably not the ideal reader or reviewer for a book about The Smiths, a band with which I have little familiarity and no emotional attachment. (As a partial defense, they had already split up before I was even born.) But it seems to me as though author Tony Fletcher has gone too far in the opposite direction, fawning over the group’s supposed genius and delving deeply into the minutiae of its members’ lives. So although the writer provides an exhaustive amount of information about the studio editing process for the band’s greatest hits — complete with unexplained technical musicology phrases like “spaghetti rockabilly skiffle riff” — he’s ultimately unable to present a coherent or compelling narrative about their rise to the top of the charts.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a 700-page history of a musical act won’t appeal much to non-fans, but I was still expecting a more neutral explanation for why this particular group succeeded when and how they did. Or even, given the book’s title, a more lengthy discussion of their legacy and influence on the acts that followed and the fans who still love them. Instead, it’s mostly a lot of tedium about record deals and touring schedules, occasionally leavened by discussions of the clashing personalities behind the music.

Fletcher is best when exploring those personalities to track the causes behind the band’s eventual dissolution, yet this account comes too little and too late in the overall text to make up for the hundreds of stale pages beforehand. For a reader who hasn’t come at the book already enthused about its subject, I have to admit getting very little out of the experience.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

Book #102 of 2018:

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #5)

The flashback-centric Wizard and Glass is my favorite novel in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower sequence, but I’m willing to entertain arguments that this next book is its best. The setting has been firmly established at this point, and King is plainly reveling in just how weird he’s made it all. There’s the post-apocalyptic western fantasy world where most of the action takes place, now home to a Magnificent Seven plot of cowboys protecting a small town from the army of killer robots set on abducting its children for their latent psychic powers. There’s the return of the portals into a world more like our own, now with time travel looping back into pivotal moments from earlier in the series. And there’s even the sudden appearance of a character from the author’s heretofore-unrelated novel ‘Salem’s Lot, whom no reasonable reader could have predicted would ever show up again, let alone here.

Of course, the best thing about this story, and the wider Dark Tower series in general, is not all the weirdness but how Stephen King makes all the weirdness work. His narrative voice is so confident that it’s easy to get swept up in the action and believe in these characters despite the plain absurdity of their circumstances. In this novel in particular, King really puts in the effort to build up the series theme of destiny driving apparent coincidences, and the payoff in its epilogue is honestly like nothing else I’ve ever read. (How that development gets explored in the remaining books would prove more divisive among fans, but its introduction here is tremendous.) The series is entering its home stretch now at full strength, and the Tower awaits.

★★★★★

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TV Review: Arrested Development: Fateful Consequences

TV #29 of 2018:

Arrested Development: Fateful Consequences

Just ahead of the new fifth season – which I haven’t seen yet – Netflix released this “remixed” version of Arrested Development season 4. The original version of the season, which came out in 2013, was built to work around the busy schedules of its actors, most of whom had gone on to bigger careers after the show first went off the air in 2006. As such, season 4 is less of an ensemble series and more of a collection of episodes focusing on one particular main character each. The stories from these episodes run more or less parallel to one another, so that the overall timeline of the season is pretty convoluted and a small moment from one part of the season will often only make full sense after you’ve seen an entirely different episode. (The creators have even claimed at times that the episodes can be watched in any order, although this has never struck me as entirely true. But it is certainly a season that rewards multiple screenings, since a repeat viewer is guaranteed to catch jokes they’ve missed the first time around.)

The format is experimental, especially compared to the first three seasons of the show, and if I were reviewing that original run, I could get into what does and doesn’t work. Suffice to say that a lot of fans were disappointed by season 4, and that this remix aims to recut the season into a more conventional and linear narrative, resulting in 22 episodes of around twenty minutes each that collectively tell a sequential storyline, as opposed to 15 half-hour episodes that often loop back and retread the same ground. Both the runtime and the chronology make the show feel more like its old self.

It also feels less clever, though, absent much of that sense from the original season 4 that seemingly separate events are in fact connected after all. And there are weaknesses in the raw material of the season that no amount of remixing can overcome. Narrator Ron Howard does a lot of work to draw parallels between what different characters are up to at any given point, but there’s no escaping that the A plot and B plot of many episodes seldom intersect directly. In the end I’m not sure whether I prefer this remix to the original, nor even which I’d recommend for someone watching through the series for the first time. (For now, Netflix has decided the matter by placing Fateful Consequences as the official season in its episode list, with the original version of season 4 relegated to a sub-menu of ‘Trailers and More.’) But if you’re like me and are watching season 4 to refresh your memory several years after watching the original, you might as well check it out in this new format.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: New Girl, season 7

TV #28 of 2018:

New Girl, season 7

From a storytelling perspective, season 6 of this sitcom wrapped things up just fine. There was no real need to bring back the series for a final abbreviated season (8 episodes, as compared to the 22+ of every previous season), but my hope was that doing so would allow a Parks and Recreation style celebration of everything the show had done before, bringing back old characters and running gags to remind viewers of what we had loved and send the program off in style.

This is… not that. Oh, it’s fine, but it feels more like the continued last wheezes of a show that had already been fading for a while, rather than any last-minute creative renaissance. With a few minor exceptions, season 7 comes across not as a celebration of New Girl’s past but just the last few ideas that the writers hadn’t gotten to yet. It’s still funny and sporadically moving, but not really an essential send-off for fans.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

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

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Book Review: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Book #101 of 2018:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Much like the earlier Tayari Jones novel Silver Sparrow, this story ends somewhat abruptly and before I feel like the author has really said everything she could/should with its characters. But what we do get is a compelling and believable exploration of what might happen to a new marriage after one spouse is falsely convicted and sentenced to spend the next decade behind bars.

It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines case of an innocent black man in the south railroaded on rape charges, but Jones foregrounds the relationships and character dynamics over the sheer injustice of the situation, with the haunting effect of making the tragedy just a fact of life for her all-black cast. We instead focus on how the newlyweds adapt to their change in circumstances and on how life can’t stand still for either of them, which gives the book a distinct and moving perspective. I’m a little dissatisfied with the ending, but at least I can honestly say it leaves me wanting more.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

Book #100 of 2018:

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner (The Queen’s Thief #2)

In principle this is a fine follow-up to The Thief, although it shares that novel’s predilection for hiding character plans and motives from readers even when they’re pretty easy to guess. It expands this Greek-flavored fantasy world a little, and tells what should be another fun story of intrigue and spycraft.

Yet I have such a visceral negative reaction to the romance at its core — which is hard to discuss without spoilers*, but is abusive on one side and coercive on the other — that it’s hard to focus on anything else in the text. It absolutely kills the mood for me, and guarantees that I won’t be reading any further into this series.

*SPOILER: She tortures him and chops off his hand; he then kidnaps her and says she can either marry him or drown. Later they both admit they’re in love, and I worry about what relationship dynamics we’re modeling for young readers here.

★★☆☆☆

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