The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Sharp Objects

TV #39 of 2018:

Sharp Objects

This miniseries adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s debut novel is subtle and understated, to the point where I wonder if I would have been lost without having read the book first. But I do think the show tells its story more effectively than the source material, with beautiful cinematography and powerhouse acting from Amy Adams and the rest of the cast. (The only sore point is Chris Messina, who is nowhere near a strong enough actor to differentiate his character from the gruff doctor he played on The Mindy Project.) It’s a wicked little piece of television, but I’m really glad that HBO is letting it end after just one season, rather than trying to come up with a way to continue the story past the end of the book.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Marvel’s Luke Cage, season 2

TV #38 of 2018:

Marvel’s Luke Cage, season 2

I think this season is about on par with the last one, which I similarly liked but didn’t love. The plot is at least more cohesive this time around, but the message is a little muddled and there are still some elements that kind of go nowhere. And it’s really a problem on a character level, where Shades is the only figure who really has anything like a consistent and compelling arc across the season. I know that the creative team can do better than this, but I’m still waiting for this show to really be as great as it so obviously could be.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Book #169 of 2018:

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

This memoir from Roxane Gay is a powerful and emotional read about what it’s like for the author to go through the world and take up space as a medically-obese black woman. She is uncompromising and unflinching about her own trauma: from the gang-rape at age 12 that initially led her to start overeating to the daily difficulties and humiliations of her size that many readers will have never had to personally consider. It’s a difficult and not particularly empowering book, and I don’t know if I’d recommend it to anyone remotely sensitive to these topics, but Gay has truly used her pain to fuel some great writing here. Although short in pages, it packs quite a punch.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Book #168 of 2018:

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (The Daevabad Trilogy #1)

This fantasy novel goes far on the strength of its worldbuilding, which depicts a gorgeous Middle Eastern setting inspired by Islamic folklore that’s markedly different from the Eurocentric genre norm. While I sometimes had trouble keeping track of all the warring factions of djinn and I wish we hadn’t left 18th-century Cairo so quickly, it’s overall a rich and fleshed-out world that I enjoyed exploring. The characters and plot don’t feel quite as revelatory for me, and the love story seems a bit perfunctory so far, but I’m hoping these are marks of a debut novelist that will only improve in the forthcoming sequels. There’s a lot in this book of a magical young woman discovering her secret heritage that recalls Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone to me, and I will happily read on to chase that feeling.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II by Ben Macintyre

Book #167 of 2018:

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II by Ben Macintyre

As made famous in the fictionalized movie The Man Who Never Was, the Allied intelligence mission Operation Mincemeat was an audacious undertaking: the secret planting of a corpse dressed as a British officer and carrying forged documents, in order to mislead Nazi Germany about the site of an upcoming invasion. This 2010 book, drawing directly on recently-declassified military files, is pretty much the definitive story of the operation, an exhaustive deep dive into a fairly narrow topic. The narrative probably could have been streamlined further– author Ben Macintyre includes several elements that are really only tangentially related at best — but if the topic interests you, you’re unlikely to find a more complete account.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

Book #166 of 2018:

The Cruel Prince by Holly Black (The Folk of the Air #1)

Although I like the protagonist and some of the other female characters, I’m pretty lukewarm on this book as a whole. The plot has long periods of inaction and a few moments that seem to come out of nowhere, the title character and most of the other men feel a bit flat, and the setting is a pretty generic fairyland whose most distinctive element — that its immortal denizens cannot lie — isn’t even upheld consistently. The YA court intrigue is fine for what it is, but ultimately I don’t really feel like this is a series that I need to read any further. And if anyone’s looking for a better and weirder take on humans raised as changelings by the fey, I recommend checking out The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins instead.

[Trigger warning for an attack on the heroine that’s pretty much a sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

Book 165 of 2018:

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

I think this would be a great book for a certain type of reader, but I unfortunately can’t count myself in that class. Part family memoir and part literary analysis, the story broadly tracks the relationship of a classics professor with his elderly father as the latter sits in on his son’s Homer seminar and then later accompanies him on an Odyssey-themed cruise of the Mediterranean. Author Daniel Mendelsohn patterns this account on the structure of The Odyssey itself, resulting in a narrative that frequently bends around to revisit an earlier or later stage. Along the way, Mendelsohn shares insights about the epic poem and about his dad — and about how these connect and inform one another in his mind — which he conveys to his readers with varying degrees of success. I sense that the author is aiming for profound and timeless revelations about fathers and sons, but he never really gets there for me.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Book #164 of 2018:

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Joe Hill’s novels have been hit-or-miss for me, and it turns out that his short stories are much the same. There are some great pieces in this collection: the opening “Best New Horror” manages to be heartfelt, creepy, and darkly comic all at once, and “Abraham’s Boys” is the Dracula sequel about the pressure of parental expectations and the difficulty of teaching kids about the past that I never knew I needed. “The Black Phone” and “You Will Hear the Locust Sing” are also strong (albeit disturbing) stories that go in unexpected directions. Unfortunately, though, there are other entries in this book that come nowhere near them, resulting in a somewhat uneven feel. On average it’s a fine collection of horror and the horror-adjacent, but the aforementioned gems are really worth seeking out on their own.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

Book #163 of 2018:

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz (Hawthorne #1)

A solid whodunnit mystery, but not quite as imaginative as author Anthony Horowitz’s earlier novel Magpie Murders (to which this story is unrelated, despite the similar title). The hook this time around is that Horowitz is writing as a fictionalized version of himself, relating the time that he supposedly played Watson to a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. The conceit is amusing but somewhat gimmicky, especially whenever our narrator laments that he never would have had events unfold a certain way in one of his novels.

I like that the pieces of the case line up and make sense in hindsight without being super obvious along the way, which can be a tricky balance for crime writers to strike. On the other hand, it bothers me that the detective makes several sexist assumptions — the strangler couldn’t be a woman, an injured boy wouldn’t call out for his father, etc. — that are ultimately validated by the text. It’s not enough to turn me off Horowitz, but it does weaken what he’s trying to accomplish here.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

Book #162 of 2018:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #1)

It’s a little hard for me to be objectively critical about the Harry Potter books, which, although not my first introduction to children’s fantasy literature, were nevertheless a formative and beloved part of my childhood. Still, I’ve always considered this first novel to be one of the weakest in the series, and I went into this reread fully expecting to give it a 3-star, middle-of-the-road rating.

I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to rediscover how charming and brilliant it is, right from page one. The things that bother me most are minor inconsistencies with the later books — which suggest that the worldbuilding was not yet firmly fixed in author J. K. Rowling’s mind at this point, but probably can’t fairly be labeled a flaw of this particular novel. Taken on its own, the wizarding world of the first book feels completely fleshed-out and believable.

The narrative is funny and moving, and I admire how Rowling has tied together a classic boarding school drama of classes and bullying to an engaging plot that builds over the course of the novel (in contrast to similar school adventures of the era like Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small quartet, which have very little rising action). Telling the story over the course of a school year is also a smart decision on the author’s part, creating a framework that marks the passage of time via seasonal changes and holidays and will easily demarcate the action of successive novels.

As for the flaws, well, the story here does come across as a bit juvenile at times — which is fine for its eleven-year-old heroes, but just silly when serious responsible adults are using chess and logic puzzles to guard a priceless treasure. And although the plot has some unexpected twists, neither it nor the characters are anywhere near as complex as they will grow to be in the sequels.

In the end this is not a very good Harry Potter book, but that’s quite the curve on which to grade a story. It is a very good book in and of itself, and a great start to something even better.

★★★★☆

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