The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, season 4

TV #16 of 2017:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, season 4

The season finale was kind of a letdown, but the season itself was the best S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever been – and close to the best the MCU in general has offered in terms of character-driven informed storytelling and really meaty material for its actors. I will probably never stop raving about the alternate reality arc of episodes for how it stood in conversation with the previous seasons, but even the parts of season 4 before then were really top-notch. The decision to break this season into individual arcs – Ghost Rider, LMDs, the Framework, and so on – was a very smart one, as it enabled the plotting to feel more tightly focused than it ever has before. There was very little wheel-spinning, just constant movement from one plot development to the next and some great character-work the whole time. I never would have predicted this from how it began, but Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has grown into one of the best parts of the MCU.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

Book #101 of 2017:

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (The First Law #1)

An overall solid fantasy novel, very much in the George R. R. Martin tradition of court intrigue and gratuitous violence. Unfortunately the plot was slow-moving and fairly opaque, and I found myself struggling to care about most of the characters. Still, the writing was decent enough that I’ll probably read the rest of the trilogy at some point.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

Movie #6 of 2017:

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

This sequel takes everything I loved about the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and turns it up to 11. It helps that the team is already in place at the start of the film, so we get more of their banter and prickly personalities instead of focusing primarily on Quill, but the writers really upped their game as well. Drax, Gamora, and Nebula are all just so much funnier here, and that’s excusable in-universe because they’re less focused on vengeance, but it also just makes them a lot more enjoyable as characters. (It’s particularly nice to not limit Gamora to just being a straight figure for men to bounce wisecracks off. I wouldn’t argue that GotG2 is a phenomenally feminist movie or anything, but it does treat its female characters better than the first movie. Heck, there’s even one of those dramatic superhero group shots near the end of the film where I counted 3 female characters and 4 male – a much better ratio than the Avengers have ever managed.) The plot was nice too, with some great moments for Peter to reflect on his various father figures and make proactive choices about who he wants to be like. Honestly, I just loved it to pieces.

★★★★★

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Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Movie #5 of 2017:

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

I hadn’t seen this movie since it was in theaters, and my wife hadn’t seen it at all, so we streamed it through Amazon before heading out to see the sequel. Even three years later, it’s still really impressive how much this movie stakes out its own territory while still feeling recognizably like it belongs in the same universe as the other MCU properties. The talented cast and the terribly funny writing help make this film so great – in addition to the very smart use of its 80s pop soundtrack – but what really sticks with me is how it seems to open up the Marvel movies to new and wildly different possibilities. Guardians of the Galaxy would probably have never been made, let alone made in the same continuity of earthbound superhero flicks, had it not been for the success of the MCU movies that came before. But still this is the moment where that franchise really takes off for me.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

Book #100 of 2017:

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

An odd little story, focused on a pair of brothers in 21st-century Venice who run away from home to join a gang of thieving street urchins. As when I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I initially found it a little hard to sympathize with the main characters, but that eased somewhat as more details of their former home life came out. What was more surprising was the sudden presence of magic, which isn’t even hinted at until halfway through the novel and doesn’t become explicitly confirmed until its final quarter. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the magical element detracts from the story, but it certainly seems out of place with what comes before.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Book #99 of 2017:

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (The Shining #2)

I’m still not convinced that Stephen King needed to write a sequel to his classic book The Shining, especially after the original had stood on its own for over 30 years. But for an author who struggled with addiction for much of his younger life, there’s a certain sense in bringing back the character of Danny Torrance (now grown and going by Dan) to grapple with the legacy of alcoholism and violence that he’s inherited from his father.

The villains in this novel are a typical King invention of psychic vampires who prey on telepathic children, but the real heart of the story lies with Dan’s efforts to be a better person and a better father figure than his dad turned out to be. So although The Shining may not have needed a sequel, Doctor Sleep is undoubtedly a stronger book for being about Dan Torrance rather than a brand-new character.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik

Book #98 of 2017:

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #1)

The plot of this novel moves at glacier speed, which is fairly agonizing when the premise is as rich as this fantastic alternate history of dragons fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. So although I did love the characters, I’m not sure if I’m really up for another eight sequels where nothing much seems to happen to them.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Book #97 of 2017:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

A truly stunning work of scholarship, describing how the current U.S. program of mass incarceration – and the War on Drugs that feeds it – systematically oppresses people of color in similar ways to the Jim Crow laws that the civil rights movement overturned. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander shows in deadly detail how minorities (particularly black men) fare worse than white people at every stage of the criminal justice process: although they use drugs at equal rates, black Americans are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be arrested following a stop, more likely to be charged with a crime following an arrest, and so on. She also shows how prison time and the felon label proceed to disrupt a person’s entire life long after the initial sentence is over, disqualifying the former convict from public housing and other benefits and forever shading their employment efforts in most states (with the ultimate result being a wide-scale decimation of communities of color and non-white sociopolitical power).

There are no easy answers to be found here about how to fix such a rotten system, but Alexander lays out an airtight case for the existence of this newest racial caste paradigm and how it continues to thrive despite our drug laws being formally race-neutral and most Americans professing to reject racism. Since recognizing these truths will have to be the first step in dismantling the new Jim Crow, this book is absolutely essential.

★★★★★

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Movie Review: Arrival (2016)

Movie #4 of 2017:

Arrival (2016)

Honestly just a terrific movie all around. I had some minor gripes about the way linguists and linguistics are presented in the film, but it’s still probably the closest Hollywood’s ever gotten or that we could have reasonably hoped for. The script stuck pretty close to the beats of the original Ted Chiang story too, and the parts they added to fill it out to movie-length all felt justified. I was skeptical when I first heard that Story of Your Life was getting turned into a big-budget blockbuster, but Arrival was a legitimately great piece of art. I’m just sorry I missed it in theaters.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

Book #96 of 2017:

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

As a racially-conscious progressive, I was hoping Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America would be a powerful tract that I could quote from and recommend to others in the hope of opening their eyes to the state of ongoing racial inequality. And there are individual moments throughout the book that succeed on that front, distilling the message of institutional racism into pithy and easy-to-follow passages. The strongest sections are probably the parts where author Michael Eric Dyson speaks about his own encounters with police and other authority figures, emphasizing the ways that his blackness affected those incidents and the issues that white people don’t have to take into consideration in similar circumstances.

Unfortunately, the book as a whole is a rather poor messenger for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. There are logical flaws in many of Dyson’s arguments, and I was particularly uncomfortable with his treatment of Jewish Americans as simply a subgroup of white people. (There’s no denying that many Jews have some access to white privilege, but it’s maddening to suggest that Jewishness is simply a variety of whiteness or that Jews don’t face ongoing oppression and discrimination ourselves.) Taken in isolation individual moments might be convincing, but as a whole, I just don’t think this Sermon is going to convert anyone to Dyson’s point of view.

★★☆☆☆

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