The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

Book #209 of 2017:

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

Mary Roach’s in-depth look at the human digestive process is pretty gross, but thankfully less stomach-churning than her earlier book on dead bodies. (The author’s irreverent tone works better here too, where the lighter subject matter makes her jokes come off as far less disrespectful.) She’s packed all manner of interesting factoids into this volume, from how scent and sound affect taste, to how food preferences vary cross-culturally, to the fouler mechanics of stomach acid, defecation, drug-smuggling, and farts. It’s all fairly disgusting, but Roach’s clear fascination with these subjects somehow makes for a compelling read nonetheless.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Book 208 of 2017:

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

A creepy true-crime account of the serial murders that plagued the Osage Indian Nation in the early 20th century, as outsiders sought to gain access to the tribe’s lucrative oil business. The investigation into these killings was the first high-profile case for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and this book both shines a light on that now-obscure piece of American history and presents new evidence that the Bureau was too quick to close its Osage file before all of the perpetrators were brought to justice. All in all, it’s a chilling look at a case of systemic corruption that thrived on the ongoing oppression of Native Americans and left shockwaves that still affect that community today.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Book #207 of 2017:

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #1)

Taken in its own right, this is a charming little collection of cozy mysteries, packaged as a novel but really more like a succession of independent cases with a little bit of a character through-line. That character is Botswana’s first female detective, a fat woman approaching middle age who is constantly outwitting the dim criminals of her small African nation. This heroine is refreshing and easy to root for, but it’s hard to know how to feel about the criminals themselves, or to overlook the fact that they come from the pen of a white man. There’s nothing overtly off-putting here, but the divide between the author and his foolish characters is discomforting enough that I don’t think I’ll read any further in this series.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

Movie #16 of 2017:

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This series has always been goofy, but this movie felt particularly lazy in justifying its various set pieces. Most of it also didn’t seem all that impossible? Like, it was still a solid enough action movie, but most of the scenes could have been lifted straight from a Bond movie instead of being on-brand for Mission: Impossible. You do have to wonder how long Tom Cruise is gonna keep making these, but it would be a real shame if he exits on such a low note as this.

★★☆☆☆

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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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