The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Altered Carbon, season 1

TV #27 of 2018:

Altered Carbon, season 1

On the one hand, this series is based on a book that would be pretty hard to present faithfully on television, and I think the show writers have made a lot of really smart adaptation choices in how they handle that material. I’d also say that the worldbuilding and central concepts are really well established, and there are definitely elements like the sentient hotel that work better on screen than they ever do on the page.

On the other hand, the TV story kind of fizzles out for me well before the end of this season, and the main character seems nowhere near as smart or capable as he is in the original novel. That’s a drag, especially when we keep getting told about his legendary augmented intuition. Ultimately I like the program well enough to watch another season (although I guess I should read the sequels first), but I’m a little unsatified by how this one ends up.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Book #99 of 2018:

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A powerful collection of essays on race and racism in America, reflecting the author’s evolving understanding of these issues over the eight years of the Obama presidency. Half of these entries are drawn, roughly one per year, from articles originally published in The Atlantic; the rest have been newly written for this volume in the dawn of the Trump administration. Throughout, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes movingly and convincingly on the historical forces of racial injustice that survive today, the ways in which the unique figure of Barack Obama has navigated them, and how they have ultimately led us to his successor in the Oval Office.

It’s as meditative and elegiac as the title suggests, using a racial lens to examine both the triumphs and flaws of the Obama White House but especially to mourn its passing. Yet despite that focus, the language is less poetic than the author’s earlier work Between the World and Me, which I personally appreciate. This is an accessible book for all of us who have had our eyes opened over the course of the past decade, and it deserves to be read widely.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

Book #98 of 2018:

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

Practically from the start, I’ve been reeling over the emotional journey that the heroine makes in this intensely personal fantasy novel. Largely eschewing the traditional genre focus on epic quests, author Rachel Hartman has instead written a powerful meditation on trauma, grief, and healing that only happens to take place in a world with dragons. (It’s technically a follow-up to her Seraphina duology, but this volume tells an independent story that doesn’t require having read the previous two books first.)

The tale of a young woman who takes to travel in order to escape her past and find a reason to keep living is incredibly cathartic, and is suffused with an uplifting moral philosophy that finds Tess ultimately letting down her barriers to affirm the goodness of life in all its diversity. We need more stories like this, and I can already tell this is one I’ll be revisiting in the future.

[Trigger warning for a character recounting what’s clearly her rape near the end of the book, which some readers might want to know is coming ahead of time. And major thanks to Random House and Goodreads for providing me a free advance reader’s copy of this novel in exchange for an unbiased review — even though I received the book a month and a half after its actual publication, which would sort of seem to defeat the purpose of an ARC.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Book #97 of 2018:

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

This book skates by on a terrific premise, which is basically Scooby-Doo crossed with Stephen King’s IT. The teens in this off-brand Mystery Gang have disbanded after stumbling across a real Lovecraftian horror, and the surviving members now reunite as adults to face their fears and reopen that final case. And that’s fun enough, but the novelty wears out well before the book ends, helped along by some questionable writing choices on the author’s part (like switching in and out of a screenplay format or constantly anthropomorphizing the Daphne stand-in’s hair and a variety of inanimate objects). This novel reads like a sugar rush, and when that high inevitably came down, I was personally left craving something more substantial.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King

Book #96 of 2018:

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King

I’m normally a big Stephen King fan, but I’m feeling pretty underwhelmed by this recent collaboration between the bestselling author and his son Owen. The premise is fine — all the world’s women start falling into deep comas when they go to sleep, leaving a shaky society of nervous men and a few increasingly delirious women trying to stay awake — but there are major issues in how the Kings develop it.

Hardest to swallow is probably the gender essentialism: nowhere in this 700-page novel is there any indication that people can exist outside of a rigid male/female binary, and the authors’ repeated mention of chromosomes suggests a transphobic worldview in which the difference between men and women is strictly biological. This would be problematic in any story, but it’s downright absurd in a book about a supernatural affliction aiming to divide the world by gender for some vague morality test / allegorical demonstration. The Kings display fairly narrow gender roles for their characters as well, at one point mentioning “a makeshift daycare run by men” as though such people are completely foreign to this field under normal circumstances.

