The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

Book #227 of 2017:

The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

Taken individually, I suppose I like the three different strands that make up this novel, although the stories set in 2098 China and 1852 England are far more compelling than the one set in 2007 America. (Respectively: a woman trying to track down her sick son in a dystopian bureaucracy, a man struggling with depression while inventing an artificial beehive, and a farmer upset that his son doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps.) But even though these three stories are loosely tied together by the end, it never really feels like they have much to do with one another. All involve bees and all involve parents, but I didn’t really track any major insights resonating from one storyline to the next and the eventual plot connections are fairly superficial. Again, I like the stories just fine on their own, but I think I would feel more warmly towards this effort if I had encountered them as three separate novellas rather than as alternating chapters in a single novel.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Book #226 of 2017:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Flavia de Luce #1)

The precocious eleven-year-old detective in this story alternates between cute and grating, but even at her worst it’s a shock to see her kidnapped and physically assaulted in the story’s climax. It’s overall an interesting murder mystery with a distinctive voice telling the story, but if that’s how the child is going to be treated, I think I’m one-and-done with this series.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

Book #225 of 2017:

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #1)

Great fantasy worldbuilding and effortless diversity of race, gender identity, and sexuality, but it bothered me a little that the three different storylines felt so isolated from one another (even after I developed a suspicion about how they were connected and well before a late reveal confirmed it). Still, this apocalyptic setting where earthquake wizards are kept in glorified slavery has a lot going for it, and I’m hopeful that the sequels will be even better now that the overall shape of the narrative has been made clear.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Little Evil (2017)

Movie #18 of 2017:

Little Evil (2017)

The last fifteen minutes or so redeem this movie somewhat, when things take a Good Omens sort of turn and start emphasizing the antichrist child’s free will. But for most of the runtime, it’s a pretty lackluster effort. I think the idea is supposed to be that Adam Scott’s character clearly has a devil kid for a stepson but he’s the only one who seems to notice anything weird? But the comedy in that isn’t particularly on point and the parts that are played straight don’t feel distinct enough. It seems like this movie wants to both exist in and critique/puncture a particular film genre, which can be a terrific mode of storytelling — see Disney’s Enchanted, or for a more horror-relevant piece, Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods — but this one never really goes all in on either front. It’s not horrendously bad, but it’s all a bit muddled.

★★☆☆☆

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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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