The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Book #138 of 2017:

Every Other Day by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Every Other Day is the story of a teenage girl with Buffy-like powers, but only on alternating days. (In between, she’s as human as the next high schooler.) That’s a fun hook, but the story beats were fairly predictable and I had a hard time believing in this world, which is almost identical to ours despite humanity having known paranormal monsters are real since Darwin’s time. (There’s also a rather boring Twilight-esque love interest, creepily intruding and having precisely zero redeeming qualities.) The main character and her friends are just about interesting enough to make up for that, but I still wanted more from this book.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Doctor Who, season 10

TV #24 of 2017:

Doctor Who, season 10

Not as great as season 9, which was a real series high for the show, but still really quite good. Bill was an absolute gem, and I liked that the season finale left her fate open enough that she could plausibly either return or not, based on how the incoming creative team decide. Nardole was also a lot more enjoyable than I had feared; he brought an interesting alien perspective to the TARDIS that reminded me most of Turlough in Classic Who or Jack Harkness in the revival. (He also might be the most rehabilitated character from initial appearance to subsequent companion status, although Donna Noble is another solid contender for that role.)

Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez both turned in some of their finest work for this season, and the plot had nice momentum across episodes – which can be a real difficulty for Doctor Who – without getting mired in confusion like the Matt Smith Silence arc. The setup for the Christmas special where Capaldi will regenerate into the next Doctor seems like it will be a great showcase for both Capaldi and outgoing showrunner Steven Moffat to take their final bow.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

Book #137 of 2017:

A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

There are some truly lovely moments throughout this book, and its interracial gay love story is a real breath of fresh air for the fantasy genre. But the disjointed chronology didn’t work for me, and I felt like there were so many missing scenes that could have made this a more powerful read. It’s so short that I still feel like it’s worth picking up, but I would have loved it so much more as a full novel about Lucrio and Aqib rather than just a fragmented novella.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Sense8, season 2

TV #23 of 2017:

Sense8, season 2

I have the most mixed feelings about Sense8. On the one hand, it’s like no other television show out there, and I feel like it gets at some really profound truths about living in a networked society where your friends around the globe can be there for you at a moment’s notice. (Or at least, that’s my favorite take on the show, that the internet provides this extra texture to sociality that we can bring to our daily experiences now, and sensates are just a heightened way of representing that on-screen.) Plus, the show really has improved a lot as it’s gone along, although occasional episodes still stumble here and there.

On the other hand, those stumbles are often massive, as in the case of the season 2 finale that basically offered no resolution to any of the ongoing plot or character arcs for the season except for maybe Nomi and Amanita. (But their biggest moment was two episodes ago at the wedding, really.) And after 23 episodes – likely an entire day’s worth of storytelling, given the typical episode length – there are still really basic worldbuilding points about how sensate powers work that are very unclear to me. And they still haven’t made the whole BPO conspiracy at all compelling as a plot engine, but the writers just keep going back to that well over and over again without ever fleshing it out further.

So… mixed feelings, like I said. I love so many things about this show, and I’m really happy to hear that it’s coming back for a 2-hour special. But I hope the writers really take their time on that, to deliver a product that resolves all of the lingering threads from this season and can stand as a satisfying series finale if it ends up being the last we see of this world.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: iZombie, season 3

TV #22 of 2017:

iZombie, season 3

I really love the way iZombie’s seasons are self-contained storylines – creator Rob Thomas has likened them to books in a series – that inevitably blow up their premise in the finale to set up a brand-new status quo for the next season to dig into. The fallout from the season 2 meant (among other things) that this was the first season where all of the main cast was in on the zombie secret, which opened up all sorts of interesting new story angles. Plus it’s just always nice for a show to grow up like that – I’ve lost count of all the shows like Buffy and Arrow that improved considerably once they let all of the major characters in on whatever the big secret identity is, but I feel like iZombie is probably going to fall into that category when we look back on the show. Now, this season itself was a little bit overstuffed, and the emotional beats were seldom given enough time to land, especially in the finale. But that finale, as expected, shook up everything we’d come to expect from the show, ushering in a brave new world of zombies for season 4. Bring it on.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis

Book #136 of 2017:

Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (The Space Trilogy #1)

While not as instantly endearing as his Narnia books, there’s still a lot to enjoy in this first volume of C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy, which could have easily been titled A Linguist of Mars. For although Lewis owes a clear debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs, this is Barsoom by way of Oxford, with the red planet being explored by a peaceful philologist rather than a bloodthirsty soldier like John Carter. There’s the usual Christian moralizing that you have to expect from Lewis, but he wisely makes his Martians more spiritual than the human characters, so that what seems at first like a story about missionary work among a savage people actually ends up being a challenge and refutation to western-style colonialism. I’m looking forward to seeing how the story plays out in the remaining books in the series.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Book #135 of 2017:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

This book was way more graphic than I expected or wanted, so I’m not surprised it produced such outrage when it was first published in 1928. There’s a bit of a plot regarding female empowerment happening in and around the sex, but the novel seems most useful as a time capsule for the politics of the era. When they’re not otherwise occupied, the characters have frank discussions on class, gender, love, marriage, and (of course) sexual intercourse as it relates to all of the above. It’s an interesting distillation of the zeitgeist of its time that people generally weren’t talking about so openly.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

Book #134 of 2017:

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

I liked Cory Doctorow’s earlier novel Little Brother, about teens using technology to nonviolently resist an overreaching surveillance state, but I couldn’t stand this one about illegal downloading and copyright violation. The characters are like those in an Ayn Rand novel, existing merely as cardboard mouthpieces for the author’s political speeches rather than as recognizable humans with any believable inner life. The villains are one-dimensional Hollywood fat cats and the politicians they’ve bought; the heroes are plucky independent creators fighting back against the evils of copyright law that won’t let them download everything they want without paying. Even for a reader whose politics lean towards Doctorow’s on the matter, this novel was incredibly grating. (The fact that it includes a manic-pixie-dream girl and a privileged kid from a loving family running away to live on the streets didn’t help matters, either.)

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Book #133 of 2017:

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I’m ultimately left scratching my head over this one. It’s a satire on contemporary American race relations, featuring a black man reintroducing segregation into his all-minority hometown (because just the idea of a neighboring whites-only school makes the local schoolchildren work harder, and so on). It’s funny at times, and author Paul Beatty sure knows how to turn a phrase, but too often it felt like he was utilizing political incorrectness for no deeper purpose than shock value. With such a wide range of taboo subjects on display there’s something here to offend every sort of reader, but the book is fairly meandering and I never really felt there was an overall point the satire was aiming to drive home.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Book #132 of 2017:

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb (Farseer #1)

This fantasy novel was a staple of my high school shelves, the start of a favorite series that I would read over and over again. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t live up to my memories when I revisited it now, but if anything it’s gotten even better with time. Author Robin Hobb offers a master class in court intrigue, bildungsroman, and fantasy worldbuilding, and I think I take those things a lot less for granted now that I’ve encountered so many other authors who struggle to pull them off. Hobb’s story of a royal bastard secretly groomed to protect the realm through deadly espionage has its share of plot thrills, but at its core it’s a personal narrative of a lonely boy coming of age as a perpetual outsider. I may relate to the narrator less now that I’m not so much of an angry young man myself, but his history is still a beautiful tragedy to watch unfold.

★★★★★

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