(And this is a truly minor point, but the effectively-omniscient fairy creature who brought on the sleeping sickness mentions that any further episodes of Doctor Who will require recasting the companion as a man — although the story is set when actress Jodie Whittaker would have already taken over as the Thirteenth Doctor, surely a bigger issue for producing the show in a womanless world.)

If the story were stronger these flaws might not stand out as much, but the parameters of the conflict remain hazy throughout and the narrative beats of a small town breaking apart are practically rote at this point in Stephen King’s career. If you’ve read The Stand, or Under the Dome, or The Tommyknockers, or Needful Things, or ‘Salem’s Lot, there won’t be many surprises here. Having never before read anything by Owen King, I can’t say for certain that the weaknesses stem from him and not his father, and this is far from the first dud that the older King has released. But unless you’re an absolute Constant Reader, it’s best to let this one lie.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., season 5

TV #26 of 2018:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., season 5

The finale of this season is outstanding, especially for the closure on Coulson and Fitz’s respective character arcs, but I’m not as sold on some of the episodes that get us there. Although the season has clearly been written with the knowledge that it might be the last one, it sometimes feels like that pressure on the writers to avoid loose ends has resulted in over-tidy solutions and an unnecessary amount of wheel-spinning throughout. (I’m also still kind of unclear on how exactly the apocalyptic timeline from the start of the season ultimately gets averted, but as usual with time travel, I’m more or less willing to just roll with it.) The final episode this season really could – and perhaps should – have closed the door on this chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I worry that the show is never again going to hit the heights of last season’s Framework storyline. But I’m still enjoying this series for the most part, and I’m definitely on board to see what next season will look like.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 8

TV #25 of 2018:

Bob’s Burgers, season 8

I don’t have much to say about this season of Bob’s Burgers that doesn’t apply to the show at large, but it remains impressively strong this late in its run. Top-notch, character-driven comedy that somehow hasn’t worn out its welcome despite the general lack of any sort of ongoing plot or narrative stakes. I think it’s the character work that really powers this show: the main cast has grown naturally over time, and the extensive bench of supporting characters all have a great comic specificity to them. If Bob’s Burgers can keep effortlessly hitting this level of quality, I’m happy to keep watching.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 5

TV #24 of 2018:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 5

It’s been a whirlwind time to be a Brooklyn Nine-Nine fan, with the show getting canceled by Fox and then saved by NBC in roughly the span of a day. I’m super glad that show isn’t ending now, but if it had, it would have absolutely gone out on top of its game. This season takes the series over that key 100-episode syndication benchmark, offering some great storylines and character work in the process. Rosa coming out as bisexual is the one that stands out the most, but that finale is the first one that’s felt like it could have been a satisfying conclusion for the series itself if it had to be. I would have been happy to leave these characters where we last see them here, but I’m very excited to continue following them on NBC.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 43

TV #23 of 2018:

Saturday Night Live, season 43

We started watching SNL regularly sometime last year, making this the first season of the long-running sketch comedy show that I’ve actually seen in its entirety. Taken as a whole it’s understandably not as great as the isolated bits that go viral, and its present iteration definitely relies way too heavily on celebrity cameos and toothless Trump impressions. Still, every week there are skits that get huge laughs out of me, and I was particularly impressed with new cast member Heidi Gardner. Colin Jost and Michael Che are also consistently strong at their Weekend Update gig, which I would probably still keep watching on a weekly basis even if we let the rest of the show slide.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Native Son by Richard Wright

Book #95 of 2018:

Native Son by Richard Wright

This 1940 classic feels astonishingly modern — which is a sad commentary on the slow progress in American race relations over the decades since. Author Richard Wright pens a blistering look at privilege and marginalization, as embodied in the life of a young black criminal. Yet despite the novel’s clear anti-racism themes, it’s a more challenging read than something like To Kill a Mockingbird, since Wright’s protagonist is unambiguously guilty of rape and murder, with the author seeking to explore the societal factors that have contributed to the man’s actions while still holding him accountable. A better comparison might be Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which similarly asks readers to empathize with a cold-blooded killer who struggles to put his motives into words.

The book only really shows its age in the final section, when the plot momentum gives way to long philosophical courtroom monologues that lay bare the themes of the text. As in the works of Wright’s contemporary Ayn Rand, there’s a feeling that the story may have been built merely to scaffold these speeches and deliver the author’s moralizing. But when the moral is still as necessary as this one, that’s an easy flaw to forgive.

★★★★☆

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