The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Book #224 of 2019:

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Given that comedian Trevor Noah has risen to international prominence as Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, I was expecting this memoir to be a typical rags-to-riches narrative (or at least something like Bossypants where a struggling artist keeps grinding and eventually breaks through into success). Instead, Noah makes the far more interesting authorial choice to sideline his comedy career almost entirely and instead focus on his extraordinary childhood growing up in apartheid South Africa, where the existence of biracial children like him was literally against the law.

It’s a deeply moving history – and periodically terrifying in the moments about the author’s abusive stepfather – but also incredibly funny and an informative inside look at life under apartheid rule. Sometimes these various aspects pull the book in contrary directions, but overall it’s the heartfelt true story of a clever outsider trying to figure out his place in the world. That’s a story no one but Trevor Noah could have shared with us, and I’m so glad that he did.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Book #223 of 2017:

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)

If you read science-fiction primarily for the science, this is definitely your book, with all sorts of experimental particle physics and theoretical issues in astronomy. There’s just unfortunately not much of a plot or characters worth caring about. The flashbacks set during China’s Cultural Revolution are the most compelling part of the novel, and they make this story distinctive enough from the rest of the genre that I was willing to put up with the less interesting parts set in the present (including the endless scenes surrounding a heavy-handed video game). But I’m still nowhere near invested enough in this story to finish the trilogy.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Book #222 of 2017:

Night by Elie Wiesel

It’s hard to find the words to describe Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. No matter what you know about the horrors of the Holocaust — and as a Jew born in the late twentieth-century, those horrors formed part of my earliest religious education — nothing can prepare you for the matter-of-fact way this survivor’s narrative unfolds. It’s bleak and relentless and immediate, with no artifice or figurative language to distract from the awful reality. Like millions of other Jews, the teenaged Wiesel was torn from his home, stripped of all property, and placed in a concentration camp to face torture, starvation, forced marches, and the constant fear of a death that ultimately claimed the rest of his family (and so many others). His account of that time is haunting beyond its slim pages, and I couldn’t look away.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Book #221 of 2017:

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

A Freakonomics for the modern age, this book explores the provocative notion that we can get more reliable information from people’s Google searches and other online activity than from their answers to traditional polling questions. Author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues convincingly that people sometimes respond to surveys with the answers they consider socially expected or even aspirational, but they are less motivated to filter themselves before a search engine that can bring them whatever they ask of it. As a result, aggregate big data can provide insights on racism, political trends, sexual proclivities, and other sensitive topics that classical research methods might miss.

I did sometimes wish that the author had consulted more linguists for his discussions of language-related studies, but that’s a larger critique for the text-as-data research field as a whole. Overall, I thought he made some sharp points about the research avenues opened up by big data, as well as the ways that the internet in particular can reveal discrepancies between who we claim to be and our actual underlying natures.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Book #220 of 2017:

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before modern technology eroded it. When she helps uncover a limited way to still do magic today (in a controlled Schrodinger’s Box environment), the agency then uses that power to send operatives back into the past to convince historical witches to cast more powerful spells on behalf of the modern U.S. government.

Things quickly go off the rails, and what follows is a very funny and inventive story of time-travel shenanigans and government bureaucracy, presented as an epistolary novel made up of various incident reports, diary entries, ancient epic poems about a Viking raid on the mystical land of Walmart, and more. It doesn’t quite tie together as nicely as I’d like in the end, but it’s still a very entertaining and imaginative read. (It’s great as an audiobook too, especially with all of the different accents.)

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Book #219 of 2017:

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #1)

The first Miss Marple mystery is as fun as it is implausible, requiring readers to suspend our disbelief enough to accept both that a criminal could be as devious as the denouement reveals and that a town gossip could be cunning enough to see through it all to the truth. But if you can make that leap, there’s great joy to be found in the various prickly residents of St. Mary Mead, who will hereafter be plagued by crime after crime for Miss Marple to solve. Her first outing keeps her largely on the outskirts of the action, but she’s already thinking circles around the police and other characters.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Book #218 of 2017:

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

This memoir about growing up dirt-poor (first in Brooklyn, then in Ireland) is tremendously funny and moving in equal measures. I didn’t always care for author Frank McCourt’s conceit of writing from the supposed perspective of his childhood self – largely because there are a lot of details that it seems almost impossible he could be remembering accurately from back then – but he paints an evocative picture of his family’s extreme poverty and how it was reinforced by his father’s alcoholism. The Irish town of Limerick is drawn in tangible detail, and McCourt’s recollections of the hard times there are lovingly bittersweet. The audiobook, read by the author himself, also helps to bring this modern classic to life with warmth and love.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Book #217 of 2017:

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The prose in this novel is just as lyrically beautiful as Jesmyn Ward’s earlier Salvage the Bones, but the story is more magical realist than southern gothic, and I feel like it suffers for it. The portrait of a Mississippi family dealing with racism, poverty, incarceration, and drug addiction is well-drawn, but it’s hard to take any of it seriously when there are two different ghosts that keep popping up (one of whom even gets to narrate a substantial portion of the story). That’s not just a literary device; these figures are actual spirits that the otherwise-realistic characters can see, and they detract significantly from every scene where they appear. Ward’s considerable talents still shine through, but this could have been a much stronger story if she had found some less literal way to show how her characters are haunted by the past.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

Book #216 of 2017:

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #19)

Terry Pratchett’s City Watch novels have been steadily improving as the Discworld sub-series goes along, and this third book continues that happy trend. Whereas the introduction of nonhuman characters into the Watch in the previous volume felt largely like an unfunny joke about affirmative action, their inclusion here seems more like a celebration of diversity, which is a much better fit for a melting-pot setting like Ankh-Morpork as well as the overall comic tone of the larger series.

The golems at the heart of this story also allow Pratchett to explore some weighty issues of slavery and dehumanization with a light touch, much as J.K. Rowling would later do with house elves in her Harry Potter books. The subplot about Nobby Nobbs as a possible heir to the throne isn’t nearly as effective as the rest of the story, but overall this is a great deepening of this particular section of the Discworld.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

Book #215 of 2017:

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

I have to admit, I had some doubts that a white author like Ben H. Winters would be able to bring the necessary sensitivity for this alternate-history novel of a modern America that never fully abolished slavery. Ultimately, though, I decided to trust Winters on the strength of his earlier novel The Last Policeman, and I’m so glad that I did. Underground Airlines is a tight thriller that never once shies away from the horrors of its subject and paints an all-too-plausible picture of how history could have gone.

The novel reads stylistically like a hardboiled detective story, centering around a black bounty hunter tracking down runaway slaves in exchange for his own freedom papers. It’s uncompromisingly bleak in its exploration of how the institution of slavery taints everyone in this society, and the narrator’s struggles over the morality of his actions against that backdrop are absolutely devastating. This is a novel that never stops asking uncomfortable questions of its readers, as perhaps all good art should.

★★★★☆

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