The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Book #171 of 2017:

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan #1)

If you can get past all the early-twentieth-century racism, this first Tarzan novel is a pretty fun adventure story. It’s complete pulp fiction with larger-than-life escapades and improbable developments, but sometimes that sort of romp is just what you need in a book. Unfortunately, the author’s prejudicial ideas of white nobility and black savagery make it really hard for a modern reader to just sit back and enjoy these capers for what they are.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer

Book #170 of 2017:

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Sanford Mayer

This 1954 book draws on interviews with German citizens to explore the typical actions and attitudes of everyday members of the Nazi party, with particular focus on why they were drawn to the movement and how they viewed their own roles within it. This focus on the popular enabling of Hitler’s program is critical for any understanding of how atrocities like the Holocaust were carried out in a purportedly democratic society, and it’s a chilling, timely reminder of the need for vigilance against passivity as similar discriminatory movements gain steam in our own country today.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Game of Thrones, season 2

TV #29 of 2017:

Game of Thrones, season 2

As mentioned before, we are watching this show for my wife’s first time and my first time since catching it live as it first aired. It’s fun to rediscover the beginnings of everyone’s stories, especially the ones that have changed the most over the years. On balance I think this season is probably even stronger then the first; both are pretty great, but there’s both less exposition now that the world has been fairly well-established and more playing with how plots and characters from the books are interpreted rather than just faithfully executing them (pun very much intended) on-screen.

The biggest book divergences this season are probably throwing Arya and Tywin together and rewriting / expanding Jeyne Westerling into Talisa, and I think the show generally gets stronger the more it leans into some of these unique interpretations of A Song of Ice and Fire. (On the other hand, I haven’t read the books since A Dance with Dragons came out in 2011, so my memory of them hinges largely on fan discussions surrounding the show.) Anyway, Gabby and I are both really enjoying this watch-through, and I’m really looking forward to the next couple seasons, which I think are probably my favorite.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard

Book #169 of 2017:

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard (Johannes Cabal #1)

Johannes Cabal isn’t a very compelling Faustian figure. He’s trying to win back his soul from the devil (by tricking 100 other people out of theirs), but he’s not particularly clever, or funny, or decent, or righteous as he goes about it. He’s mostly just fussy, and this story of him and his demonic carnival really wasn’t my speed. I never felt like I had any good reason to be rooting either for or against Cabal’s success, and most everything that happened seemed pretty arbitrary.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

Book #168 of 2017:

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

This 1966 Pulitzer-winning novel tells the story of a nonpracticing Jew in late Tsarist Russia who is arrested and falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy for ritualistic purposes. It’s a fictionalized version of the case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, and author Bernard Malamud nails the antisemitic fervor that propelled such cases through the courts on the flimsiest of evidence. In the novel, the prisoner’s situation becomes a kafkaesque nightmare of administrative doublespeak as his treatment steadily worsens over his continuing refusal to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, offering shades of both The Crucible and the biblical Book of Job as his protests of innocence are all but ignored in light of the lurid yet ever-shifting testimony against him. This is a book that still feels shockingly relevant half a century after publication and a full century past its setting, as antisemitism and abuses of the justice system continue to thrive. May we all be able to face such corruption with the resolve of Yakov Bok!

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming

Book #167 of 2017:

Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming

A soul-baring memoir from actor Alan Cumming on his abusive father, the resulting trauma, and how learning more about his family history caused him to reevaluate everything he thought he knew about himself. I already admired Cumming as an actor, but I now have a lot of respect for him as a person as well. A short but powerful read.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: House Rules by Jodi Picoult

Book #166 of 2017:

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

Taken on its own merits, House Rules is a decent story of a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome on trial for murder. The solution to the mystery is painfully obvious just a third of the way into the book, but the characters are fairly well-developed and compelling. By shifting among various character perspectives, author Jodi Picoult does a particularly good job of illustrating both how the world looks to a person with Asperger’s and the alternating joys and frustrations of having a loved one with special needs.

It’s hard to look past the novel’s factual inaccuracies, though, which include both an unrealistic depiction of the autism spectrum – for all her evident research, Picoult seems to have missed that no one with autism manifests every single textbook behavior – and the dangerous disproved claim that childhood vaccines can be linked to an autism diagnosis. The author’s heart is clearly in the right place as she seeks to educate her readers about these issues, but I worry this afterschool special of a book does more harm than good.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Book #165 of 2017:

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

This murder mystery sort of fizzles out in the end, but for most of the book, it’s a creepy psychological thriller that most resembles The Girl on the Train with its alcoholic Londoner narrator whose blackouts make it difficult for a reader to decide whether she’s being paranoid or actually witnessing a crime. In this case, that purported crime is the murder of the cruise liner passenger in the cabin next to our narrator, but when she reports what she’s seen, the cabin is empty and no one else on board remembers seeing the woman she describes. It’s appropriately moody and claustrophobic, but the twists are fairly easy to guess and the resolution could have been a lot more satisfying.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Pyramid Schemes by Peter David

Book #164 of 2017:

Pyramid Schemes by Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing #4)

I loved the first Sir Apropos of Nothing book back in high school (although I have no idea how well it holds up now), but even back then I felt like the two sequels that immediately followed offered diminishing returns on the cheeky antihero. So I was cautiously optimistic when I heard that Peter David was publishing a fourth Apropos novel after 13 years away, since it could mean a return to form by a more mature author and a satisfying resolution to the series. Instead, we got… this.

It’s hard to know where to start. The basic plot of this book is a retelling of the Passover / Exodus story, except that Apropos accidentally causes the death of Moses and then has to free the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt himself. (Technically speaking, these are “Shews” in “Rogypt” – except when one of the book’s many typos renders them “Shrews” instead – but let’s not kid ourselves here.) There are lots of uncomfortable scenes of Jewish characters praising a gentile savior, and when the plagues show up, they’re due to a mummy’s curse rather than the “Shewish” god. This erasure of Jewish agency from one of our most central faith narratives could be offensive if the story were better written, but as is it’s mostly just irritating. Also the protagonist is in his 40s but sleeps with a teenage girl he describes as “the most beautiful young woman I’ve ever seen,” because of course he does.

Maybe I’ve just outgrown this character, who still feels aimed at a high school audience despite his own advancing years. Even the end of the book, which picks up a dangling plot thread from the earlier novels and sees Apropos return to the kingdom of his birth, doesn’t really provide anything like closure or evidence of character growth. I was hoping this long-delayed sequel would live up to the fun of the first novel, but it’s basically a nadir for the series, give or take the gay panic-fueled slaughter at the end of book three. It’s a very frustrating reading experience, not recommended no matter how much you liked the earlier books.

★☆☆☆☆

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Movie Review: The Dark Tower (2017)

Movie #14 of 2017:

The Dark Tower (2017)

This movie was pretty fun – not great, but far better than the Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest. Very cool to see things like gunslingers and North Central Positronics on the big screen after so many years.

For fans of the Dark Tower novels, it was largely an original story, drawing on Jake’s storyline from The Waste Lands and the Breakers plot from supplemental books like Black House and Everything’s Eventual, but still almost entirely new material. (Despite some promotional claims, there’s not really anything in the movie itself justifying that this is a sequel to the book series rather than a straight-up adaptation, though.)

Very little from The Gunslinger makes an appearance, for better or worse, but there are some cool easter eggs from across the series and other Stephen King works. There’s definitely room for one or more sequels (ideally hewing closer to the source material), and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that this movie performs well enough to greenlight that.

★★★☆☆

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