The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Book #110 of 2017:

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s vision of the Martian frontier is a haunting dream, populated by a telepathic indigenous species that humanity can never hope to truly understand. In this collection of loosely-related vignettes, he walks us through a history of the human presence on Mars from first contact onward, as the settlers attempt with mixed success to put the sins of the old planet behind them. There’s no main character or sharply-defined plot, but the text still feels like a cohesive whole, with the melancholic spirit of Bradbury’s Mars suffusing every passage.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Book #109 of 2017:

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

This science-fiction novel is like It’s a Wonderful Life, if George Bailey had ended up in that alternate reality without a wife and children because the version of himself there kidnapped him at gunpoint and forced him to switch places. The other version of our hero Jason is a research scientist who sacrificed his chance at a happy family while working on a way to to access the branching realities of the multiverse, but who now regrets his decision and abuses that power to take Jason’s place. Our Jason understandably isn’t content to have his life stolen like that, so he proceeds to use his other self’s technology to try and find his way back home.

The result is a somewhat mind-bending adventure across realities, especially once Jason realizes his own life has continued to branch and there are now multiple copies of himself all trying to get back to his/their family. It’s a dark but interesting look at issues of identity, fate, and choice, guaranteed to have readers wondering how our own lives could have turned out differently (and if there really are infinite alternate versions of ourselves somewhere out there who made different choices along the way). It’s also a decent thriller, and a great example of using real science to inform science-fiction.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Supergirl, season 2

TV #17 of 2017:

Supergirl, season 2

Kind of an uneven season, but then, I think at this point we just have to accept that Supergirl is kind of an uneven show. It continues to be unabashedly 100% girl-power in a way that I think is probably amazing for the smaller girls and boys who are watching. I honestly can’t think of any other genre show that prioritizes female friendship, female mentorship, and even good male ally behavior to this extent. This season also delivered a really great and respectful coming-out arc for one of its main characters, which I loved. And it integrates the formerly-independent series into the CW Arrowverse fairly smoothly, all things considered.

On the other hand, the writers also decided to abruptly break up the interracial couple that had been teased all of season 1 and only gotten together in the finale, with no real motivating reason given to the characters and only to throw Supergirl at a new white character (who got better as the season went along but was as bland as mayonnaise when first introduced). The plotting could be rocky and the extended metaphor of aliens representing real-life oppressed minorities was a tad clumsy, but in the end this is still a show with a whole lot of heart.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

Book #108 of 2017:

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel (Themis Files #1)

I expected a lot more from this novel about humanity discovering parts to a giant alien robot buried beneath the earth, especially once I found out the author has a PhD in linguistics. (There’s even a linguist character in the book, and the only remotely language-related thing he gets to do is tell someone else what the Rosetta Stone is after that character indicates they already know about it.) But the dialogue is stilted, the characterization is unclear and inconsistent, and framing the text as a series of interviews relegates to most of the action to happening off-screen. I was pretty thoroughly underwhelmed.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Book #107 of 2017:

Red Rising by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #1)

Just as great as when I first read it last year, so I’ll just quote from my earlier review:

Red Rising at its heart is telling a story like The Count of Monte Cristo or Gattaca, where someone from a lower class has to infiltrate the upper class in order to take them down from within. Except in this case, doing so involves joining the upper class’s war games, which are a delightful mix of Ender’s Game and The Hunger Games. Also the whole thing is set on a terraformed Mars.
Darrow is a great protagonist that you will desperately root for while also feeling his conflict over the friends he’s making – friends that are, unbeknownst to them, actually the enemies of his people. He’s also a character that will constantly surprise you with how he manages to think his way out of trouble and turn existing systems on their head. This book was absolutely amazing – I almost can’t believe it was a first novel, or that it was written by someone my age, but I know I can’t wait to read the sequel!

