The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Inkspell by Cornelia Funke

Book #22 of 2017:

Inkspell by Cornelia Funke (Inkworld #2)

I have mixed feelings on this one. Exploring the “Inkworld” that the characters in the previous story came from is a smart move on writer Cornelia Funke’s part, and I like that Meggie has grown as a character from the plucky kid in Inkheart to a rebellious teen here. The tone of the series has matured some too, following Harry Potter’s lead in featuring more darkness and death as its protagonist grows up. But the already-confusing magical system gets even more ridiculously contradictory in this book, and a lot of the character choices and story developments feel like they’ve been mandated by plot concerns rather than arising organically – and yet the plot itself lacks any sort of narrative through line. The resulting novel is a bit of a mess, but there’s enough potential left in the series for me to follow it through to the final book.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Book #21 of 2017:

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

I’m a big fan of time loop stories, but even in the context of that particular genre, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is remarkable. (I’d personally put it second only to Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay, which is one of my all-time favorite books.)

The premise of this one is that the main character keeps reliving his entire life, getting reborn as his own infant self with his memories intact every time he dies. But he’s not the only person living in such a loop, and while that’s a little mind-bending at first – for how can one person be reliving a period of time that starts in 1890 when Harry’s own birth occurs in 1919? – it’s gradually explained via a branching multiverse theory. So although the world essentially resets for Harry August each time he’s reborn, other “kalachakra” like him could have done things earlier in the timeline of his new reality to change history – including preventing his birth from happening in the first place.

As with any time loop story, there are equal parts joy and sorrow to be had with a character who knows how events are going to unfold by virtue of having already lived through them. But the novel really distinguishes itself from the genre with its inclusion of other kalachakra whose motivations are sometimes at cross-purposes to Harry’s own, and author Claire North’s depiction of this society of decadent immortals calls to mind Anne Rice at her best.

The back half of the novel in particular is a gripping chess match of a conflict between Harry and one of his fellow kalachakra who is bent on introducing future technology well before its time, and North writes a great spy thriller of the two figures struggling to outwit one another. All in all, it’s a rich concept that is exquisitely explored, and I would certainly not be opposed to reading a second chapter of Harry’s lives one day.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller

Book #20 of 2017:

The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker #2)

A definite improvement over the first book, although at the cost of a few narrative threads and characters that are unceremoniously dropped in the transition. And I still don’t understand how Asher earns the love and devotion of so many other characters by scowling bitterly and shouting at them, but that’s less bothersome now that he’s surrounded by a more compelling plot. Both the court intrigue and the magic are much better handled here, and having clear villains with well-defined aims helps sharpen the story. This is still not my favorite series, and I probably won’t read any further in it, but I’m glad that this particular duology came to a satisfying conclusion after such a rocky start.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Victim by Saul Bellow

Book #19 of 2017:

The Victim by Saul Bellow

When an antisemitic acquaintance accuses Asa Leventhal of ruining his life, the New York City Jew brushes off the accusation to focus on a recent family tragedy. But the gentiles in his life are quick to take his accuser’s side, to the point where Leventhal begins to feel guilty and finds himself bending over backwards to help out a nemesis who continues to belittle him. It’s a powerful look at gaslighting and the pervasive effects of antisemitism, no less relevant today than in the post-World War II era when the novel was first published.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

Book #18 of 2017:

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher’s account of her time filming the first Star Wars movie, along with some reflections on what the franchise’s fame has meant for her over the years. It’s a deeply personal memoir, constantly foregrounding the fact that the actress was just 19 at the time of filming, with no way of knowing what she was getting into when she accepted the role of Princess Leia.

Nowhere is this naïveté more plain than in the section where Fisher discusses her on-set love affair with costar Harrison Ford, who as a married man in his mid-thirties was far more worldly than she. It’s this hitherto secret affair that made headlines when the book was published, and there’s a certain awkward voyeurism in being invited into the lives of famous people we thought we knew so well. (The book also includes a lengthy series of excerpts from the actual journals that teenage Carrie kept during filming, and they are utterly ordinary in their bad poetry and relationship angst.)

