The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

Book #206 of 2017:

Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King

This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, wherein a man gets revenge on his wife’s killer by methodically burying him alive in the titular car. Home Delivery, about a group of islanders who survive once the graveyards on the mainland start spewing out zombies, is also pretty great and classic Stephen King. But reading the whole collection also means suffering through items like Head Down, a 54-page nonfiction account of his son’s Little League season that’s every bit as self-indulgent as it sounds. (In a way I guess that’s as horrifying as the zombies…)

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Book #205 of 2017:

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1)

My feelings about this book are all over the place! I ended up really liking it, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy, but it was sort of a rough journey to get there. The main character initially struck me as boringly perfect: she’s a beautiful blue-haired teenager who’s so talented that her art school classmates gather around each day to see her new drawings, and she’s also independently wealthy, and magical, and fluent in 20 languages, and skilled at martial arts. She also instantly falls in love with an inhumanly beautiful stranger, despite the fact that he beats her bloody then secretly tracks her down and watches through her window while she sleeps.

All of that was incredibly off-putting to me as a reader, and if I hadn’t absolutely loved author Laini Taylor’s novel Strange the Dreamer, I might have given up on this one. But as I read further, its charms gradually won me over. Taylor’s use of lyrical prose is very well-crafted, and after the first few chapters, her characters and world hit that great lived-in quality that so many authors struggle to achieve. Even the sudden pivot in the final third of the novel to an extended flashback with an essentially new character only served to draw me in further, since the fantasy worldbuilding was so compelling.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone is uneven and problematic, but those problems really do fade away by the time it reaches its conclusion. I’m eager to see where Laini Taylor brings this story next.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Book #204 of 2017:

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

This book was good, but I don’t think it quite lived up to its full potential as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey, especially given author Margaret Atwood’s bonafides. Presenting Odysseus’s bloody homecoming from the perspective of his wife Penelope and her murdered serving girls is a great concept, but I didn’t always care for the execution (no pun intended). The girls seem no more fleshed out here than they did in Homer’s version — Atwood doesn’t even give them names — and the anachronisms in dead Penelope’s narration to a modern audience kept taking me out of the story. It’s still an important counter-narrative to Homer, but not nearly as strong as an immersive dive into the experiences of these female characters could have been.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Hollow City by Ransom Riggs

Book #203 of 2017:

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #2)

I don’t know if Hollow City is any worse than Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but it certainly doesn’t improve on that first book’s problems. There are the same under-developed characters, the same sketchy romance between a sixteen-year-old and his grandfather’s ex-girlfriend, and the same awkward shoehorning that comes of building a story around a collection of found photographs.

None of these issues are insurmountable, and they were all minor enough in the first book that they didn’t keep me from reading this sequel, but the growth I was hoping for doesn’t seem to have happened. There’s a bit more of a plot in this one, but most of it boils down to the children wandering about and meeting a succession of other peculiars (which is frankly ludicrous, given their supposed rarity). The stereotypical treatment of a band of Romani travelers and the repeated use of a slur to describe them didn’t exactly endear me, either.

If you loved the first book I guess you’ll probably enjoy this one as well, but at this point it seems clear that author Ransom Riggs just isn’t telling a story that really interests me all that much.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Odyssey by Homer

Book #202 of 2017:

The Odyssey by Homer

I liked this story a lot better than The Iliad, in part because it maintained a tight focus on a small number of characters rather than bouncing around among a sprawling Greek host. I also preferred the larger-than-life nature of Odysseus’s adventures to the endless battle scenes at Troy, particularly given that the wandering hero relates many of these tales directly and is firmly established in the text as someone who is not above lying or exaggerating on a whim. (Everything in the story can certainly be taken at face value, but the presence of Odysseus as an unreliable narrator adds an extra layer of complexity that I appreciated.) His exact character logic sometimes eluded me – presumably due to cultural differences between Homer’s time and our own – but I still really enjoyed this epic as a collection of sailor yarns.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, season 4

TV #42 of 2017:

Game of Thrones, season 4

I try to keep these reviews fairly spoiler-free, even this long after the fact, so let me just say vaguely that after three years of Game of Thrones airing shocking plot twists at the end of each season, it’s nice to have the major moment in season 4 happen so much closer to the beginning – and even more so that it’s actually a welcome development, rather than a horrifying one, but still an event that upends nearly every aspect of the status quo. Season 4 gets a real boost of adrenaline from that creative decision, and the ensuing arc for the (surviving) character most affected makes this one of the more memorable seasons as a whole. Lots of characters are also finally coming into their own, so even though the plot is feeling pretty scattered these days, it’s still a heck of a lot of fun to watch.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Book #201 of 2017:

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

This is a creepy atmospheric story of people staying in a haunted house, although it’s never completely clear whether we’re witnessing actual spirits or just troubled human minds. It’s a solid story and probably the definitive take on this sort of plot, and although it seems a little derivative today, that’s only because it’s been so influential since its original publication in 1959.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin

Book #200 of 2017:

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R.R. Martin (The Tales of Dunk and Egg #1-3)

This book is a collection of three novellas from George R.R. Martin, set in the century before his major series A Song of Ice and Fire. Presenting these stories in a single volume is a little misleading, since there’s not really any larger plot linking them, but they each follow the adventures of a lowborn but honorable knight and his squire, who will grow up to be King Aegon V (three kings before Robert, who rules the realm at the beginning of the series).

These novellas are decent stories that help shade in the backstory of the Seven Kingdoms, but they don’t really have the same epic scope that makes A Song of Ice and Fire or its HBO adaptation Game of Thrones so thrilling. Still, it’s not a bad way to spend your time while waiting on the next installments of those.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

Book #199 of 2017:

Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

This is such a warm, cozy story of a baby found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck and the absentminded scholar who adopts her. Other characters may not understand Charles and Sophie’s unique little family, but they’re happy with one another and I just wanted to curl up inside that happiness and drowse.

When it looks like twelve-year-old Sophie will be forced to leave Charles and live in an orphanage, the two of them follow a tenuous clue about her mother’s identity to Paris, where they meet the roof-dwelling homeless children who give the book its title. This part didn’t give me as fuzzy a feeling, but it was still pleasingly reminiscent of the classic children’s novel From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (only even better, since it lacked that book’s feeling of well-off kids slumming it on a lark). All in all a very cute story, and an immediate placement on the shortlist for books I’ll read to my own children one day.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Party Down, season 2

TV #41 of 2017:

Party Down, season 2

One of the things I love about Party Down – and there’s a lot! – is just how committed it is to its structure. This is the only workplace comedy I can think of where practically every single moment takes place entirely within the workplace. These people aren’t friends outside of work, and the only glimpses we get of their personal lives are what they discuss with one another while at a catering gig. That’s a bold writing choice, but it works and it gives the show a really distinct feel. This was my second time watching this show the whole way through, and I’m sad all over again, because 20 episodes was not nearly enough for a cast and writers as sharp as this one had.

★★★★☆

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