This time I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator did a great job with the different accents. Using an Irish accent for Darrow’s narration and the other Red characters and various upper-class British accents for the Golds was a really cool way to emphasize the caste distinctions and underscore how hard it is for Darrow to infiltrate Gold society. I’d love to listen to the sequels as audiobooks too, if my library ever acquires them.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

Book #106 of 2017:

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows #2)

As much as I liked the fantasy heist novel Six of Crows, I was a little put off when the ending seemed to wrap up its main plot and then throw a curveball cliffhanger out of nowhere, because I didn’t relish the idea of a sequel that was just about undoing the sudden sidelining of a central character.

Luckily, it turns out that author Leigh Bardugo had much bigger plans in mind for that sequel, and Crooked Kingdom ultimately ends up being an even stronger novel than its predecessor. The kidnapping plot is resolved before the book is a quarter through (with active help from the kidnappee), and the rest of the story is devoted to exploring the ramifications of the events of Six of Crows through an epic plot with personal emotional stakes for every character.

Kaz and his gang are at their best when their backs are against a wall, and it’s a joy to watch them here as they try scheming their way out of an increasingly tight situation. But it’s the character dynamics that truly raise this book above Six of Crows, deepening certain connections that felt more lightly sketched before. There’s an interracial gay romance that never feels reduced to tokenism and another budding relationship, also interracial, between two people whose PTSD makes physical contact a constant struggle. As with Kaz’s physical disability, these are facets of the characters that don’t solely define them, but Bardugo’s world is a lot richer for their inclusion.

Every character feels like an individual with their own plot arc, and while it wouldn’t be a Leigh Bardugo book if everyone got a happy ending, they all get moments of triumph and satisfying resolutions to their stories. Go read Six of Crows if you haven’t already, but don’t let that book be the last you see of this crew.

★★★★★

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Book Review: My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams

Book #105 of 2017:

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams

A collection of writings and speeches by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, interspersed with brief biographical details and other context. Ginsburg’s collected remarks provide an engaging (and fairly apolitical) view into one of America’s finest legal minds, and I was particularly struck by her understanding of how our shared Jewish heritage has shaped her lifelong commitment to justice.

The collection itself could have been better curated to cut down on repeated themes and details, and it’s frustrating that the audiobook replaces narration with archival recordings whenever available, even when those recordings are very low-quality and hard to make out. But overall these are minor faults in a close insider’s look at the top level of the US justice system.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith

Book #104 of 2017:

Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith (Portuguese Irregular Verbs #1)

A lightweight little comedy about a trio of hapless linguistics professors. The plot is thin, but the humor is droll, particularly in its barbs at academia. A short, fun read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

Book #103 of 2017:

All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

A gripping firsthand account of the Watergate investigation, told by the two Washington Post reporters who first broke the story and kept following up on its leads until the scandal ultimately brought down a president. It’s easy for people like me, born long after Watergate, to not grasp how shocking all of this was at the time, or to let our later knowledge of Nixon’s corruption color our understanding of his downfall as inevitable.

But the truth is that Richard Nixon was a very popular president (winning 49 states when he ran for reelection even though the Watergate burglary was already common knowledge), and no one could have predicted where the Post story would lead. Woodward and Bernstein place us squarely in the context of that time, documenting every step of their quest to discover who was pulling the strings behind Watergate in the face of enormous political pressure and initial public disinterest. It’s a fascinating story of the relentless pursuit of truth, and a clarion call for all journalists to put that pursuit over politics.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: John Dies at the End by David Wong

Book #102 of 2017: John Dies at the End by David Wong (John Dies at the End #1)

This novel is weird, both in the sense of uncanny Lovecraftian horrors and in the sense of a bizarre plot related by a rambling unreliable narrator. I think the author was aiming for an Army of Darkness sort of tone, where snarky characters battle creeping monstrosities, but the whole thing is severely hampered by the juvenile humor and the end result is pretty sophomoric. I probably would have liked this better if I had read it back when I was a teenager in love with Kevin Smith movies, but these days I need more from a story than just freak-out gore punctuated by toilet humor and random asides.

(It’s pretty messed up that the author is a white guy named Jason Pargin writing under an Asian-sounding pseudonym, too! I know that “David Wong” is also the protagonist’s name, but that character isn’t even Asian either, so the whole thing just reeks of literary yellowface — on top of all its other faults.)

★★☆☆☆

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