Fisher had no way of knowing when she wrote The Princess Diarist that she and her mother would both pass away before the end of the year, but it is impossible to approach the book now without that in mind. Although somewhat narrow in scope, the memoir offers a fitting contemplation of the author’s legacy and how she will always be remembered in connection to her most famous role.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time #1)

For the most part this first book in Robert Jordan’s massive Wheel of Time saga feels like a paint-by-numbers retelling of the Star Wars / Lord of the Rings monomyth. There’s some occasional flashes of originality, but it’s mostly just the same familiar story of farmboys, dark lords, and black riders. This version of that story isn’t bad, but it’s not really good enough to justify reading another 13 books of it either.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Book #16 of 2017:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

As many others have noted, the title Anna Karenina is somewhat misleading, as the novel devotes more space to the story of Anna’s brother-in-law and author stand-in Konstantin Levin than it does to Anna herself. (“Brother-in-law” is a simplification, and suggests a closeness between Anna and Levin that does not exist in the text. More properly, he is the suitor and then husband of her brother’s wife’s sister.) The two characters have several common acquaintances, but their stories do not directly intersect much, and they only meet one another once very near the end of the book. Nevertheless, they share a deep unhappiness that persists even when, as with Levin’s marriage or Anna’s ongoing love affair, they manage to get what they think they want.

This novel is a product of its time, which brings both occasional sexist moments and endless digressions about 19th-century Russian politics or farming techniques. But the characters are interestingly flawed, and they change meaningfully throughout the story as Tolstoy considers how easy it is to fall in and out of love. Anna herself is an inspiring figure of an early liberated woman, and the tragedy at her core cannot detract from that legacy.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Book #15 of 2017:

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

This was kind of a strange book, about a former war photographer who gets tracked down in retirement by a soldier he once photographed who now blames the man for ruining his life and says he’s come to kill him. The two men proceed to have a series of philosophical conversations on topics like art, violence, chaos theory, and free will, all interspersed with flashbacks to the photographer’s time with a lover whose death led him to quit the business. This concept has potential, and the flowery language in the book provides some vivid imagery, but I often felt as if I was grasping after oblique points that were obvious to the two characters but not to me. Maybe that was intentional on the author’s part, as the two men repeatedly discuss how someone who has not seen the horror of war firsthand cannot truly relate to it. But it’s hard to really love a book that shuts you out like that.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

Book #14 of 2017:

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake (Three Dark Crowns #1)

I loved the atmosphere in this book, which is set on a secluded magical island slowly gearing up for its sacrificial rites – a tradition that no one really questions, which is delightfully eerie in a Shirley Jackson kind of way. The matriarchal society on the island is always ruled by a queen, but in every generation the current monarch gives birth to triplet daughters who are then raised apart learning different magical traditions until the age of sixteen, at which point each girl must try to kill her sisters and become the last queen standing.

The three queens in this novel are all compelling in their own way, and author Kendare Blake derives a lot of tension from making us care equally about characters who are destined to be at one another’s throats. She also wisely takes the Hunger Games approach of not rushing the build-up to the bloodletting, giving readers a chance to learn about the characters and the setting before the outbreak of violence, which is largely saved for the upcoming sequel. Hopefully that next book will also resolve some of the lingering worldbuilding issues that don’t get adequately explained here, but so long as its story is told as skillfully as Three Dark Crowns, I’ll be happy regardless.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Howard the Duck (1986)

Movie #1 of 2017:

Howard the Duck (1986)

Okay, so there’s no denying that this is a bad movie, but it’s definitely one that’s so bad it’s good (especially when watched with a group of friends making jokes throughout about possible connections to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like how the technology that brings Howard to earth is the sort of stuff Jane is working on in the first Thor movie). I also knew very little about this movie going into it – basically just a little bit about the Marvel comics character it’s based on – so it was a delightful surprise about halfway through the film when it turned from a duck-out-of-water story into a plot to stop Lovecraftian aliens from conquering the earth. Again, this is by no means a great movie, but it was weird and fun to watch exactly once.

★★★☆☆

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